If it's protein, and not calories, that are going to be an issue in PRC, I suspect the people in PRC will be ordered by their government to consume chicken instead of pork. one chicken per week per man is plenty to supplant a rice- or wheat-based diet, along with some vegetables. Chicken production can also be scaled rapidly, albeit if done quickly there will probably be outbreaks of avian flu.
Whilst I've seen plenty of emotive videos over the years showing chickens' capacity for socialisation, empathy and intelligence, I as equally find it hard to have too much sympathy for them in their function as food for humans, given most of them barely make it two months into the world.
I say this as someone who, whilst loving her utterly after her birth, had occasional abstract thoughts about how entirely unconscious and parasitic my daughter was for a few months. It got me thinking. Whilst I now find my heart softened utterly by so much more than I did, my heart also hardened when thinking about sentient chickens as food.
Out of grim interest, I just checked how long it takes for Mealworm to mature. Chickens take less time to grow..
>Pigs https://doomberg.substack.com/p/chinas-achilles-squeal
Calories are generally cheap. Protein is dear. When the ocean ecosystem collapses under the strain of acidification by dissolved CO2, efforts to control access to protein will trigger wars.
Meat is non-essential, nutritionally, given beans and B-12, but materially reducing access to it is politically destabilizing.
PRC is a totalitarian state that has starved its own population in the name of progress in living memory.
I suspect they would be fine with doing this again.
Imagine if all that had happened over a year or two. The BLM protests would probably look quaint by comparison.
Just, a lot less of them than would have been fed to the animal it replaces.