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As China’s middle class has expanded, pet ownership has taken off. In 2025, people living in Chinese cities owned around 126 million pet cats and dogs – roughly 73 million cats and 53 million dogs.

That market has expanded quickly. Perfect data are hard to come by but what is at hand suggests that pet ownership levels have lifted by 50% in a decade, while real spending on urban pets, the more important marker of cultural attitudes, may be up by roughly 200% over the same period.

Cats account for 58% of the combined urban pet population as they are generally easier to keep in smaller urban apartments and require less daily attention. But considering those living arrangements, the number of dogs is surprisingly large, suggesting that an affection for the animals must be developing in many Chinese homes.

An estimate places the share of Chinese households owning a pet at about 22.0%. This is substantially lower than in the United States, where the share is roughly 70.0% – but it is the trajectory of the trend line that is important, not the absolute current level of ownership.

A document The Common Sense encountered during the course of its research suggested that until around 40 years ago, pets were considered a “bourgeois peculiarity” and ownership was restricted.

The rise of pet ownership poses a two-phase threat to China’s system of government.

Culturally, pet ownership strengthens individualism. People who have pets increasingly organise their lives around personal choice, private happiness, and emotionally chosen relationships and accordingly become less willing to accept that the state should define their duties, families, and priorities.

That individualism in turn creates the foundations of democratic thinking by encouraging citizens to see themselves as people with rights, interests, and loyalties that exist independently of the government.

Pet owners also form communities to defend animals, challenge arbitrary rules, and demand legal protection for their private attachments, which conditions people to become accustomed to voluntary organisation and public pressure. The emotional intensity behind those organisations can easily rival that behind formal political organisations. Roughly half of American pet owners care so deeply about their pet that they see it as a member of their family – which explains why the market for spending on pets in the West broadly is so vast. (A new report from the American Pet Products Association says that pet industry expenditure is projected to reach $165 billion in 2026.) This explains why the roughly 200% lift in Chinese pet spending is such an important insight – especially as the pet spending trendline is increasing far faster than the per-capita GDP trendline for China.

The chart below sets out the Chinese pet spending line against the GDP line. Note that the early data for Chinese pet spending are a broad estimate, but that the quality of that data has begun to improve in recent years.

The threat to Beijing is that increasing pet ownership, especially the ownership of dogs, leads to a more individualistic society that will increasingly expect political institutions to respect personal freedom, property, association, and choice. It will be interesting to watch whether this risk lands on the radar of Chinese policymakers and whether that leads to actions to curb pet ownership.