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Paper short abstract

In urban China state development displaces humans and animals into shared precarity. Marginalised animal rescuers enact care that simultaneously upholds extractive logics, revealing how broader power logics continue to operate through multispecies relations constraining possibilities for coexistence

Paper long abstract

Rapid development and urbanisation are reconfiguring animal-human relations in contemporary China through histories of dispossession. Urban development displaces villagers and labourers, creating both human precarity and animal abandonment. Free-roaming village dogs become urban scavengers; pets are discarded by precarious workers; stray cats are poisoned by management committees. Dog lovers clash with those who fear rabies. "Dog beating" squads kill unregistered dogs. Cities impose registration laws and breed bans, yet lack funds to manage stray populations effectively.

Into spaces where the state manages animals through elimination, rescue has emerged, performed by marginalized older women ('aunties') without official funding or legal status. Though companion animals were historically seen as luxuries, it is often the most precarious who step forward to care - yet that care is complex. Rescuers' affective relations with animals open possibilities for different coexistence, but also constrain animal agency. While fighting for survival rights, they simultaneously enact caging and confinement, reproducing state logics of control. Whilse rescuers celebrate official companion animal status granted in 2020; it risks categorising any unowned or unsuitable animals as problematic.

Through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how rescue bases become sites where development, precarity, and care are ambivalently entangled. Rather than viewing rescue as benevolent or failed, I trace how power operates through the affective and material labour of the marginalised, asking: what forms of multispecies politics does rescue make possible, and for whom? How do the structures marginalising rescuers also shape the animals they seek to save?