I could be reading it wrong. The government invested 100m+ yuan into the company CellX last year so I wouldnt be surprised if it were subsidized. I can't find any up to date information of other types of cultured meat, seems pork is the cash cow right now. Comments on similar articles says the meat is only available in restaurants right now.
:some-controversy:
This entire thing reads like it's written by a poorly trained AI or some kind of robot that crawls around social media copying posts based on keywords.
On the bottom it says some other pork (not lab grown) is ￥18/斤(500g) which makes no sense.
It def is an aggregator. There were a number of articles but this one summarized most of the things I found on baidu. Also, real talk, Chinese search engines don't feel as good as Western or even Russian/Czech ones. Very cumbersome to find things and throws out a lot of trash articles. And things like Google are not good at finding Chinese sources either.
That is the general cost of pork, though. SCMP reported in 2019 that it is about a dozen yuan per 500g, but it rose to 30 yuan later. It seems pork in general is very volatile in price in China and that might be why they're looking to lab meat.
I would like to note that this price isn't particularly absurd, prices are getting cheaper across the board. Right now it seems a matter of distribution and getting funding to produce at scale because the tech that has made this available has only recently released.
Why doesn't China have cheese caves and prosciutt caves? Every few years it seems like a glut in the market causes farmers to dump milk or kill livestock.
A lot of markets are like this. Its a universal issue with capitalism and particularly with consumable goods. If the agriculture industry was entirely owned by the state, that would be possible. But small scale farmers do not have the ability to start up a cheese operation off the cuff, so they pour out excess milk so spoilage doesn't spread.
You'll note that there is a trend towards monopolies in capitalism. Monopolies do have some flexibility when it comes to perishable goods like this, like redirecting things to canning, because they own the farm and the factories. But sometimes even then, a monopoly isn't big enough to reduce wastage. Thats where socialism is necessary in order to reduce wastage. But you can't just hit the socialism button, its far more complex than that.
One benefit of lab grown meat is that it can be confined to a small area, which makes centralization even easier and reduce wastage and increase recycling. I do strongly believe these sorts of technologies that downsize old high land use structures are the most necessary for socialist development.