Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China spends an enormous amount of money on agricultural infrastructure, but a string of exposés in State media, government crackdowns, and "scared straight" meetings for rural officials reveal that spending is extremely bloated, consists mostly of showpiece projects, and nobody really knows for sure what's happening in the hinterland.  A China Central TV broadcast on April 14, 2026  got attention for exposing an extravagant complex built as a farmer training center in a Chinese county. CCTV journalists visited an 11-building "Jun'an County Modern Agriculture Public Practical Training Base" on a 9.2-hectare (137 mu) site sandwiched between a highway and an excavated hillside. The compound included swanky hotels, two apartment buildings for experts, office buildings, restaurants, a sports center with badminton courts and a fitness center, chess rooms, gardens, and decorative ponds, but no facilities or equipment related to agriculture. The small sign on the g...

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...

China's October 2025 commitment to buy U.S. soybeans has bifurcated the Chinese soybean trade. Beijing-based state-owned companies have been buying U.S. soybeans to fulfill China's purchase commitment while crushers in the provinces have been buying from Brazil and Argentina. A stark contrast in the regional breakdown of Chinese soybeans importers this year suggests that state-owned companies are carrying out the purchases of U.S. soybeans.  As we showed in a recent post , China has purchased nearly all the 12 mmt of U.S. soybeans promised in October 2025, and 8.3 million metric tons of those U.S. soybeans have arrived in China as of May 2026. Customs data shows all 8.3 mmt of those U.S. soybeans were imported by companies headquartered in Beijing. The headquarters of state-owned giants COFCO and Sinograin are in Beijing, but there is little or no soybean processing capacity there. No U.S. soybeans were imported by companies in other provinces.  Imports in million metric tons ...

The 2026 China Agricultural Development Report released on June 10 had a theme of "Launching the 15th Five-Year Plan: Structural Transformation and Optimized Trade" that peddled the priority of upgrading the "quality" of the Chinese diet, farm machinery and technology, agricultural imports and exports during the 2026-2030 five-year plan. The report was written by PhD economists, includes input from a prestigious international institute based in Washington, and it is littered with buzz words and mathematical modeling. But the report's guiding concept is the notion that a resource-stressed country should try to produce all the farm products it consumes and simultaneously export more of them.  A summary of the report in Farmers Daily emphasized foreign trade and self-sufficiency, noting that China had an agricultural trade deficit of $103.25 billion in 2025 on agricultural exports of $104.16 billion and ag imports of $207.41 billion. China was the world's top...

On June 18, USDA announced sales of 132,000 metric tons of soybeans to China--the first for the 2026/27 crop year. As the market begins to watch progress on China's 25-mmt purchase commitment for 2026, let's review how China met its commitment to purchase 12 million metric tons of soybeans during 2025. The U.S. began announcing tariffs on Chinese goods during March-April 2025. Soybean sales to China promptly slowed to a dribble of less than 20,000 metric tons in April 2025. Sales to China then stopped completely for 6 months from May through October 2025. Sales restarted as Trump and Xi met in Busan, South Korea and the White House announced  China's commitment to buy 12 mmt of U.S. soybeans during the last two months of 2025 and 25 mmt annually from 2026 to 2028. After sales restarted at the end of October 2025, they surged during November-December 2025 and in early January 2026. A little more than 6 mmt of sales were made by the original target of December 2025--only half...

China's corn market has flipped from tight to loose. Policymakers have been dumping old grain reserves into the market while simultaneously buying corn in the northeast to prop up prices for farmers in the biggest production region. Meanwhile, weather impacts that don't officially exist have been buffeting the corn market. Chinese corn prices had bottomed out below RMB 2000 per metric ton in late 2024 before strengthening during the first half of 2025. Chinese corn prices plummeted during the September-October 2025 harvest and soon began rising again after torrential rains ruined a significant portion of the harvest . That event was quickly memory-holed by Chinese censors, but tight supplies boosted corn prices to around RMB 2300 by March 2026. From December through February 2026 spot prices for corn were 9%-to-11% ahead of year-earlier levels. With livestock producers and industrial processors encountering headwinds and corn substitutes flowing into the market, prices began de...