More than thirty years ago, a girl in a small Chinese county town had a dog. She loved him. In his whole life, that dog never ate a bag of dog food, never saw a vet, and generated almost nothing we would call “pet spending” today.
More than twenty years later, the same woman got another dog. This time, behind one small poodle stood an entire industry: specialized nutrition, veterinary care, e-commerce, smart devices, and a market worth over RMB 300 billion (more than USD 40 billion) a year.
Her love for dogs did not suddenly appear. So where did the market come from?
The answer has less to do with pets than with what happened to the Chinese family over the past three decades.
01 | 1986: One more person in the family
In the winter of 1986, a baby girl was born in a county town in central China. There was no banquet, and few relatives were told. She was her parents’ second child.
Her name was Xu Lan.
Her father worked at the county education bureau, and her mother taught at a primary school. Both held jobs in the state system, with fixed salaries and every expectation of staying until retirement. In the China of the 1980s, such positions came with a condition. Under the family planning policy, urban employees of state institutions were expected to have one child, and to set an example for everyone else.
The second child cost the family dearly. Her father was suspended without pay: he stayed on the books, but his salary stopped and he was no longer expected at work. Her mother lost the right to apply for any further professional title, the rank that set a teacher’s pay and standing for the rest of her career. On top of that, the family paid a fine of RMB 3,000. The average annual wage in China that year was RMB 1,329, so the fine equalled more than two years of an average worker’s income.
Growing up, Xu Lan often heard relatives say, “Your dad lost his job because of you.” Sometimes it was a joke, sometimes a complaint. She knew nothing about population policy or household economics, but she learned one thing early: in a family, one more person comes with a cost.
In that household, money went first to the most concrete needs: food, clothes and school fees for two children, a roof over everyone’s heads, the grandparents, and what to do if someone fell ill. A family was an emotional unit, and it was also a very practical system for allocating scarce resources.
After leaving the education bureau, her father drove trucks and traded clothes and household goods. He worked hard, but his business never really took off. At the bureau, showing up had meant a paycheck at the end of the month. In the market, he discovered that effort and income had no reliable connection. The money the family could count on was her mother’s teaching salary, paid on time every month.
It was in this family that Xu Lan met her first dog.
02 | Xiaohei: the love was there, the market was not
When Xu Lan was five or six, the family kept a black-and-tan mongrel. Her father called him Xiaohei, “Little Black”; some neighbours called him Dahuang, “Big Yellow”. Nobody knew his breed or his birthday. He lived in a corner of the courtyard, and his job was to guard the house.
The family never bought dog food. Xiaohei ate leftovers: rice soaked in vegetable broth, or a bone someone had already gnawed. He had no toys and no bed of his own. He was never bathed and never saw a vet.
Xu Lan adored him. Every afternoon he was the first to know she was home from school, his tail wagging behind the gate while she was still far down the lane. She would crouch down, hug him and tell him about her day. He understood none of it, but he never scolded her, and he never reminded her how much trouble her birth had caused.
One year, Xiaohei stopped eating and lay in the courtyard all day. No one knew what was wrong or where to take him. Her father thought he might recover on his own. Her mother said, “We don’t have money to spare.”
Not long after, Xiaohei died. There was no medical record, no burial, and not a single photograph that was really of him.
03 | Leaving
In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. Xu Lan was in middle school. She had little idea what the WTO meant; she remembered TV footage of ports, containers, factories and negotiating tables. Her English teacher told the class that China would do more and more business with the world, and that good English would open doors.
For a girl in a county town, that meant the outside world had suddenly become reachable. It might be a university, a city, a company, or simply a train ticket out.
In 2004 she was admitted to a university in Shanghai. As the train was about to leave, her father stood on the platform and spoke through the window: “Find yourself a good, stable employer. Don’t end up like me. I’ve never had a settled day in my life.”
She remained her parents’ daughter. She went home for Spring Festival, her mother still called to ask whether she had eaten, and she was among the first to hear when something happened at home. What changed was that they no longer lived together.
Xu Lan was one ordinary young person in one of the largest internal migrations in history. Hundreds of millions of people moved between regions and cities. Families did not dissolve, but more and more of their members lived in different places. “Who is my family?” and “Who do I live with every day?” were no longer quite the same question.
04 | Forty square metres
Xu Lan graduated in 2008. Her father wanted her to come home and take the civil service exam or become a teacher, anything with stability. After half a lifetime of market uncertainty, stability was still what he believed in most.
She stayed in Shanghai and joined a large American pharmaceutical company as a medical sales representative. Her days were spent moving between hospitals, calling on doctors, attending department meetings and tracking regional sales data. There were monthly targets and quarterly reviews, and in the end her performance came down to a clear set of numbers.
It was a different commercial world from her father’s. He had traded on experience, tips and luck. She had entered a professionalized system of product training, territory management, sales targets, marketing strategy and compliance. For her, business had become a career. Having watched her father chase one opportunity after another while her mother held the family together on a fixed salary, she understood early that a stable professional income buys choices as well as money.
There is a shift here that is easy to miss. Xu Lan’s mother was also a working woman who earned her own salary all her life. So the notable difference between the two generations is not that women started working. Women have long been a major part of China’s labour force. What expanded over the following decades was access to higher education and professional careers. Far more women went to university and into jobs that require specialized training. For some urban women, a stable professional income widened what they could decide on their own: where to live, what to spend on, and how to organize their daily lives.
Xu Lan was one of them.
In 2014 she bought a small flat of just over forty square metres near Shanghai’s outer ring road. The down payment took most of her savings and left her with a long mortgage.
When she signed the contract, the sales agent glanced at her paperwork and asked, “Just your name on the deed?”
“Yes.”
The day she got the keys, she sat in the empty flat for a long time. There was no furniture, and the floor was still dusty from the renovation. Forty-odd square metres was nobody’s dream home. But it was probably the first space in her life that was entirely hers to decide about: what furniture to buy, when to come home, who could stay, where the money went, and who, eventually, she might want to live with.
05 | What counts as a family?
Before thirty, Xu Lan was in a serious relationship. But once marriage became a real decision, vague questions turned concrete. Which city would they live in? Who would change jobs? How would they buy a home? If they had children, who would take on more of the care?
Her boyfriend wanted her to leave Shanghai and move to a city closer to his parents. His reasons were sensible: cheaper housing, less pressure, grandparents to help with the children. But “going back” meant different things to each of them. For him, it was a change of address. For her, it meant giving up the career and life she had built and starting over. The relationship never became a marriage.
Her mother found this hard to understand. Her daughter had a job and a flat, so the next steps seemed obvious: find a suitable man, marry, have a child, settle down. She began sending Xu Lan profiles of potential matches, one after another.
Once, on the phone, Xu Lan said, “I’m doing fine on my own.”
Her mother was quiet for a while. Then she asked, “How can one person be a family?”
Xu Lan remembered that question for years. Only later did she realize that she and her mother were arguing about more than marriage. They no longer meant the same thing by the word “family”.
For her mother, a complete family had a clear structure: husband, wife and child, living together and looking after one another. That order carried another meaning for her too. To give birth to Xu Lan, she had given up her professional future, and her husband had lost his position. The family had paid dearly for its second child. So in her mind, that daughter ought to end up with a stable marriage, a family who loved her, and a life her mother would recognize as complete. She was trying, in the way she knew, to make sure her daughter would be all right.
But Xu Lan was living in a different era. On 1 January 2016, China’s universal two-child policy took effect. Thirty years earlier, her parents had paid heavily for having a second child. Now that second child had reached the age where everyone was urging her to have children of her own. In 2021, the rules changed again to allow three. Policy can turn quickly. Families do not rewrite decades of habits, finances and life choices because a new document has been issued.
One Spring Festival, someone at the dinner table brought up Xu Lan’s marriage again. A relative said, half joking, “If a woman doesn’t marry, who’s going to look after her when she’s old?”
Her father, who had been sitting quietly, put down his chopsticks. “If she doesn’t want to marry, she doesn’t have to. I’m her father. I’ll take care of her.”
Looking back, Xu Lan found this a little funny. She had a job, a flat and her own income; she hardly needed her father to support her. But she understood that he wasn’t talking about money. The man who had spent her youth telling her that stability mattered above all had finally accepted that his daughter’s life did not have to follow the path he knew.
06 | Maiya
In 2018, a friend forwarded a message in a WeChat group. An apricot toy poodle, not yet a year old, needed a new home because her owner was leaving Shanghai. Xu Lan went only to have a look. That night she carried the dog back to her flat and named her Maiya, which means “malt”.
What does a first-time dog owner need? She opened a shopping app and filled her cart with kibble, supplements, freeze-dried treats, chews, an automatic water fountain, a travel crate, a leash, pee pads, a brush and disinfectant. The first order came to more than a thousand yuan.
Rewind twenty-odd years and the contrast is striking. Everything Xiaohei ever owned as a “pet” probably amounted to one old enamel bowl for leftovers. On Maiya’s first day, an increasingly specialized system of products and services was already standing behind her.
Gradually, Maiya became part of the rhythm of Xu Lan’s life. There was a walk before work, and another trip downstairs at night however tired she was. Before every business trip, someone had to be arranged to look after her. When shopping, Xu Lan began reading ingredient lists, checking reviews and asking whether a product suited Maiya’s age. Her parents were still back in the county town, and her friends had their own jobs and families. In that small flat in Shanghai, the one who woke up with her, came home with her and shared her days was Maiya.
An animal had become part of the order of her everyday life.
07 | 4,000 yuan
In early 2020, the pandemic changed life in Shanghai. Offices closed, business travel stopped, and friends went months without meeting. Xu Lan worked, ate and slept in her small flat, and Maiya was the only other warm-blooded creature in the room.
One night Maiya started vomiting and couldn’t stop. She refused food and had no energy. When nothing improved, Xu Lan carried her to the car and drove to a 24-hour animal hospital. Blood tests, imaging and other diagnostics followed. The bill came to nearly 4,000 yuan. She paid without much hesitation.
While she waited for the results, she thought of Xiaohei. Years before, he too had stopped eating and lain in the courtyard all day while nobody knew what was wrong. Her mother had said, “We don’t have money to spare.” Xiaohei never saw a doctor.
Now, sitting in the waiting room, Xu Lan could finally say to another living creature: if you can be treated, we’ll treat you.
Rising income explains part of this. Without enough disposable income, there would be no pet spending on today’s scale. But something else had changed as well. For Xu Lan, 4,000 yuan had become an expense her household could, and should, take on.
That is the distance between Xiaohei and Maiya worth studying. The old question was, “How much is a dog worth spending on?” More and more owners today ask, “My dog is sick. What can I do?” What separates those two questions is income, and also the place an animal holds in the family.
08 | When millions of families change
Now pull back from Xu Lan’s flat.
In 1990, the average Chinese household had 3.96 people. By 2020 it had fallen to 2.62. The 2025 national 1% population sample survey put it at 2.52. Over thirty-five years, the typical household lost about 1.4 members.
Several long-term forces drove this: falling fertility, internal migration, better housing, and more young people living on their own. Over the same period, higher education expanded rapidly, and occupations and urban lifestyles shifted. For many urban residents, a stable professional income and a home of their own meant more room to organize daily life as they chose.
The pet market was changing in a related way. Pets were increasingly given a place as members of the family.
According to the 2025 China Pet Industry White Paper (Consumer Report) published by the pet-industry data platform Paidu (派读), China’s urban dog and cat consumption market reached RMB 300.2 billion in 2024, up 7.5% year on year. Over the same period, the urban dog and cat population grew just 2.1%, to about 124 million.
The gap between those two growth rates matters. The market is growing considerably faster than the pet population. A simple calculation puts annual spending at about RMB 2,400 per dog or cat, up roughly 5% on the previous year. Understanding China’s pet economy therefore means looking beyond how many people are getting cats and dogs. Behind each animal, spending is growing and becoming more specialized.
Food is moving from basic feeding towards nutrition, life-stage formulas and health management. Veterinary care is extending from one-off spending when an animal falls ill to vaccines, check-ups, diagnostics, chronic disease management and senior care. Smart devices, boarding and other services address a distinctly modern urban problem: how to keep caring for an animal when you live alone or when both partners work.
Which brings us back to the question we started with. Xu Lan loved Xiaohei as a child. What was missing was more than affection. A mature pet market also needs households with enough disposable income, a stable place for the pet in the family budget, and commercial infrastructure able to meet that demand: food, veterinary care, e-commerce, logistics, services and technology. Only when these conditions came together did an affection that had always existed turn into sustained, specialized and scalable consumer demand.
This is why I think the popular explanation, “young Chinese aren’t having children, so they treat pets as children”, falls short. Families with children keep pets. Couples keep pets. Older people keep pets. Pets have not necessarily replaced anyone. What companies should watch is how the pet’s position within the family has changed. Once an animal takes up a household’s time and space, needs ongoing care and is seen as a long-term responsibility, it also enters the household budget.
If your company is trying to understand or enter the Chinese pet market, RMB 300 billion is an important number. But beyond market size, there may be a more important question: who is this pet in your customer’s family? The answer shapes why people buy, what they will pay a premium for, and which brands they will trust.
09 | Going home
This Spring Festival, Xu Lan took Maiya back to the county town.
Her father is old now. Every morning he takes Maiya out for a walk, sometimes past the corner of the courtyard where Xiaohei used to lie. When neighbours ask what kind of dog she is, he says, “She’s my daughter’s. Her name is Maiya.”
Her mother still brings up marriage now and then. But these days, when she calls, she also asks, “How’s Maiya doing?”
Xiaohei lived in that courtyard with no birthday, no medical record and no insurance. Maiya lives in a small flat in Shanghai. She has her own food, her own vet, her own things, and a fixed share of a household budget.
Ask Xu Lan whether she loves Maiya more than she loved Xiaohei, and there may be no answer. She loved Xiaohei too. What changed was the world around the two dogs. Over the past few decades, people in China moved, households shrank, work and housing changed, and so did the way people organize their daily lives. At the same time, a vast market was built to meet needs that goods and services had rarely met before.
Xiaohei came too early for that market. Maiya arrived in time.
More than thirty years separate the two dogs. So does the transformation of a Chinese family.
Many new consumer markets are emerging in China today: pets, single-person dining, small appliances, elder care, and more spending driven by changing lifestyles. If we want to understand them, there is one question worth asking before we look at market size.
Don’t start by asking how big the market has become.
Start by asking what the family has become.
Note: Xu Lan is a composite character based on real family experiences, with some people, dates and details adapted. Population, policy and market data come from public statistics and industry research.
Sources: National Bureau of Statistics of China (China Statistical Yearbook; 1990 and 2020 census communiqués; 2025 National 1% Population Sample Survey); Paidu, 2025 China Pet Industry White Paper (Consumer Report).