In his 2006 novel "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out," China's Nobel Laureate Mo Yan tells a story of dead pigs being illegally dumped into a river at night, after authorities refuse to offer farmers subsidies to properly dispose of the carcasses.

Unfortunately, life recently imitated art, and over 14,000 pig carcasses had been retrieved from a section of the Huangpu River near Shanghai as of last week.

While the dead pigs didn't end up on dinner tables, they did become a point of concern for Shanghai's 20 million residents, for whom the Huangpu River is a major source of drinking water.

The case had revealed a lack of coordination in China's social management strategies, in which solving one problem often creates another.

Social management is systematic work that requires coordination in policies and among various government bodies. In the case of pig dumping, equal attention should have been paid to food safety regulations and social services regarding the disposal of dead livestock.

In China, some meat processing companies are notorious for producing ham, bacon and sausage with meat from diseased pigs.

It's no wonder that some netizens said they felt lucky that the dead pigs were found in a river and not on the kitchen stove, jokingly attributing the illegal dumping to police cracking down on people trading dead hogs.

An investigative report aired Sunday by the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) also underscored the double-edged sword of the crackdown on the dead hog trade -- food safety was improved, but the problem of how to dispose of dead pigs emerged.

Since the amended Food Safety Law took effect in 2012, according to the program shot in Jiaxing, the city in Zhejiang Province to which many of the pigs found in the Huangpu River were traced, the local government initiated a harsh crackdown on dead hog trading, culminating in three dealers being sentenced to life in prison.

Pan Huimin, one of the jailed dead pig dealers, was quoted in the program as saying local pig farmers found his role indispensable in the eight years that he conducted such business.

He smugly asserted that because the dead hog dealers are in jail, pig farmers had no other choice but to dump the dead pigs in the river.

Though dark, Pan's words ring true to some extent. The crackdown on the illegal trade of dead and sick pigs eased food safety woes, but did not offer a practical, sustainable plan for handling livestock carcasses. The program also revealed that regulations and social services regarding the disposal of dead livestock are also lacking.

The Ministry of Agriculture has a policy to offer pig farmers a subsidy of 80 yuan (12.87 U.S. dollars) for every dead pig as an economic incentive for farmers to properly dispose of carcasses. But as the program showed, many farmers were unaware of this policy, and incineration facilities were unable to keep up with demand, anyway.

As pig-raising operations are generally run like family businesses, farmers lack skill training or market information about how to keep the scale of their operations manageable to ensure the animals' health. This is certainly another area in which social management strategies could be improved.