This article is food for thought Def-Con News readers. Yes, U.S. farmers are exporting record volumes of products to China, as reported by Gordon G. Chang on Newsweek. Beijing is admittedly unable to feed the Chinese people and this means shipments of soybeans, corn, and pork are expanding jobs for workers in the American heartland. But at what possible long-term cost in geopolitical security?
In 2019 the official Xinhua News Agency, in a piece titled “China’s Food Self-Sufficiency a Blessing To World,” claimed China was producing far more food than it needed. In 2020 this exaggeration became evident.
Floods in the country’s south, drought in the north, typhoons in the northeast, and pest infestations in the southwest took their tolls. Further, disease continued to spread among animals across China.
Beginning in 2018 and continuing in 2020, African swine fever also ripped through pork-eating China: disease and culls claimed more than half the country’s pigs from 2018 to last year.
Moreover, misguided policies are leading to severe water shortages. The Yangtze River, cradling 460 million people, is drying up, and more than 1,000 lakes along its 3,900 miles have disappeared. More than half of Beijing’s water comes from that river. To protect the waterway, fishing has been banned for a decade.
Scarcity is not the only water problem. Up to 80 percent of China’s water is polluted. “What lands are suitable to grow foods are producing far too little of it, and much of the food is produced from a polluted soil and water base,” Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told Newsweek.
Finally, if all this were not bad enough, an affluent population is demanding high-value protein foods—chiefly beef, pork, poultry, and lamb. This requires more water and far more agricultural production. “It seems the Communist Party itself doesn’t think it will have enough land or water to produce not just the human food, but also the animal feed it will need,” Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said.
The net result? China is now the world’s largest importer of food.
Chinese officials will not formally admit China is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign food—that would be political dynamite—but it is now apparent that the country needs to buy foodstuffs from abroad.
China will have to import even more in coming years.
Analysts project that China’s food self-sufficiency will drop to around 91 percent by 2025, down from 94.5 percent in 2015.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, recently made such an admission.
Last August, he announced what became known as the “clean your plate” campaign to end what he called a “shocking and distressing” waste of food. Just about everyone saw this effort, to get the Chinese people to eat less, as a warning of food shortages to come.
Paskal thinks China, to solve its food problem, “will 
continue to buy farmland in Africa, Canada, and around the world, but it is also possible that Xi will try more aggressive measures to ensure food self-sufficiency.”
“The essential strategic basic characteristic of every enduring great power is its ability to feed itself, to be a net exporter of food,” said Copley, also the editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy. “It is difficult to see how China can remediate its soils and its food production—or deliver enough potable water—to meet demands any time in the coming decade, even with a declining population.”
Henry Kissinger often—and correctly—reminds us how Chinese leaders are devoted students of history and devise current strategies from successful ones in the past.
Xi Jinping, therefore, may believe he will need to annex land to give the Chinese state a more secure hold on agricultural areas before going on to achieve his grand territorial ambitions.
Annexation, after all, is how the Qin, during the Warring States period of the fifth to third century B.C., succeeded in conquering others. It first grabbed land from small neighbors to assure food supply in order to sustain its successful campaigns against the larger kingdoms to “unite China.”
What say you Def-Con News readers? A China that is increasingly dependent on the United States to feed its 1.4 billion people may not be good news for America, or the nations adjacent to China. The world may possibly expect geopolitical tremors when China decides to flex its muscle and address its need to obtain self-sufficiency in food.
