MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Young people in China - meaning people in their 20s and 30s - are having fewer children, but they are buying more pets. They're also increasingly seeing their pets as members of their family. That means a host of pet service industries have popped up, including funeral services for furry loved ones. NPR's Emily Feng reports with Jasmine Ling in Beijing.
MO YANG YANG: (Speaking Mandarin).
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Mo Yang Yang (ph), the owner of this funeral home in Beijing, is preparing for a pair of bereaved parents to arrive.
MO: They always treat their pets like their kids or their family members. So I would call them, like, parents. Literally, if you have a dog named Bubble (ph), I would say, hi, Bubble's mom or Bubble's dad.
FENG: The parents in question are weeping.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Crying).
FENG: Their puppy, they say, suddenly died the night before.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Crying).
MO: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: Mo guides the sobbing parents through funeral rites. Her pet burial company will help bury the puppy's ashes later. Mo has multiple cats and one dog named Bagel (ph). And as an animal lover, she noticed a societal shift - more people considering their animals as family. So she launched her pet funeral company.
MO: You don't have to just toss your pets away after they passed away or just, like, bury them in some middle of nowhere.
FENG: The popularity of companies like hers in China is notable because the attitude towards pets in China was not always so personal.
ELISA HARCA: It was more pragmatic years ago.
FENG: This is Elisa Harca, co-founder of a marketing agency called Red Ant Asia. It works with a lot of Chinese and China-focused companies.
HARCA: The way that the Chinese culture has evolved and the way that those bigger cities and the lower-tier cities have evolved around general well-being of humans has then permeated into their love of animals.
FENG: One Goldman Sachs analysis based on rising pet food sales concluded that Chinese cities could already have more pets than human toddlers as of this year. Meanwhile, China's human population has been contracting since 2022, and its birth rate falling for four years running.
HARCA: Young people in China are choosing not to get married or get married much later. And I think that is closely tied with that need for love has been somewhat filled by other ways.
FENG: Like having pets, and people are willing to spend on them. iMedia Research, the Chinese market consultancy, estimates the pet industry is worth about $113 billion in China this year. So when Adidas launched its first pet sportswear line, it launched it exclusively in China. Other companies offer everything from grooming services to much more niche products. Entrepreneur Cheng Xu (ph), for example, makes paper money for pets, shaped like their food cans and toys.
CHENG XU: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: He says the idea for making paper money for pets came to him when he was staring at the ashes of his own beloved cat, Rourou (ph). He had a flash of inspiration to send her into the afterworld in style. After just about a year in the business, he's now one of the biggest pet paper money companies in China. Sometimes he gets requests from pet stores like...
CHENG: (Speaking Mandarin)?
FENG: ...Can you make your paper pork chop a little more realistic and more detailed? Cheng loves pets, but he says he does actually want to have human kids in the future. But Mo Yang Yang from the pet cremation company says she's very happy as is with her many pets.
MO: Now society has a lot of pressure, and it's just so much competition going on everywhere. You have to be the best. You have to be this and that, and our parents would have a lot of expectations. And we are also in a period of time we are very - sometimes very lost. Even I am.
FENG: But you know who doesn't have those expectations, she says? Your pets.
MO: Like me yesterday, I worked for, like, almost 20 hours. And the only thing that keep me going is I know when I open my door, my dog is going to be there. My cats are going to be there.
FENG: She says her dog and her cats provide her the unconditional love she's always longed for.
With Jasmine Ling in Beijing, this is Emily Feng, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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