Herding on Debt: Qinghai Herders Endure Yet Another Year
I. Summer Pasture: The Last Pastoral Song
Niang’e Jia’s family is a typical Tibetan pastoral household around Qinghai Lake, still herding in the traditional way. They were among the protagonists of my documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture, filmed the previous year. A year had passed since we last filmed; I had returned to Qinghai both to show them the finished film and to learn more about how they were faring.
As summer on the grassland drew to its close, Niang’e Jia’s family had moved to this collectively shared summer pasture at Caohun (rendered by sound). Few outsiders venture here. Apart from Niang’e Jia’s third uncle, who lives on the mountainside one or two kilometres away, every other household is several kilometres off. There is almost no sign of another soul—just the occasional white tent visible in the far distance across the grassland. Besides yaks, Tibetan sheep and Tibetan Mastiffs, the creatures you are most likely to encounter are plateau pikas and white-rumped snowfinches, along with the wolf that occasionally calls by at night.
Yet beyond the postcard-perfect scene, the livelihoods of grassland herders grow ever more precarious. Since 2023, while filming community documentaries with herding families around Qinghai Lake, we learned of the sharp drop in livestock prices and the flood of imported frozen meat into pastoral-area markets. We joined Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme, determined to record how these new market shifts were hitting herders’ lives. In November last year, my colleague and I completed a circuit around Qinghai Lake and finished the filming.
Although Qinghai is not one of China’s major beef and lamb-producing provinces, it is one of the country’s five major pastoral regions and ranks first nationally in the slaughter volume of yaks and Tibetan sheep. More than half of the income of herding and farming households in the lakeside pastoral areas comes from the Tibetan sheep industry. Price declines strike their livelihoods directly. The herders recall enduring four or five years now of falling livestock prices.
National data bear this out: lamb prices have been on a downward cycle since 2021, with live sheep fetching progressively less. Cattle prices have fared little better—in 2024, domestic beef prices slid to their lowest point in nearly five years, and live-cattle prices to their lowest in close to ten.
Under such pressure, some herders can no longer weather the downturn and have sold off all their yaks and sheep, exiting the trade altogether.
This year, Niang’e Jia’s family have yet to sell any sheep; they are preparing to move to their winter pasture and wait for buyers to come. They have also heard that prices have ticked up a little since last year. Will a price rebound make life any easier for the herders? My follow-up visit began on precisely that sliver of hope.
II. Qieji West Road: The Buy-Sell Gambit
National market figures told much the same story: throughout September, the average national price of beef stood at 70.90 yuan per kilogram and mutton at 69.59 yuan per kilogram. Yet compared with 2023, both beef and mutton had still fallen by around 10 yuan per kilogram.
I walked into the shop to ask about the rise in meat prices. The shopkeeper explained that cattle and sheep reared in winter are fed mostly on grain, while in summer they graze on grass. The method of rearing makes a marked difference to the taste of the meat. Generally speaking, fattened cattle and sheep are too fat after slaughter, with too much abdominal fat and a thick fat layer. For local consumers accustomed to eating hand-picked mutton, pasture-fed mutton is naturally the more popular choice. So September prices are already a touch higher as a rule.
Leaving Xining, my formal follow-up visits began 142 kilometres away in Gonghe County. On both sides of the G6 Expressway leading to Gonghe, grasslands stretch out unbroken. Road signs along the way read ‘Watch for livestock,’ and herds of yaks and Tibetan sheep stand or lie in clusters across the pastures. Gonghe is the seat of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and by long-standing custom Qieji West Road has become the hub for live-sheep trading — herders from the surrounding area all come here to sell their sheep.
Last year, it was on this very road that I happened upon another group of filming subjects — Makali’s father. At the time, he and his companions had been waiting along the roadside for sheep to come in. Sheep traders are essentially the ‘brokers’ of the livestock trade, and most of them are local Hui people. The cattle and sheep raised by herders pass through their hands, step by step, before reaching the market and ultimately the dining table.
The summer pasture season is one of the busiest times of the year for the sheep traders. I had arranged to meet Makali that evening, but he cancelled at the last minute — he had to head to the Heishui River to collect payments. So once again I had to return to Qieji West Road and try my luck, just as I had the previous year.
Live-sheep trading normally takes place only in the morning. That day, just one sheep turned up. Five or six sheep traders had gathered by the roadside, occasionally glancing at videos of cattle and sheep sent by herders on their phones, sizing them up and chatting. They were not worried about business; in this season, trading is usually done out on the hills, where the younger traders have headed to pick up seventy, eighty or even over a hundred sheep at a stretch — so the herders no longer need to come to the market themselves.
But none of them showed much interest in this particular sheep. The traders said something was wrong with it — the problem was in its head. That was why its gaze was askew and it walked at an angle, unable to keep to a straight line.
Try as I might, I could not see anything wrong with the sheep. More likely, buyer and seller simply could not agree on a price. An experienced sheep trader can gauge the meat yield of any sheep after slaughter on instinct alone, then work out a fair price based on market rates. Offer too much and they take a loss; offer too little and another buyer will snap it up.
According to the traders, this ewe, just over two years old, was too thin and small, yielding barely more than twenty jin of meat. At this year’s wholesale price of 25 yuan per jin for mutton and 27 yuan per jin for yak, it was worth no more than 600 yuan to them.
The sheep’s owner was a middle-aged Tibetan man. He insisted the sheep was perfectly healthy! To sell it, he had driven his small van thirty or forty kilometres from home that very morning. He was asking 900 yuan, which sent several curious traders away. Groups of sheep traders approached the Tibetan man in turn, exchanged a few hushed words, and then each one left.
By noon, the sheep traders who had been stationed along Qieji West Road had all drifted off, and the lone sheep found no buyer in the end.
III. Sheep Herders Trapped in Debt
Falling prices also cut into their earnings. Meanwhile, fixed rearing costs and year-on-year outgoings had not fallen. Every herder I filmed mentioned that their own grassland was insufficient; to feed their cattle and sheep adequately, they either had to rent more land or buy in feed. When sale prices for cattle and sheep fell short, they would expand their herds to maintain their income — creating a vicious cycle.
The remaining few tens of thousands he put towards repaying his loan. By the time I visited again this year, he still had 200,000 yuan left to settle. Each year, come the repayment date, he can only borrow from relatives and friends first, then pay them back once a new loan comes through — this cycle of revolving debt has gone on for seven or eight years.
By Wang Sheng’s own reckoning, he needs at least four more years to clear the debt.
That is, provided their life of grazing in secret can carry on.
IV. The “Bachelors’ League” of the Grazing-Ban Zone
To save on fodder costs, the herders in the village resort to guerrilla tactics, sneaking back onto the grassland to graze. Otherwise, their life of herding on borrowed money would be impossible to sustain.
Almost all of these herders live in disaster-relief tents, far from their families. The furnishings inside are spartan: a bed, a stove, and a simple trestle table holding daily necessities, instant noodles, and biscuits. The tent moves with the flock. Wang Sheng has a house in the village some tens of kilometres away, but after long years of being left empty it has fallen into disrepair. ‘Where would the money for repairs come from?’
Besides, the flock cannot do without a herder. Every morning Wang Sheng drives the sheep out onto the grassland to graze, then rounds them back in the evening — the same routine of herding out and herding in, day after day. He also has to watch for signs of illness in the flock and buy medicine promptly to treat any sick sheep.
On 13 September this year, when I reached Wang Sheng’s camp, he was in the middle of bringing the sheep back in.
The flock was feeding among the waist-high feather grass at the edge of Qinghai Lake; the grass all around them had been grazed almost bare. Wang Sheng had to ride his motorcycle out to where the sheep were grazing and, together with the other herders from the village, drive it straight into the flock, shouting loudly every so often. Startled, the sheep scatter in all directions. The herders watch the flock’s movements, riding after them to cut them off, guiding the strays back to their respective flocks.
It took over an hour before the 3,000-plus sheep of the village were finally home.
‘Is there any caterpillar fungus?’ During my time in Qinghai I had heard of other herders who could supplement their income by digging caterpillar fungus. ‘We don’t even have caterpillar fungus here.’
What about going out to find paid work? ‘A hundred-odd yuan a day — when would we ever pay off the loan?’
E-commerce, then? Doing their own slaughtering and processing, or even bypassing the sheep traders and finding customers directly? Any other subsidies? Every idea I could think of, they dismissed.
‘So what do you do going forward?’ I pressed on, feeling anxious on their behalf.
Their answer was simple — hope. Hope for rising sheep prices: from this year to next, from next to the one after.
V. A Way Out?
When I returned to Qinghai and got in touch with Danzeng Zongzhi again, I found he had moved to Gonghe County, renting a small room for 190 yuan a month with his wife and his son, who was nearly three.
As it happens, his new home is close to Qieji West Road, the live-sheep trading hub. Step out of the courtyard gate and you can hear sheep bleating from the neighbouring yard.
Prices have ticked back up a little this year. When he mentioned the cattle and sheep he had sold last year, Danzeng Zongzhi sounded somewhat resigned: ‘Prices were terrible then, but if we didn’t sell, we didn’t have enough grassland either. We really lost out.’
I was curious about how Danzeng Zongzhi made a living in Gonghe County. The answer came as a bit of a surprise. After hitting a string of closed doors in his job search, he turned to food delivery, completing at least thirty orders a day. This was the first time, in his twenties, that he had left the pastoral area to work in a town. Life in town often drained him of energy — no matter how late he got up, he always felt exhausted, whereas on the grassland he had been full of life every day.
‘Herding is so much simpler than this.’ From a free herder to a delivery rider trapped by algorithms, he had to struggle through the transformation of identity. In his eyes, the job was fraught with danger — you have to ride fast or you run over time. Not long ago he had been fined 200 yuan for arriving late, the equivalent of two days’ earnings. The danger also came from theft. Since becoming a delivery rider he had lost a meal on the way, and just the other day, through a moment’s carelessness, he had lost his own phone, forcing him to keep running deliveries on his wife’s.
He also had to avoid clashes with unpleasant customers at the door as much as possible. Once, a customer belittled him — ‘You’re just a delivery guy, aren’t you?’ — in a rage he threw the man’s meal to the ground.
I had planned to continue filming Danzeng Zongzhi’s story, picking up where last year’s narrative had left off. He gladly agreed and let me follow him with the camera the next day. But to my surprise, when I arrived at his rented room at nine the following morning, as agreed, I found he had not yet gotten up. My first instinct was that I had stumbled upon a young man who loved oversleeping. As it turned out, after a little while, he shuffled out, still groggy, washed his face and told me that he had taken on an unexpected overnight shift the night before, only getting back at six in the morning, and that he was so exhausted he could not take us filming.
He missed herding life terribly. ‘The best thing is grazing at home, in your own pasture. But there isn’t enough grassland — that’s a huge problem. If you have too few cattle and sheep, you can’t feed a family of five or six on them alone. Out of desperation, you start wondering whether there might be another way, and that’s why I came here to work.’
Perhaps this attempt to find a new path would end in failure after all. He told me that in a few months’ time he planned to go back — perhaps to take up herding again.
Yet even with prices ticking up a little this year, the underlying contradictions in the market had not been fundamentally resolved. Imports of meat, for instance, continued to flood the market in vast volumes. In the first three quarters of 2025, cumulative imports of beef and mutton remained steady; beef alone accounted for 2.125 million tonnes, a year-on-year increase of 1.0%.
Although the CIF prices of imported meat had also risen sharply — the average CIF price of beef stood at USD 5,225.12 per tonne (roughly 37.88 yuan per kilogram), and the average CIF price of mutton at USD 3,846.16 per tonne (roughly 27.88 yuan per kilogram), both up 23.5% year on year — even after layer upon layer of mark-ups from the port of entry to retail, imported meat still held a clear price advantage over local meat, which sells at 60 to 70 yuan per kilogram.
As a result, across the country, some livestock herders are exiting the trade altogether. By the end of the first three quarters of 2025, the national cattle inventory stood at 99.32 million head, down 2.4% year on year and 0.6% quarter on quarter; the national sheep inventory stood at 290 million head, down 6.9% year on year and 3.7% quarter on quarter.
Will the better prices herders have been hoping for ever truly arrive?
On the evening of 19 December, at 19:40, the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture, directed by Jiao Xiaofang and Qiongwu Danzeng, will be screened at the [Fengnianqing Space] at Guangzhou Pazhou South TOD. Director Jiao Xiaofang will join online for a Q&A session after the screening — all are welcome!
“Ame the Cleaner, Just Wanting a Proper Meal | The Working Person’s Table”
“In Malaysia, Chinese Traders Want Only Grade-A Durian”
“‘Fake Meat’ Displaces Real Meat: Herders, the Table, and the Amazon”
“Watermelons Guaranteed Sweet, Growers Guaranteed Bitter”
“Marlan in Shenzhen, with No Meal Companion”
“Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Disappeared?”
“Technology, Pesticides and Drone Pilots: The Other Side of the ‘Technological Revolution'”
“Who Drove the Wet Market Away?”
“Will Online Fresh Produce Make Wet Markets Vanish?”
“When Drones Become the New Farming Tools: Who Is Defining ‘Scientific Farming’?”
