Beijing Makes Pig's Ear of Pork Policy, Say Farmers

choi

Financial Times, Dec 23, 2017

(1) front page: in the left lower corner was a reefer:
photo of a white piglet, followed by a paragraph that comes with a heading:

Beijing Makes Pig's Ear of Pork Policy, Say Farmers  The pig is so central to rural culture that a hog with a roof over its head forms the Chinese character for 'home.' But a nationwide drive to reduce water pollution and steady pork prices has led to mass closure of pig farms and a 50m cut in numbers in two years. The campaign -- in which pigsties are demolished, driving price volatility -- has hit smallholders hard, leaving them suffer from the booms and busts of the 'pork cycle.'

Note:
(a) reefer
(i) Explaining Today's Papers. Slate.com, undated
http://www.slate.com/articles/ne ... _todays_papers.html
("Readers have requested explanations of some of the terms used in Slate's 'Today's Papers' column. Here is a brief glossary. * * * Reefer: A brief front-page synopsis of a story that appears inside the paper. USA Today's 'Newsline' and the Wall Street Journal's 'What's News' are essentially multiple reefers")
(ii) Glossary. In Tim Harrower, The Newspaper Designer's Handbook. 5th ed. McGraw-Hill Cos, 2002
https://highered.mheducation.com ... view0/glossary.html
("refer (or reefer)[:]  A line or paragraph, often given graphic treatment, referring to a related story elsewhere in the paper")
(A) The latest edition is 7th, published in 2012. The "Cos" stands for "Companies."
(B) This (Harrower's) may explain the etymology, which I can not find anywhere else.

(b) make a silk purse of a sow's ear
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_a_silk_purse_of_a_sow%27s_ear
(etymology)

Because this page is about origin of the phrase, it (the page) is faithful to the original phrase. But in current use, sometimes it is written "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" to make the phrase ever clearer.

(2) the report at page 4:

Tom Hancock, Chinese Pig Face the Chop; Smallholders count cost of nationwide drive to reduce pollution and steady prices.
https://www.ft.com/content/f5a665a6-de30-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c

Note:
(a) 新港镇
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新港镇
(安徽省芜湖市繁昌县; 江西省九江市濂溪区; 湖南省长沙市开福区; or 广东省河源市东源县)

But a map in print as well as online shows Xingang is in Fujian -- more specifically, 福州市 , where there is a harbor called 新港（江阴港）.
(b) The print report carries a photo that shows four black pigs, a white pig and a mottled pig.
(c) ONLINE but not in print is the paragraph: "Livestock-farming-ban zones covering 636,000 square km – about twice the size of Poland -- have been designated nationwide since 2014, and authorities have shuttered hundreds of thousands of pig and poultry farms – more than 200,000 in the first half of this year, according to officials.

The print does not have any graphic displayed online.
(d) The second word of the compound noun pigsty is sty.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sty
(etymology: Old English)

Both pigsty and sty means the same: pigpen.

(e)
(i)
(A) hog (n): "a domesticated swine especially when weighing more than 120 pounds (54 kilograms) — compare PIG 1a"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hog
(B) pig (n): "a young domesticated swine usually weighing less than 120 pounds (50 kilograms) — compare HOG 1a"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pig
(ii) Alina Bradford, Pigs, Hogs & Boars: Facts About Swine. Live Science, Apr 24, 2015
("Pigs are in the Suidae family 科, which includes eight genera and 16 species. Among those species are wild boars, warthogs and pygmy hogs and domestic pigs. Pig, hog and boar essentially describe the same animal, but there are some distinctions. A boar is an uncastrated male domestic pig, but it also means a wild pig of any gender. A hog often means a domestic pig that weighs more than 120 lbs. (54 kilograms). Pigs are also called swine")https://www.livescience.com/50623-pigs-facts.html

(f) So fat, this report has not appeared in 金融时报中文网 www.ftchinese.com.