Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

Xi Jinping's highly scripted visit to the countryside last week highlighted the communist party's intent to overhaul rural China in the latest 5-year plan (2026-30).  In a carefully staged photo, Xi stands in a recently harvested wheat field socially distanced from lesser officials and harvester operators. A tractor is strategically placed in the background. On June 24, 2026, Xi made a rare trip outside of Beijing to inspect rural areas of the Dezhou Municipality of northern Shandong Province. State media coverage made it clear that the trip was meant to feature priorities for agricultural and rural modernization with Chinese characteristics during the 15th 5-year plan. A description of the inspection placed in State media outlets  emphasized that Xi's visit to Dezhou was made "with matters of national importance in mind." A second version emphasized measures to achieve Chinese-style rural and agricultural modernization  and improvement of rural life under the lea...

" There's no need to worry about the increase in imported agricultural products ," Chinese State media said earlier this month. The  Economic Daily  article assured readers that "the expansion of agricultural imports is not a bad thing in itself." It needs to be analyzed, authors said.  This endorsement of food imports by the Communist Party-run Economic Daily appears to be an Orwellian reversal of food security propaganda. It was posted on dozens of Chinese web sites, a sure sign that it is official Chinese communist party propaganda, not the product of a rogue commentator.  Economic Daily  authors said that "some people" have baseless worries that "China will be controlled by others if it imports food" and that "foreign low-priced agricultural products will impact the domestic industry." To prove their point, Economic Daily authors pointed out that "these situations have never occurred in over 20 years since entering the WT...

This year dozens of agricultural officials have come to China to talk about cooperation. A compilation of news reports from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs web site shows 29 meetings with foreign dignitaries (full list below), mostly visits with Minister Tang Renjian in Beijing, but also including Vice Minister Ma Youxiang's trip to the western pacific and Australia, regional meetings of Southeast Asian and Pacific Island nations hosted in China, a meeting with Russia on fishing, and a meeting with Latin American diplomats to show off Chinese technology at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences.  China's new friends include many developing countries in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Africa. Pacific Islands--Samoa, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati--are well represented, reflecting China's hunger for fish, ambitions to control the Pacific right up to Australia's doorstep, and rewards for switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. C...

China can reduce its food import risk by importing low-quality wheat from the Black Sea war zone because importing from Canada is too risky. This is the latest idea peddled by China's "food security" propagandists struggling to tout a Xi-Putin wheat trade deal while simultaneously assuring the public that the country doesn't really need to import wheat.  Yicai , a communist party-controlled business news outlet, observed last month that 80 percent of China's record-high wheat imports in 2021 came from the United States, Canada, and Australia, while less than 1 percent came from Russia . The propaganda directives were apparently to allay concerns about wheat supplies in view of bad news about this year's wheat crop announced by the agriculture minister AND to give a boost to the February 3 wheat trade announcement by new best friends Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Yicai noted that the "record-high" 9.77 million metric tons of wheat imported in 2021 w...

Chinese leaders--apparently concerned about threats to national food security--have no new ideas after 8 years of Xi Jinping rule. The same Gollum-esque aphorisms about clinging tightly to food bowls were trotted out to address the "complex" and "severe" environment full of "uncertainty." These slogans were introduced in Xi's first year in power in 2013 and have been repeated over and over since then with no change or adjustment. Get a grip on food security. Don't let anyone grab it! A cloud of pessimism hung over the annual "economic work meeting" of China's top officials held December 8-10. Speakers moaned about the pandemic of the century, changes at a pace not seen in 100 years, weak demand, supply pressure and changing expectations. Officials were exhorted to "face up to the difficulties" and "restore confidence."   An official media account declared this the most pessimistic economic work meeting in t...

With China's cities expanding at a rapid clip, the loss of farmland seems to have set off alarms among Chinese leaders, but statisticians are not allowed to report farmland loss. Rapid urbanization was one of the most notable features in China's new population census data, released last week. China added 236 million to its urban population between 2010 and 2020, while its rural population shrank by 164 million. The population was 64 percent urban in 2020, up from 50 percent in 2010.  Source: China's 7th population census. Urbanization is a reversal of China's heritage as a nation composed primarily of rural peasants. The urbanization rate was only about 10 percent when the communist regime took over in 1949. Most people lived directly off the land, and only a small portion of the food supply was needed to feed city-dwellers.  The urbanization rate began its long upward climb with "reform and opening" in the late 1970s. The  64-percent urban share of population...

China seems to be worried about a global food crisis on several fronts. Consumers in Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang Provinces began panic-buying rice in late March, causing prices to surge. Since then, China's news media have issued articles almost daily to dispel panic but in doing so most recite alarming signs of possible spikes in prices and famine. Meanwhile, the topic is nearly absent from U.S. news media--prospects for a world food crisis rated only a brief note on the back page of today's Wall Street Journal . On March 28, China's official Xinhua News Service published a food security Q&A to assure readers that there is no danger of a food shortage in China. The article recited the policy of self-reliance and "absolute security in food grains", the usual statistics about grain production exceeding 650 million metric tons, the small percentage of rice imported, reliance on technology and minimum price guarantees for rice and wheat, and a policy of ho...

China's food security strategy insists on self-sufficiency, yet China also claims to advocate liberalized global food trade, according to a white paper on China's food security released October 14, 2019. The paper recites vague phrases like "keeping Chinese peoples' food bowls tightly in their own hands," a mantra that has been repeated as in speeches and communist party documents since Xi Jinping's ascension to party chief in 2013. The Chinese version of the white paper has an emphasis on self-reliance that is largely scrubbed out of the English translation. The Chinese version advocates a "path to food security with Chinese characteristics" ( 中国特色粮食安全之路 ) that is translated as "food security in China" in the English version. The food security policy is stated in a series of opaque phrases that call for China to remain self-sufficient in grain most of the time by ensuring domestic production capacity while allowing for undefined ...