Five months ago, one of China's leading pork analysts vociferously denied making a dire prediction that Chinese hog prices would crash during 2026. Prices are now tumbling to levels unseen in decades, and the bearish prediction he had disavowed now appears to have been more or less accurate. Why did he disown a bearish forecast? What does this incident say about the China dream of AI-driven agriculture?
On November 24, 2025, long-time Chinese hog analyst Feng Yonghui posted an article on his soozhu.com web site denying that he had predicted that hog prices would fall below RMB 10-to-11 per kg and stay there during 2026. Mr. Feng disavowed the bearish forecast, calling it a "malicious spreading of rumors." He blamed an artificial intelligence algorithm for splicing together comments he had made out of context and constructing a misleading assessment that tarnished his reputation.
Five months later, on March 23, Mr. Feng's site reported that hog prices had broken through the RMB 10 threshold, dropped 26% so far this year, and were still under downward pressure. On March 27 his site reported an average of RMB 9.58 per kg. Prices may well rebound above RMB 11 this year, but the drop in prices is alarming, and there is consensus that hog supply and demand are seriously out of whack. So, sounding an alarm last November was not really irresponsible.
In November Mr. Feng had claimed that the forecast of low prices was inconsistent with supply & demand fundamentals, including signs that sow inventories were being pared back. This week his site reported that the sustained decline in prices is due to a severe imbalance between supply and demand. A high volume of pork is being moved into cold storage because demand is at a seasonal low during the early-Spring, and farms are giving up on expectations of a price rebound and sending hogs to slaughter. Another item this week concluded that large-scale hog companies had consistently failed to meet targets for reducing production issued by authorities. Government officials held meetings with hog companies again this month taking even stronger measures to force them to cut back sow inventories, control the volume of hogs slaughtered, and report company data to authorities.
In November, Mr. Feng had suggested that production costs would act as a floor preventing a steep drop in prices. This week, Mr. Feng's site said the drop in prices caused a predicament of unremitting losses for the entire sector, with farrow-to-finish operations losing nearly RMB 200 per hog and feeder-to-finish operations losing more than RMB 300 per hog.
Mr. Feng is one of China's most experienced and incisive hog market analysts, and his commentary is usually free of propaganda. So it's out of character for him to get this wrong. It's odd that his November disavowal of the low-price prediction for this year is still featured on his site literally alongside news about this month's plunging hog prices. His November accusation of "spreading rumors" (造谣) -- a favorite phrase of communist apparatchiks -- is a clue that his November diatribe may have been published under pressure from an official behind the scenes intent on squelching bad news. Ironically, it appears that Feng's November essay describing bearish forecasts as false information was itself false information.
Mr. Feng's November accusation that an AI algorithm assembled his comments "out of context" to spread misleading information gives us another thread to pull on. Soozhu.com also features an article in which New Hope Group founder Liu Yonghao urges hog farms to embrace AI to follow the CCP's "Number One Document's" order to integrate AI in agriculture. But AI's autonomous gathering and analysis of information is at odds with the CCP's obsession with actively controlling the narrative. If the CCP succeeds in scrubbing any fact or statement that is at odds with its accepted narrative (e.g. bad news or evidence that policies failed), an AI algorithm will only be able to utilize factoids and statements that agree with the CCP narrative. Consequently, AI will reproduce the CCP's narrative.
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| Data from xinfadi.com.cn |
Comments
I'm not expecting AI to move the needle on official narratives, but would be curious if it becomes a rhetorical device - especially when someone posts a view that's outside the boundaries and deletes it later - acting as a fig leaf when someone's more disruptive opinions leak out.