Eye on the future

It was because he had three children to feed that a relatively wealthy butcher became a struggling farmer. Han Bingbin finds out how an epiphany changed his life.

It was in the later years of the 1990s, and beef hotpot restaurants were catching on in popularity in Beijing. Si Guiquan was working as a butcher at a slaughterhouse that offered meat processing services to some of the capital's most popular restaurants. He was killing cows and slicing the meat into dinner-ready portions for the restaurants. Ten years in this booming business apparently made him a tidy fortune. He was one of the few people able to afford three apartments in his native Sanhe city in Hebei province and another two in Beijing. But in 2005, he decided to quit because he got scared by the prevalent industry practices and work ethics.

At the beginning, Si says, beef in Beijing's restaurants came mainly from cows raised on small farms in Shandong and Hebei provinces. They were not meat animals, but were used to work the land. Some were sold after they become too old to work.