China’s Starvation Video games | Foreign Affairs

Among the numerous sectors shaping China’s financial technique towards the United States and different Western international locations, few are as essential as meals and agriculture. As one of many world’s largest importers of agricultural merchandise, China has regularly used entry to its huge markets as leverage in commerce negotiations. In 2025, as an illustration, it suspended soybean imports from the United States for a number of months—a significant setback for U.S. farmers—in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. As a part of Trump and Chinese chief Xi Jinping’s fragile commerce truce in May of this 12 months, China agreed to buy a minimum of $17 billion per 12 months of U.S. agricultural items for the rest of Trump’s presidential time period, and it restored market entry for U.S. beef and poultry imports from sure U.S. states.

The United States just isn’t China’s solely goal for this technique. In 2026, China equally stopped importing a wide range of Canadian agricultural merchandise in retaliation for Canadian tariffs on Chinese electrical autos. And in different instances, Beijing has gone additional, wielding its marketplace for meals merchandise as a weapon in political disputes. When, in late 2025, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signaled the potential for Japan to intervene in a battle over Taiwan, China suspended greater than $86 million in purchases of Japanese seafood and sake. 

Yet Beijing’s huge marketplace for agricultural merchandise additionally displays a precarious actuality: China is closely depending on imports to satisfy home demand. As Chinese folks’s incomes have grown, so has their urge for food for meat, dairy, and different items. Despite main efforts to shore up home meals manufacturing, China has grown extra reliant on imports—for animal merchandise in addition to feed to provide them. China’s meals imports reached $215 billion in 2023, the world’s largest on the time, with practically 85 % of its soybeans, greater than 67 % of its oil crops and nuts, and practically 25 % of its beef coming from international suppliers. China’s food-import invoice has receded barely in recent times however has remained above $200 billion, a determine higher than the overall imports of most international locations.

Given China’s shrinking labor pressure and the results of overproduction and local weather change on its arable land, Beijing is more likely to stay reliant on international meals merchandise within the coming years. Although its technique of leveraging its import marketplace for geopolitical affect has served it nicely up to now, Beijing additionally appears to acknowledge its nice vulnerability. As a outcome, it’s taking steps to develop into a pacesetter in agricultural biotechnology, such that China might in the end wield not solely its huge meals import markets but in addition choose agricultural exports for political achieve.

FEEDING THE PEOPLE

The risk of meals insecurity looms massive within the minds of Chinese Communist Party officers. Uprisings over meals have contributed to political crises all through China’s historical past. As many as 25 million Chinese starved within the famine of 1906–7, an occasion that accelerated efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty, China’s final imperial dynasty. Even worse was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–61, which was introduced on by extreme mismanagement amid Mao Zedong’s revolutionary zeal. It claimed the lives of roughly 30 million folks and is broadly thought-about the deadliest famine in historical past. In the late Eighties, surging meals costs infected the favored discontent behind the Tiananmen Square protests, which resulted within the bloodbath of protesters in 1989.

Given this darkish historical past, Beijing has lengthy sought to shore up the nationwide meals provide, and in current a long time has made huge beneficial properties in its skill to feed its inhabitants. Economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping within the late Seventies ushered in market-oriented insurance policies that ended the meals rationing system and offered new incentives to extend agricultural yields. The transition from collective manufacturing to a “household responsibility system” led to fast marketization and shifting dietary patterns, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 flung open the doorways of China’s economic system to international meals and agriculture commerce. China additionally put in place a number of laws to advertise and shield agricultural manufacturing and handle consumption. In 1996, as an illustration, the federal government referred to as for a self-sufficiency price of 95 % for staple grains, and in 2006 it established a minimal threshold of farmland that should stay in agricultural use.

Under Xi, these efforts have intensified. Chinese state media is replete with tales of a younger Xi experiencing starvation as certainly one of Mao’s “sent down” youths in the course of the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s personal mom even turned him in when he escaped his college one evening to beg for meals. As a younger official within the CCP, Xi then traveled to Iowa in 1985 as a part of an agricultural delegation from Hebei Province and returned to Iowa as China’s vp in 2012, famously impressed by superior U.S. meals manufacturing applied sciences. Soon after rising to energy in 2013, Xi emphasised that “feeding the people has always mattered most in national governance” in a speech on China’s meals safety.

As such, he has overseen a steady effort to realize meals self-reliance. In 2017, as an illustration, ChemChina, a Chinese state-owned firm, purchased Syngenta, the Swiss seed and pesticide firm, in an effort to enhance home agricultural output with cutting-edge expertise; at $43 billion, it was—and sure stays—China’s largest international acquisition. By 2019, Xi was demanding “absolute security” in home manufacturing of wheat and rice and he reiterated China’s minimal farm-acreage threshold coverage, emphasizing strict punishments for officers who fail to keep up arable land of their jurisdictions. The Chinese authorities additionally reclaimed land from different industries and companies and devoted it to agriculture. China even accredited its first pilot program for cultivating genetically modified staple crops in 2021, reflecting Beijing’s shifting stance on the expertise and its effort to additional speed up home meals manufacturing.

GROWING APPETITE

On paper, these sweeping efforts have produced outcomes. China’s manufacturing of pork, poultry, and beef, for instance, surged by practically 55 % between 2000 and 2025; for some fruits, the determine is 258 %, and for dairy it’s 342 %. For corn, rice, and wheat, China has achieved close to self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, undernourishment has declined considerably, falling from ten % of the inhabitants in 2001 to underneath three % by 2010, the place it has remained since.

For all these beneficial properties, nonetheless, manufacturing has not stored up with consumption, and meals and agricultural imports have exploded. Today, China is the biggest client of meat and fish on the earth, consuming greater than 30 % of the world’s whole. By 2025, China’s imports of some citrus had grown 243 %, imports of meat had grown roughly 669 %, and imports of dairy had grown greater than 1,751 % in comparison with 2000.

It is unlikely that China will be capable of fill this hole with nonetheless higher home manufacturing. Although Beijing’s previous efforts have improved its meals safety within the close to time period, they’ve additionally launched long-term challenges to the agriculture sector. China’s restricted farmland has been degraded by overcultivation and extreme use of fertilizers, as an illustration. In a few of China’s best areas, water shortage and water air pollution threaten farming; in different areas, torrential rainfall and flooding—made extra frequent by local weather change—are destroying crops. Overall, scientists challenge that, by 2050, lack of cropland from urbanization and soil degradation might scale back China’s meals manufacturing capability by as much as 18 %.

Meanwhile, the decline in China’s agricultural labor pressure, pushed by the migration of farmers to city and industrial facilities, can be lowering productiveness. And demographic shifts, mixed with Chinese social norms, have contributed to the nation’s outsize meals waste downside; at present, China wastes extra meals than every other nation on the earth—even after Xi launched a number of “Clean Plate” campaigns and China’s legislature handed a 2021 Anti–Food Waste Law. China will thus stay reliant on meals imports because it struggles to match home manufacturing and consumption in years to come back.

BOTTOM-LINE THINKING

China’s persistent reliance on meals imports is a possible irritant to Xi, particularly given current international financial disruptions. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, international meals costs reached historic highs, and China was briefly denied entry to exports from Ukraine, a high maize provider to China in recent times. That similar 12 months, entry to meals turned a flashpoint amid large-scale protests in China opposing the federal government’s strict COVID-19 insurance policies. In a uncommon public show of discontent, one protester unfurled a banner on a Beijing bridge that proclaimed, “We need food, not COVID tests.” Recognizing the political urgency of those points, Xi talked about the time period “food security” in a minimum of 71 public engagements that 12 months—double the references from the 12 months earlier than—together with his assertion that “food security is among the country’s most fundamental interests.”

Growing tensions with Washington have heightened Beijing’s anxieties. Following the U.S.-Chinese commerce conflict in the course of the first Trump administration, China quickly shifted a lot of its U.S. soybean purchases towards different suppliers, primarily Brazil. But whereas the transfer diminished China’s dependence on the United States, it elevated its publicity to potential crop failures or market instability in Brazil, which regularly experiences droughts that disrupt manufacturing. Despite efforts to diversify imports away from the United States, the United States and its NATO and Asia-Pacific allies nonetheless accounted for 46 % of China’s agricultural imports in 2023.

As a part of a broader emphasis on financial and nationwide safety, Xi has repeatedly instructed his bureaucrats to pursue “bottom-line thinking” in preparation for “extreme case” conditions. U.S. Army consultants, as an illustration, have assessed {that a} direct confrontation between China and Western international locations would disrupt worldwide commerce flows and pressure the Chinese inhabitants to vary its meals consumption patterns, which might undermine Beijing’s skill to keep up home stability and maintain a protracted conflict. The United States and its farmers would pay a worth if Washington moved to limit agricultural exports to China. Nevertheless, Xi is keenly conscious of the dangers and political penalties of serious disruptions to China’s meals provides.

It is thus no shock that China maintains huge nationwide reserves for fertilizers, grains, and even pork. Although particulars of China’s reserve system are held as a state secret—and the standard of reserves is a subject of debate—China holds a big proportion of grains in reserves worldwide, together with about 44 % of world wheat reserves, 53 % of world rice reserves, and 59 % of world corn reserves, in accordance with U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.

SEEDS OF POWER

China’s continued lack of ability to provide the meals it wants presents existential vulnerabilities for Beijing. Yet paradoxically, Beijing has discovered methods to leverage its extraordinary want for meals imports as a supply of energy on the world stage. With agriculture and seafood imports totaling greater than $207 billion in 2025, China was among the many high three agriculture export markets for a minimum of 32 economies. This is a significant transformation from only a few a long time in the past. In 2005, in accordance with Trade Data Monitor, Brazil exported lower than eight % of its agriculture merchandise to China. By 2025, that quantity was 33 %. Similarly, Australia’s agriculture exports to China greater than doubled from ten % in 2005 to 22 % in 2025, whereas Thailand’s meals exports to China greater than doubled in an excellent shorter timeframe, from 9 % in 2010 to 24 % in 2025.

By exploiting its significance to food-producing international locations, Beijing has discovered rising alternatives to stress its rivals. According to evaluation by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Beijing has deployed coercive agriculture commerce restrictions 26 instances since 2010, together with 5 in 2025 alone. These measures are sometimes a response to perceived geopolitical affronts, with Chinese policymakers making an attempt to stress the focused nation to reverse a particular coverage resolution or deter different international locations from doing the identical. In addition to utilizing these measures in opposition to Canada and the United States, Beijing has additionally aimed them on the European Union, which has misplaced practically $4 billion in exports of pork, dairy, brandy, and cognac since 2024 for imposing antidumping duties on Chinese electrical autos. Australia is one other goal. In 2020 and 2021, in response to Australia’s inquiries into the origins of COVID-19 and China’s human rights report, China restricted purchases of Australian meats, grains, seafood, wine, and different merchandise, affecting over $4 billion in exports. Chinese officers have been overt concerning the tactic: when requested concerning the drop in Australian agricultural exports to China, a Chinese international ministry spokesperson responded, “We will not allow any country to reap benefits from doing business with China while groundlessly accusing and smearing China.”

Beijing will doubtless proceed hanging its huge agricultural market as a sword of Damocles over agriculture exporting international locations. But, conscious of its personal vulnerabilities and reliance on international international locations, it additionally seems to be discovering new methods to achieve leverage within the international agricultural market. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, as an illustration, calls seeds the “chips” of agriculture; that’s, the expertise foundational for all different agricultural manufacturing. Beyond its buy of Syngenta, Beijing has been growing investments in superior seed-breeding applied sciences, together with genetically modified applied sciences enhanced by AI. In 2019, China surpassed the United States and the EU in functions for all worldwide patents—many for agricultural patents utilizing state-of-the-art biotechnology—and China has grown to be the biggest funder of agricultural analysis and growth globally. By 2022, China had commercialized its first era of biotech corn seeds, growing corn yields by ten %. China’s imports of corn decreased from 23 million metric tons in 2023 to 6 million metric tons solely two years later. By the top of 2025, Syngenta had developed 111 new seed traits, which Chinese regulators have since accredited for industrial use.

China has additionally labored to dominate the manufacturing of the nutritional vitamins and amino acids which can be important to animal feed. China already produces between 80 and 100% of a few of the inputs to livestock and poultry feed, main the U.S. animal feed trade to conclude that “heavy dependence on imports from a limited number of sources highlights the vulnerability of U.S. animal feed production to global supply chain disruptions.” Chinese dominance of an trade essential to U.S. animal manufacturing serves as a possible counterweight to the specter of restricted U.S. meals exports to China. A U.S. resolution on this path might be met with Beijing’s resolution to do the identical, harming the U.S. farm economic system and shoppers alike.

A China that could be a internet exporter of choose however essential commodities might current a brand new kind of problem within the international agriculture market. Beijing would maintain sway over international locations reliant on its imports in addition to key exports. The United States ought to count on Beijing to proceed to wield its agriculture sector for geopolitical affect, whether or not by way of curbing imports of meals, limiting exports of choose commodities, or each. As Beijing seeks to take advantage of all doable avenues for geopolitical leverage in opposition to Washington, meals exports and imports might develop into an much more acute stress level within the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

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