Chinese inspectors upped their rejections of beef, chicken feet, and pork from the United States, Europe and Brazil during 2025. Meat was rejected for containing hormones not permitted in China, failing sensory inspections, and lack of documentation or plant registration. The spike in rejections coincided with China's imposition of tariffs over the last 2 years designed to reverse losses of Chinese meat producers or to punish trading partners.
China's rejections of imported food during 2025 increased 55% from the previous year. The volume of shipments rejected increased 150%. These were the largest values since the customs administration took over inspections at the border from the now-defunct AQSIQ in 2018.
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| Compiled from lists posted on China Customs web site. |
China rejected food shipments from about 75 countries -- from Denmark and France to Pakistan and Belarus. The top 3 trading partners with the most rejections -- the United States, European Union, and Japan -- are not known for food safety problems. Rejections of U.S. food were, by far, the most numerous. Of the 4,889 shipments rejected by China in 2025, over 1,000 came from the U.S. The European Union was number 2 (628 rejections), and Japan was number 3 (383 rejections).
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| Compiled from lists posted on China Customs web site. |
Rejections of foods from the U.S. and EU clearly spiked in 2025. Rejections of Brazilian shipments also spiked last year at a much lower level.
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| Compiled from lists posted on China Customs web site. |
Meat stood out as the food category with the largest number of rejections. Nearly 1,800 meat shipments were rejected (in HS codes 02, 0504, and 1602) with a volume of nearly 25,000 metric tons. All processed foods (HS chapters 18 to 21) had 1,056 rejections, and fish & shellfish (HS codes 02, 1603 and 1604) had 826 rejections. (Note that these lists appear to include only packaged goods, and it excludes bulk shipments of grains & oilseeds.)
Last year this blog noted the trend in meat rejections, and the trend was sustained during the second half of 2025. Rejections of beef, poultry, and pork clearly spiked in 2025. Meat offal was composed primarily of pork offal with some beef offal as well. There were few rejections of lamb.
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| Compiled from China Customs lists. Includes HS 02, 0505, 1602. |
Most of the rejected beef and chicken imports came from the United States. Brazil also had significant numbers of beef and chicken rejections. Spain and Denmark accounted for most of the pork rejections.
Chinese inspectors gave a variety of reasons for rejecting meats last year, but a few problems came up repeatedly. Most of the Spanish pork was rejected for containing testosterone, while Danish pork was mostly rejected for an unspecified "animal disease." Most of the U.S. beef rejections were for detection of a hormone (melengestrol acetate), with some additional rejections for progesterone, ractopamine, and incomplete documentation. Brazilian beef problems included lack of documentation, filth/spoilage, lack of exporter registration, and testosterone. Many shipments of U.S. chicken feet failed sensory inspections for unspecified reasons, contained nitrofuracillin, or had labeling issues. Brazilian poultry was rejected for documentation problems, lack of product approval, and failure of physical inspection.
It's probably not a coincidence that China's rejections of meats spiked at the same time China has been implementing formal measures to restrict imports of meat. In June 2024 China launched an antidumping investigation of European pork in retaliation for tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. The AD duties were imposed in September 2025. In September 2024, China's State Council announced a rescue plan to rescue beef and mutton producers suffering from sustained financial losses. The plan was included in the 2025 "Number One Document" on rural policies. In December 2025 China announced extra "safeguard" tariffs on beef imports to protect the industry. China has been in a trade war with the United States since April 2025. China banned Brazilian poultry imports during June-December 2025 due to an avian influenza outbreak in Brazil.
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| Compiled from lists posted by China Customs. |
More background on the data and Chinese food safety laws is available from a 2021 report on this topic. Rejections of meat have increased dramatically since that report's analysis was conducted. There was no spike in rejections of U.S. food during the 2018-19 China-U.S. trade war. The elevated rejections of
Ecuadorian shrimp rejections first gained prominence in 2020 during the covid pandemic when Chinese inspectors reported in news media that they banned shrimp from 3 Ecuadorian exporters after finding covid virus on the shipments. The panic about covid contamination of imported food magically evaporated by 2022, but China continued to reject dozens of Ecuadoran shrimp shipments every year, including 2025, citing unspecified animal disease and sodium metabisulfite as the reasons for most of the rejections.
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