Tongliao, long an area of sand and gravel and camels at the eastern fringe of the Gobi Desert, has been transformed into lush grasslands crisscrossed with rows of poplar trees — and the heart of China’s growing cattle industry.
Over the past several decades, the administrative prefecture in China’s Inner Mongolia region has converted an arid expanse the size of Maryland to cornfields, grass or forest. Large expanses of northern China have become significantly wetter since the 1990s because of climate change, according to the Chinese government’s National Climate Center.
Today, areas of Tongliao look more like famous beef-raising areas in Montana or Argentina’s Pampas. Grass and corn are harvested from the reclaimed desert and fed to cows along with corn and cornstalks on local farms. China’s nationwide herd of beef cattle has expanded by a third since 2018 to nearly 90 million, including nearly four million head in previously arid Tongliao.
“The situation has now been reversed: The sand is retreating, greenery is expanding,” said Shen Zhixin, a senior forestry and grassland engineer in western Tongliao.
Rainier summers in northern China have the potential to upend the $500 billion global beef industry, with consequences for beef-exporting countries like Argentina, Australia, Brazil and the United States.
China is the world’s biggest importer of beef by a wide margin, buying two-thirds of Argentina’s beef exports and large shares of other countries’ shipments. Now, Beijing has seized on the chance to become more self-reliant by expanding the country’s beef industry, already the world’s third largest after Brazil and the United States.
China is not only increasing the number of cattle but also pushing to breed plumper animals with better quality beef. China now vies with the European Union each year as the world’s biggest importer of bull semen for the artificial insemination of cows, according to World Bank data.
Beijing is taking broader actions to protect its domestic market from lower-cost imports that come from countries with much larger, more efficient ranches and feedlots. China set annual quotas on Dec. 31 for beef imports from each of the world’s biggest beef producers, with 55 percent tariffs taking effect as soon as those quotas are reached. Australia reached its full-year quota by late June and was hit with the tariffs three days later, and Brazil is close to its quota.
At a summit in Beijing in May, President Trump pressed China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for the country to buy more American beef. China had halted nearly all imports from the United States early last year after Mr. Trump’s increases in American tariffs. Although Beijing lifted one regulatory barrier during the summit, American shipments are still nearly nonexistent.
Nobody expects China, with its enormous population, to become self-sufficient in beef anytime soon. But until recently, its beef imports accelerated as an increasingly affluent population demanded a higher-protein diet that exceeded the domestic supply.
As recently as 2015, China imported less than 500,000 tons of beef, according to the country’s customs data. As imports began rising quickly, China started expanding its own herd, even handing out free cattle to impoverished households in the country’s poorest counties. Imports peaked in 2024 at 2.87 million tons — a huge windfall for ranchers around the globe. It was a pace of annual increases matched by few industries other than China’s own rapid growth in car exports.
But by 2024, real estate prices had tumbled and many Chinese households were switching to less expensive chicken or pork after losing their savings in the country’s housing market crash. Combined with rising domestic production, beef wholesale prices plunged 21 percent that year.
The price drop incited considerable anger in rural China, where millions of families put their life savings into raising cattle for slaughter.
China capped overall imports from the rest of the world this year at 2.69 million tons, using the country quotas system and the threat of 55 percent tariffs. It is a politically delicate move by Beijing, which has strongly opposed tariffs by the European Union and the United States on its own surging car exports.
Beef prices are now recovering, helping farmers like those in Inner Mongolia.
Tongliao typifies the transformation now taking place along the southeastern edge of the Gobi Desert. Several decades ago, only 12 percent of Tongliao had grasslands or forests and the rest was desert, according to the local government. Now 64 percent of the area is covered with crops, grass or forests.
China’s propaganda apparatus attributes the retreat of the Gobi Desert to decades of hard work in planting trees, supplemented more recently by the extensive deployment of solar panels. These actions have stabilized the region’s shifting sands and have helped tame dry desert winds that used to wick away moisture from surface soil, the government has said.
But climate change is also making a big difference. Annual rainfall has significantly increased, although there have been yearslong dips and surges along the way, according to China’s meteorologists. Across northern China, previously dry expanses with a total area similar to Arizona have begun receiving enough rain to support grassland or crops, although the soil quality for agriculture in many of these areas is poor.
“What we’re seeing is a long-term increase associated with climate warming, with pronounced, decade-long swings superimposed on top of it,” said Xu Xiaofeng, the president of the China Meteorological Service Association. He warned that rain also increasingly occurs during brief, heavy downpours instead of in long, gentle showers better for crops.
To prevent damage from hooves or overgrazing, Chinese officials are using farm equipment to mow the new grasslands once a year and distributing the hay to farmers for cattle in pens.
The government also installed a large network of motion sensors on Tongliao’s newly green areas to detect cattle, Mr. Shen said. Government workers get alerts, then remove the offending animal and fine the owner.
“Grazing is strictly prohibited throughout our sand restoration areas,” Mr. Shen said.
The Tongliao region has become one of the world’s largest manufacturing centers for wind turbines, many of which are installed on the new grasslands and send electricity to big cities to the south. Rapid growth in the beef industry, expanding cornfields and extensive factory construction have contributed to a sharp rise in local standards of living, including the plowing of fields with machinery instead of livestock.
China is also trying to plump up its bony, domestic cows, which for centuries were bred for pulling plows. Local cattle are better at resisting local viruses and withstanding Siberian blizzards that come south.
So local cattle are now crossbred through artificial insemination with very large and meatier Swiss Simmental and Angus cattle. The resulting offspring weigh up to twice as much as local cattle, said Guo Jie, deputy director of the Tongliao Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau.
“The Simmentals with our local cattle’s genes can better adapt to the local environment and grow fast,” she said.
(Ms. Guo spoke during a media tour this summer in Inner Mongolia, a border region where foreign media access is sometimes restricted. The New York Times paid its own travel costs.)
But many small-scale farmers are wary of the heftier, imported breeds. Nearly seven million Chinese households still raise nine or fewer cattle apiece.
A herder in China’s Hebei Province with several dozen local cattle said she had no interest in hybrids. “The beef from our cattle is much better than what you see in supermarkets — these are native Chinese breeds,” said the herder, who gave her family name, Zhao. Many of her grass-fed cattle, grazing in a remote mountain valley, had protruding pelvic bones and visible ribs.
Inner Mongolia authorities have turned to incentives to encourage consolidation of the region’s herd at large feedlots, where artificial insemination and other programs are more easily managed. The region’s government now provides a subsidy of $44 per head for cattle fattened at feedlots that send at least 500 cattle each year to local slaughterhouses.
Wholesale beef prices are up 17.6 percent from their low in March last year as import restrictions start to bite, helping farmers in Tongliao as part of a longer-term increase in prosperity.
“In the past, people had to travel on foot or ride camels,” Mr. Shen said. “Today, almost every household owns a car.”
Ruoxin Zhang contributed research.
