If you watch a recent episode of Xinwen Lianbo, a China Central Television programme, you will see President Xi Jinping standing in the middle of grain fields in every province he has inspected over the past year. Xi wants his people to take the question of food security seriously as global supply chains become increasingly contested.
In the past four decades, a construction spree to build bridges, factories, hotels, and malls engulfed cultivable land in the country. Between 1985 and 2014, construction land in China grew from 24.61 million hectares to 38.11 million hectares, an annual rise of 1.52 per cent.
Xi’s campaign is loaded with classical Chinese phrases to hammer home the significance of food security in China’s history.
For instance, the premier has repeatedly called food security Guó zhī dàzhě (国之大者), a classical Chinese term that roughly translates as a ‘matter of national importance’ or ‘national priority’. Xi has often used Guózhīdàzhě while referring to China’s economy and real estate, suggesting his intent to link certain subjects to Beijing’s national security framework. Guózhīdàzhě is a crude classicism that Xi has deployed to rally support around his campaign – mustering authority like imperial rulers of China’s past.
He has also called food security Hóng fàn bā zhèng (洪范八政), which is another classical Chinese phrase referring to the eight most important policy topics for China since ancient times.
This is China’s own swadeshi twist to food cultivation.
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Cutting import dependence
Xi’s latest campaign wants people to grow more grains at home to promote domestic production and ensure food security. Beijing is concerned about the Chinese public’s dependence on grain imports as China’s cultivable land has shrunk since rapid industrialisation began in the 1980s.
China has only about 9 per cent of the world’s arable land to feed about 20 per cent of the world’s population. The problem is old, but the situation has taken new significance in the present geopolitical environment.
“We must adhere to the implementation of the strictest system of arable land protection, from the source, to curb the increase of ‘non-agricultural’ arable land, and to prevent the arable land being used for ‘non-food’, with the most stringent supervision to strengthen the use of arable land control,” wrote Wang Junqi, Director of the Think Tank Management Division of the Scientific Research Department of the Central Party School, in an authoritative commentary published by People’s Daily.
China’s State Council wants to maintain 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of cultivable land to feed its population. The number 1.8 billion mu is a red line that Beijing has set, but it almost fell short in 2018. Chinese government data suggests that the country has about 1.775 billion mu of area with planted grains, which is lower than its 1.8 billion mu target. The urgency we see in Xi’s 2023 campaign is to halt the construction trend to give way to lush green fields.
Xi has even gone so far as to warn people against “playing tricks” to reclassify farmlands for fulfilling ulterior motives.
“Farmland is farmland, and farmland must be good land. No one is allowed to play tricks on the protection of cultivated land, said Xi in a past speech. “I don’t care about the farmland if I sell it to someone else,” he further added.
Citizens in cities and villages are encouraged to plant essential food grains instead of exotic agricultural products that can yield higher profits. The local governments have even ploughed fields planted with crops that aren’t food grains like rice or corn, a phenomenon reported by David Rennie, The Economist’s Beijing bureau chief.
Authorities in Chengdu have taken possession of 6,700 hectares of land, even closing some companies as part of the grain planting campaign.
China’s reliance on other countries for food crops is quite evident. In 2022, China imported about 53.19 million metric tonnes of cereal grains and flour. China also imported about 20.62 million metric tonnes of corn in the same year.
China’s total grain output was 686.53 million tonnes in 2022, which wasn’t enough to feed all its citizens. The story gets even more complex when we realise that the country imported almost 40.8 per cent of its grains from its archenemy, the US. Washington’s main grain export to Beijing includes corn, wheat, and sorghum, which the latter now wants to grow at home in abundance in order to cut its dependence.
Food shortage can spark internal turmoil
Ensuring food supply for their population was the major preoccupation of China’s imperial period rulers. There is an old Chinese adage: “An economy without healthy agriculture is fragile, and a country without significant grain will be chaotic.”
Studies by Zhibin Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have linked the collapse of agricultural dynasties like Han, Tang, Northern Song, Southern Song and Ming with changes in climate patterns leading to “severe food shortage which then sparked civil turmoil”. Millions of hungry Chinese are terrible news for the survival of the Chinese Communist Party – even more than the hawkish US.
Beijing sees the geopolitical contest with the US and tensions in the Taiwan Strait intensifying, and a potential conflict might be on the horizon. Domestic food production would ensure China can feed its citizens and avoid internal political turmoil.
Xi reads his classical Chinese history fervently, where food security is the bottom line. He is using the legalistic long arm of the government to increase agricultural land for grain cultivation to tide over a difficult period of geopolitical turmoil and ensure government stability.
If the emperor can’t feed his people, the aspiration of becoming a Qiángguó meng (great power dream) will remain an elusive desire that can only feed dreams.
The author is a columnist and a freelance journalist. He was previously a China media journalist at the BBC World Service. He is currently a MOFA Taiwan Fellow based in Taipei and tweets @aadilbrar. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)