Does China S Going Out Strategy Prefigure A New Food Regime

The Journal of Peasant Studies
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Does China's ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new

food regime?
Philip McMichael
To cite this article: Philip McMichael (2020) Does China's ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new food
regime?, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 47:1, 116-154, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2019.1693368
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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
2020, VOL. 47, NO. 1, 116–154
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1693368
Does China’s ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new food

regime?
Philip McMichael
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
China’s new Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is commanding attention, China; BRI; food regime; food
in this moment of international disorder, as a global strategy security
reflecting its growing political-economic power. This essay offers a
‘food regime’ lens on these developments. There are two, related,
dimensions: the first concerns how China is addressing future
food security requirements, via domestic and international food
provisioning; and the second situates China’s recent ‘going out’
policy with respect to global food regime transitioning.
Introduction
China’s new Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is commanding attention, in this moment of sub-
stantial international disorder, as a global strategy reflecting its growing political economic
power. This essay offers a ‘food regime’ lens on these developments. There are two dimen-
sions: the first concerns how China is deploying BRI-based infrastructures and agri-food
supply chains to complement its domestic food production, and the second considers
whether and to what extent China’s related ‘going out’ policy and practice expresses
food regime reconfiguration.
Corporate agri-food monopoly power on a global scale is currently intensifying, with
Chinese participation. China’s engagement with the global food regime parallels and
yet challenges such power, deploying forms of neo-mercantilism in a seemingly paradox-
ical relationship with neoliberal ‘market rule.’ This tension is examined here as central to
ongoing global political-economic reorganizations. Not only is China building an alterna-
tive world-scale network of diplomatic, institutional, economic and technological relations
to those established historically by western powers, but also a reconfigured nexus of cor-
porate food production and circulation relations is emerging, abetted by China’s reformu-
lation of the so-called ‘public-private partnership,’ with deepening food regime effect.
At the same time, a world ecological sensibility is taking root, as climate crisis reveals itself
in natural disasters threatening human habitats, growing species extinctions, planetary
boundary crossings, and deepening ecosystems degradation,1 with the acceleration of
resource grabbing and deforestation, and as arable land surrenders to chemical agriculture.2
CONTACT Philip McMichael pdm1@cornell.edu Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca,
NY 14853
1
As documented in Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodivesity and Ecosystem Services (2019).
2
Serious yield declines in industrial food production stem from annual losses in soil erosion from overuse of inorganic fer-
tilizer at a rate likely to destroy two-thirds of the world’s productive land by 2050, collapse of the global nutrient cycle
with phosphorus peaking in 2030, rising competition for available freshwater for agriculture, already using 70% of known
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 117
The international peasant movement, La Via Campesina (LVC), publicly addressed this
concern at the 1996 World Food Summit, in calling for ‘food sovereignty.’ This intervention
politicized the claim that liberalization of agricultural trade, privileging transnational agri-
business, would ‘feed the world.’ LVC maintained that global enclosure of food systems in
a massive project of commodification, licensed by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture,
violated national and extant farming system cultures’ sovereignty. A quarter century
later, punctuated by the UN Millennium Assessment (2005) and the IAASTD Report
(2008), the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems
reported: ‘Global food production threatens climate stability and ecosystem resilience
and constitutes the single largest driver of environmental degradation and transgression
of planetary boundaries. Taken together the outcome is dire. A radical transformation of
the global food system is urgently needed’ (2019). This followed the Inter-Academy Part-
nership (130 national academies of science and medicine), declaring a ‘broken global food
system’ (The Guardian, 28 November, 2018), noting attention is turning to extant agroeco-
logical farming systems geared to regeneration of natural cycles and diversity. The Com-
mittee on World Food Security (CFS), the only UN agency actively including civil society
organizations representing front-line agrarian, fishing, pastoral, indigenous and forest-
dweller interests, is now formulating policy regarding the potential of agroecology and
the stewardship of small/family/peasant farming (2019).
Whether the PRC, with its rhetoric of ‘harmonious coexistence between humanity and
nature’ and massive peasant sector, will nurture ecologically-based farming systems at
home and abroad remains to be seen given its current strategy of ‘agricultural moderniz-
ation.’ Domestically, in 1999 the PRC launched a ‘Grain for Green’ program, with an invest-
ment, so far, of over USD 40 million, including direct payments to more than 32 million
rural households, and restoring forest landscapes of over 28 million hectares of farmland,
‘pay[ing] farmers to plant trees on their land and provid[ing] degraded land to rural
families to restore’ (Dayne 2017). And internationally, in a timely gesture, the state-
owned Chinatex Corporation and China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation
(COFCO) plans to invest in long-term restoration of up to 25 million hectares of degraded
Brazilian land to expand soy production, rather than driving further destruction of the
Amazon (Araújo 2019).
This essay explores these developments, taking note of particular engagements (both
participatory and transformative) as China feels its way into the global food order with an
eye simultaneously on immediate and future food security needs. A key turning point was
perhaps in 2008, when ‘China’s globalization was still “classic” – dominated by its trade
account [as the] familiar quality of China’s development3 … But since 2008, as China’s
breakneck modernization continued, it had become ever more integrated in financial
terms’ (Tooze 2018, 603). In addition to the PRC’s contribution to stabilizing the 2008
supplies, predicted collapse of the ocean fish catch by 2040, and serious diminishing of world phosphate reserves, essen-
tial to crop and pasture growth and with no substitute (Cribb 2010, 10–11, 54, 76). And it is predicted that yields will
further decline between 5% and 50% over the next century, ‘depending on the time frame, crop, location, and extent
to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today’s prodigious rates. World agriculture will absorb two-
thirds of all climate change costs by 2050’ (Patel and Moore 2017, 160), underscoring the likelihood of a fundamental
rethinking and change of course in how the world farms – already underway.
3
Central to this was China’s evident ‘workshop of the world’ function, constituted as it was in the later twentieth century by
transnational investments and supply chains in China’s special economic zones and specialty factories catering to global
consumer (and increasingly producer) markets – in the absence of US competition (Arrighi 2007, 353–61).
118 P. MCMICHAEL
financial crisis, this includes financial investment in agribusinesses as well as enabling

international infrastructures.
The transition is palpable – as corporate capture in the global food system peaked in
2015, centralizing market power in each segment of the industrial food chain (ETC
Group 2018a, 4), although this was old news: ‘the bête noires of the food chain used to
be Monsanto at one end and Walmart at the other’ (ETC Group 2018a, 5) – across these
several agribusiness mergers were speculative investments by asset managers, BlackRock,
the Carlyle Group, and half a dozen other top asset management companies.4 The emer-
gence of such new food regime relations corresponds to the restructuring of trade, by
financial, relations. And it underscores China’s particular capacity to ‘go out,’ and indeed
challenge western capitalism on its own terms.5
The world faces some kind of tipping point, with previous food regime legacies increas-
ingly dysfunctional. Both the settler agro-export model, and the mid-twentieth century
‘development project’ of industrialization with ‘unlimited supplies of [rural] labour’ and
‘long green revolution’ technification,6 have reached their social and ecological limits.
This opens possibility for a different trajectory, restoring smaller-scale labor-intensive eco-
logical farming, as a survival mechanism – for states, (subsidized) rural populations, and
human and planetary health. It remains to be seen how this new moment will unfold.
Food regime dynamics

The ‘food regime’ concept interprets capitalist modernity as constituted by geopolitical
conjunctures of food-provisioning in the world economy. While each conjuncture is his-
torically specific, in combination food regimes constitute an evolving global food order
via state-system reconfiguration across the last one and a half centuries.7 And, methodo-
logically appropriating from Raymond Williams’ social-structural trilogy (1977), each food
regime is formed temporally: juxtaposing residual, dominant, and emergent relations.
Together, these relations configure the synchronic dynamics of a food regime ‘conjunc-
ture.’ These relations include the carry-over of previous regime institutions or practices,
but reconfigured in dominant institutions and practices, and the emergence of new insti-
tutions, geographies, and practices as precursors of a successor regime (McMichael 2015).8
Currently, the so-called ‘corporate food regime’ is in transition, and whether or how this
results in a newly configured food regime is the subject of this paper. China’s present
4
While their individual equity holdings are not substantial, their access to information via algorithms on their Big Data plat-
forms provides strategic knowledge of market and merger conditions.
5
The challenge is distinctive to this moment, even as it resembles Britain’s late-nineteenth century formation of the initial
food regime: ‘gigantic sums of British capital, in the form of loans, flowed out of London and toward the rest of the world,
especially to build railroads – which in turn were central to the next century’s extraordinary cheapening of food and raw
materials’ (Patel and Moore 2017, 69).
6
Respectively, McMichael (1996), Lewis (1954), and Patel (2013).
7
This is a dynamic process, for which the ‘food regime’ concept offers a specific lens – initially problematizing the ‘world
system’ framework. The succession of food regimes offers methodological resolution to this abstract governing frame via
‘incorporated comparison’ (McMichael 2015). Here, successive (and inter-related) food regimes contribute to formation
and re-formation of the state-system, as an expression of the political history of capitalist relations. And these ongoing
temporal/spatial relations in turn find expression within individual food regime dynamics.
8
These three sets of relations (residual, dominant, and emergent) need historicization – notably along the lines of Marx’s
method of political economy (1973). This method insists, for example, that while landed property was dominant prior to
the age of capital, it must now be analysed through a capital lens, with quite different meaning and consequence. So, for
example, US/European mercantilist practices, held over from the US-centered food regime in the process and practices of
the successor corporate food regime, were thereby reformulated.
engagement both consolidates and refashions the liberal trading system instituted by
Structural Adjustment and World Trade Organization (WTO) mandates in the 1980s and
1990s.
To recap, successive conjunctures of food provisioning embody specific hegemonic
organizing principles in the global market, projected by powerful states and then a
state-system institutional complex. The former refers to the cycling of British and US hege-
monies from 1870 to the 1970s (Friedmann and McMichael 1989). The latter complex
refers to the institution in the 1990s, via the multilateral World Trade Organization
(WTO), of broad international liberalization favoring transnational corporate traders and
investors. Such ‘opening up,’ or ‘globalization,’ was institutionally grounded in the man-
agement of the 1980s debt crisis by the International Financial Institutions (IMF, World
Bank), requiring southern state privatization, reducing social services and agrarian subsi-
dies and wages, and expanding agro-exports – instituting ‘market rule.’
‘Market rule’ does not rule out states. Rather, it refers to the internalization by state
administrations of market compulsions regarding their positioning in the world market.9
And this includes class and state alliances organized around accessing export revenues
or financial investments for the disposal and/or legitimacy of political-economic elites
(e.g. Halperin 2013). The condition of states being ‘located in markets, rather than
markets in states’ essentially defines the ‘post-democratic’ era of financial globalization
(Streeck 2016, 22). Here, ‘finance became a government of its own,’ with politically-inde-
pendent central bank operations10 coordinated through the Bank of International Settle-
ments. Democracy and social welfare lost their post-war national-economic growth
function, and finance became an ‘international private government disciplining national
political communities and their public governments’ (Streeck 2016, 23–4), and unaccoun-
table to taxpayers, who serve as the default in ongoing financial crises (McMichael 2013b,
45).
The WTO (composed of member-states) instituted the corporate regime framework,
within which states adapt variously to market rule, depending on global political-econ-
omic positioning. The subsequent rise of new agro-export powers alongside historic
settler-state,11 and European, ‘world granaries’ expresses such state-guided multipolar
competitive world-market positioning. As a power relation subject to contestation,
market rule does not rule out social or trade protectionism – evident in struggles over
rights to food and rights of small/family farmers to produce food,12 domestic agri-food
9
Such ‘complusions’ are not givens, rather they are introduced/recommended by planners or development agencies, and in
fact may strengthen a state’s role in prosecuting ‘market rule.’ For example, in detailing introduction of neoliberal-
informed policies to develop the private sector in Egyptian agriculture (under the aegis of USAID) Mitchell notes: ‘The
actual effect of these programs, however, was to strengthen the power of the state. This was not simply some fault
in the design or execution of the programs. USAID itself is a state agency, a part of the “public sector,” and therefore
worked in liaison with the public sector in Egypt. By its very presence within the Egyptian public sector it strengthened
the wealth and patronage resources of the state’ (2002, 22), enhanced by increasing commercialization of the agricultural
sector.
10
Except perhaps in China and now the US …
11
Note here that the origins of free trade fetishism so evident in the UN/CFS deliberations and the construction of the WTO
are embedded in the New World states (US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as Argentina) central to food
regime agro-exporting.
12
While this has been an ongoing struggle in recent decades, expressed in a politics of ‘food sovereignty,’ it is rising now,
both as struggle against powerful corporate and financial forces, as well as very recent significant policy recommen-
dations in the UN’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS 46), driven by incipient recognition of biodiversity loss,
species extinction, and climate emergency, opening up explicit recognition of agroecology’s potential in stabilizing
and restoring ecological and social landscapes.
120 P. MCMICHAEL
policy or food sovereignty, and regulatory struggles around food and environmental
safety.
Contemporary transitions in the global political economy are reflected in, and partly
driven by, food regime ‘multipolarity.’ Rather than the ascribed singularity of British and
US hegemonies structuring previous food regimes, rising agro-export powers such as
the EU (1970s), Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Russia and Ukraine have eroded US dominance
in the international food trade: thus the US was responsible for 93 percent of world
soybean exports in 1971, but barely 40 percent by 2011, with cereal exports at 28
percent (Zhang 2019, 44). Multipolarity expresses the neoliberal architecture of the
WTO, which universalized agro-exporting alongside deepening investments in global
supply chains across multiple sites. Standard international flows of key food, feed and
fuel grains (corn, wheat, feedstuffs and oilseeds) are now complemented by corporate
retailer assembling of multi-sited ingredients of processed foods and animal protein pro-
ducts catering to bifurcated global consumer classes. And multipolarity embodies large-
scale, ‘extra-territorial’ investment in lands for exports of food, feed and fuel ‘flex crops’
(Borras et al. 2012; McMichael 2012).
China’s expansive consumer class (outpacing American middle-class consumption), and
especially its dietary ‘meatification,’ has enlarged a historic post-WWII East Asian food
import pole (Schneider 2014; Weis 2010). As previously noted:
Geopolitically, the deepening of Japanese (and East Asian) food dependency, via the explosion
of consumer affluence and institutionalized liberalization (thus far), presents a new pole
around which regional and global, food trade concentrates, displacing the centrality of the
US ‘global breadbasket.’ In other words, the East Asian food import complex is one central
node in a global regime forming around corporate, rather than state-driven, agro-food
markets. (McMichael 2000, 421–2)
As below, a China-centered agro-import complex has deepened since the turn of the
twenty-first century. China may emerge as a commanding pole in a food regime of the
future, analogous to the British-centered food regime and its re-ordering of an offshore
tropical food empire to source (temperate) wage-foods for late-nineteenth century
British and European industrial workforces. China’s rapid industrialization reflects its role
as ‘world factory,’ and, as its industrial labor force and urban middle-class consumer
base have multiplied, and its land base has eroded, the government has begun to refor-
mulate its food security strategy beyond domestic ‘grain self-sufficiency.’ Thus, in 2014 its
No. 1 Central Document stated: ‘China must be more active in utilizing international food
market and agricultural resources to effectively coordinate and supplyment domestic
supply’ (Zhang 2019, 46).
A spatio-temporal difference is the relative absence of late-nineteenth century ‘open’
New World frontiers13 to settle by cereal producers (and ranchers), whereas twenty-first
century ‘frontiers’ include capitalization of existing farm land and factory farming. Such
capitalized ‘frontiers’ are created via new forms of land enclosure and/or conversion for
industrial cereal crops for traders and processors, as well as retailer-driven high-end
value chains. Conversions entail combinations of agronomic research by state-owned agri-
cultural research companies and capital and chemical-intensive agro-industrial practices.
‘Open’ to ‘dispossessions by accumulation’ as indigenous inhabitants and their sophisticated ecologies of social reproduc-
13
tion were overridden and erased by settler agriculture (e.g. Grey and Patel 2015; Mayes 2018; Pascoe 2014).
These enable recolonization of lands such as the Brazilian Cerrado and Argentinian and
Uruguayan Pampas, for example, as new capitalized frontiers of soybean production
(Leguizamon 2016; Oliveira and Hecht 2016; Peine 2010).14
Just as colonization of the North American ‘frontier’ by Britain for cheap wage-foods
served industrial capitalism’s rise, now reappropriation of the South American ‘frontier’
for feed crops supplying over half of China’s industrial meat industry is constitutive of
the current food regime. Here northern China’s precipitously dropping water tables, and
desertification in the northwest, have driven a turn to South America for water-intensive
crops like soybeans, including the now-stalled proposal to build a railroad and river
channel through the Amazon to access the soyfields of southern Brazil (Nesbit 2018; Bran-
ford 2018), reinforcing the slogan: ‘South America produces soybeans, China buys soy-
beans, and the US sells soybeans’ (Yan, Chen, and Ku 2016, 391).
Significantly, the Chinese state-owned company, COFCO, has recently reduced its
dependence on American grain traders – edging out Bunge as the fourth largest grain
trader, after Archer Daniel Midlands, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, thereby ‘restructuring
relations of power in the corporate-dominated contemporary food regime’ (Belesky and
Lawrence 2018, 13). COFCO has also purchased the Dutch grain trader, Nidera, and a 51
percent share in the agricultural business of the Singapore-listed Noble Group. COFCO
has multiple offices across the world, and plans to invest over US$10 billion overseas
(Grimsditch 2017, 23–4), including buying 25 percent more Brazilian soy over the next
half decade (COFCO INTL 2019). And these corporate acquisitions combine with the
recent phenomenon of ‘agro-security mercantilism’: that is, state-initiated acquisition of
(or access to) land offshore to circumvent extant markets and intermediaries to guarantee
supplies of food, feed and fuel (McMichael 2013a, 51). China, in particular, has:
cut out the soy middlemen. It clearly does not trust the large American-owned commodity
traders like Cargill and Bunge. Leading the way is Beidahuang Land Cultivation Group, a
giant state-owned farming business . . . In 2011 it secured a deal with the governor of Rio
Negro in Argentina to lease some 570,000 acres. It also tied up a long-term agreement with
domestic Argentine land giant Credus, which controls more than 2 million acres of farms. Bei-
dahuang said it would also build a new port to export the soy. (Pearce 2012, 202)
China’s ‘going out’ strategy, for direct access (here) to feed supplies embeds it in the food
regime, with a difference. Compared with Northern states and agribusinesses and their
global corporate supply chains, Southern states substitute sovereign wealth funds and
government firms and banks to acquire land overseas for reliance on a Western corpor-
ate-dominated world market. Thus, South Korea, a major food importer, focuses on
direct access to offshore food supplies, to offset its import dependence for 90 percent
of its wheat and corn:
In 2008, Korean food companies suddenly found that key foreign suppliers were banning
exports in order to feed their own people. In Seoul, the government established a National
Food Strategy to subsidize national corporations willing to annex foreign land to secure key
supplies. (Pearce 2012, 204)
14
In the early twentieth century Karl Kautsky predicted such a development (1988, 252). Note that, consistent with food
regime frontiering, indigenous inhabitants continue to be dispossessed of their access to common lands in these devel-
opments, for example: Cerrado dwellers ‘forced to emigrate to urban Campos Lindos’ (Gross 2018).
122 P. MCMICHAEL
In addition, South Korean plans include purchasing US grain directly via a Chicago office,
bypassing the large grain traders and allowing ‘multiyear delivery contracts with farmers’
(Brown 2011).
Bypassing grain trader monopoly with new hybrid state-capital combinations is a sig-
nificant dimension of contemporary food regime reconfiguration. It not only deepens
agro-exporting, but it also underscores the strategic role of Southern states in partnering
with corporations to bypass WTO multilateral trade rules, and thereby Northern domi-
nance. China’s growing involvement in securing offshore food supplies and supply lines,
and projects of agricultural capitalization, is not unique, even as it is becoming more con-
sequential. That is, while China participates in extant food regime relations, its forms of
engagement nevertheless represent emergent relations.
Food regime rearticulation via ‘multipolarity’

It has been clear from early in the twenty-first century that the food regime has multipolar
energies. And this characteristic was anticipated in the 1980s, when Structural Adjustment
mandates promoted agro-exporting from indebted Southern states. This was the period in
which so-called New Agricultural Countries (NACs) established a presence in the global
economy (Friedmann 1991). For example, Thailand’s traditional role in the international
division of labor as an exporter of rice, sugar, pineapples, and rubber was now comple-
mented with an expanding array of nontraditional primary exports: cassava (feed),
canned tuna, shrimp, poultry, processed meats, and fresh and processed fruits and veg-
etables, anticipating a subsequent ‘retailing revolution’ as powerful supermarkets (e.g. Car-
refour, Walmart, Tesco, Ahold) have globalized agri-food chains.
Other countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Kenya
adopted the NAC model, generalized under the umbrella of neoliberal WTO trade rules.
These promote agribusiness investments seeking regional and global markets, now liber-
alized for trade in agricultural commodities. New agro-export powers India, China and
Brazil have used their rising influence via the G20 to deadlock the WTO’s Doha Round
by 2008. This event lends credence to the forming of a multipolar food system, in
which the ‘new powers are challenging the hegemony of the US rather than the neoliberal
paradigm of the WTO’ (Hopewell 2016, 181). These three southern powers challenged US
and EU hypocrisy in protecting their agribusiness while WTO liberalization opened agricul-
tural sectors elsewhere. While insisting on additional liberalization in the North, they each
sought to ensure some protection for their own peasant-based farming systems for dom-
estic political reasons. As Hopewell notes: ‘Domestic tensions are precisely why no state is
advancing a purely neoliberal agenda at the WTO. Instead their negotiation positions
reflect these contradictory impulses between liberalization and protection’ (Hopewell
2016, 180).
One pertinent instance is the Indian government’s post-food-crisis National Food Secur-
ity Act (2013), which consolidated a broad-based food provisioning via the Public Distri-
bution System, which it defended at the Bali WTO Ministerial the following year,
appealing to rights-based domestic protections (Pritchard et al. 2016). But this domestic
food initiative complements the domestic footprint of the global food regime, in the
form of large-scale export agriculture and corporate food retailing. India courts corporate
food retailers at the expense of a multitude of local groceries and food producers
(Guttal 2018) and is a significant beef exporter. Supplying beef to Southeast Asia, Australia
and the Middle East, it doubled its maize and soybean feed crops between 2000 and 2015,
at a time of serious food insecurity and water shortage (Winders 2017, 101–4).
As suggested, the very recent admission of Walmart to the Indian retail economy rep-
resents the deepening of the regime – confirming Hopewell’s observation that the for-
mation of the WTO ‘represented not the realization of the neoliberal project in the
realm of trade but only its beginning. The multilateral trading system is intended to
work through successive rounds of negotiations to progressively liberalize trade’ (2016,
186). And while the Doha Round interrupted trade liberalization, the interruption came
from increasingly consequential agro-exporting states. WTO neoliberal rules still apply
(including its dispute settlement mechanism), but this challenge enabled a proliferation
of FTAs promoting regional and bilateral trade access, with ‘the centripetal tendencies
of hegemony … being replaced by centrifugal forces of multipolarity’ (Hopewell 2016,
203). While multipolarity challenges Western power in the food regime, it strengthens
the neoliberal organizing principle: favoring corporate power, and its ‘ability to shape
the rules under which [corporations] operate in the middle space that they occupy in
the world food economy’ between producers and consumers (Clapp 2016, 121).
The point here is that a food regime is not a fixed structure, since it forms through inter-
actions of its residual and emergent relations. In this case, residual mercantilist dimensions
inherited from the US-centered food regime and embedded in the WTO’s unequal archi-
tecture (by which the US and EU retained agricultural subsidies) inspired the G20 chal-
lenge at Doha, consolidating multipolarity. But multipolarity nurtures, and registers, an
emergent development, based in (geo-economic) processes reorganizing the global
food economy via supply networks formed through varying articulations of corporate
and financial deals with, within and across states.15 These processes constitute a ‘multiplex’
world: ‘the nature of economic interdependence today is denser, consisting of trade,
finance, and global production networks and supply chains, whereas … multipolarity is
mainly trade-based’ (Acharya 2017, 11). Here, states commit to the deepening and recom-
position of market relations,16 including reconfiguring food regime ‘territoriality’ as a
multi-perspectival17 outcome (in contrast with a centering hegemonic state) conceptual-
ized (in short-hand) as deepening ‘market rule.’
Food regime reconfiguring of territoriality in turn reproduces ‘neoliberal exception.’ As
Ong puts it: ‘neoliberalism as exception is introduced into sites of transformation where
market-driven calculations are being introduced in the management of populations and
the administration of special spaces’ which express and realize ‘the territoriality of
global capitalism’ (2006, 3, 7). This partial embedding of national territory in food
regime circuits of resources and value expresses the accommodation of states to
market rule. Further, it reflects Rosenberg’s ‘paradox of sovereignty,’ which may be absol-
ute in its formal conditions of political rule, but substantively it remains ‘highly ambiguous
as a measure of actual power’ (2001, 131). Here states, as the world market’s political
15
For example: ‘Since 2008, leading farm management companies such as Cresud/Brasilagro, Adecoagro, SLC Agrícola, El
Tejar, TIAA-CREF, Multigrain/Xingu Agro, and V-Agro acquired collectively over 750,000 ha in Brazil, drawing venture
capital from multiple financial partners in Brazil, EU, and especially US and Japan’ (Oliveira 2018, 118).
16
This is expressed, through a developmentalist lens, as ‘new, hybrid relationships between states and businesses, where
state funding supports and guides and businesses implement … [revealing] the emerging ways that expertise, technol-
ogy, and finance are deployed in agricultural development through “development cooperation”’ (Scoones et al. 2016, 2).
17
Cf Ruggie (1993).
124 P. MCMICHAEL
scaffolding, are subject to its structuring of financial revenues, competitive constraints, and
the compulsions of heightened capital mobility.
Chinese corporate financing deals reflect such multiplex relationships,18 where China’s
state-owned financial company, CITIC, has entered into a joint venture with Japan’s Itochu
and Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand food companies. Further, the state-owned enterprise
China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation Group (COFCO), the country’s
largest food processor, manufacturer and trader, has controlling stakes in Nidera (Nether-
lands) and Noble (Singapore) – ‘two of the largest traders of grains and oilseeds from the
Southern Cone of Latin America,’ Noble also trading in Indonesian palm oil (GRAIN 2015,
5). Meanwhile, the US private equity firm, KKR, has substantial financial stake in COFCO’s
domestic mega-hog farm project, as well as with the largest dairy producer, China Modern
Dairy, for mega-dairy farm development. And one of China’s private firms, Shuanghui
International (subsidiary of WH Group, a Hong Kong based conglomerate) purchased
Smithfield Foods of the US in 2013, with financing from the Bank of China, Goldman
Sachs, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings (GRAIN 2015). Neither
finance nor firms remain simply state-centered in the emergent and maturing multiplex
market regime.
Domestic context of China’s ‘going out’ strategy

Participation in the food regime by China stems from three combined processes: (1) chan-
ging domestic policy regarding the restructuring of its agricultural sector, (2) the elevation
of national agribusiness (‘dragon head enterprises’), and (3) a ‘going out’ strategy to secure
offshore food supplies (and establish a strategic infrastructural presence along particular
trade routes and within certain regions and countries). But first, domestic policy and devel-
opments are critical drivers of the agri-food dimension of ‘going out.’
It is noteworthy that China has the largest farm system in the world, with the highest
output, and more than 200 million small-scale farms: ‘with just 10 per cent of all cultivated
land in the world, these smallholders produce 20 per cent of the world’s total food supply’
(van der Ploeg and Ye 2016a, 1). Impressively, contrary to Lester Brown’s alarm in 1994,
China feeds itself, having adopted a grain self-sufficiency policy over the last several
decades. Between 1978 and 2009, agricultural production rose at an annual average
rate of 4.5 percent – with grain output at 2.4 percent compared with population growth
of 1.07 percent (Li et al. 2013, 31). This expansion was initiated with the ‘Household
Responsibility System,’ incentivizing farmers, followed in the mid-1980s by market
reforms permitting grain surpluses over the state-requisition quota system, and rural
industrial development via intensification of Township and Village Rural Enterprises
(TVEs), in the 1990s with land contract stabilization, and in the twenty-first century with
grain market relaxation and subsidies encouraging farm-labor intensification. In short,
‘the state-led, market-driven and farmer-based model has been the central element in
the success of Chinese agriculture’ (Li et al. 2013, 33–4).
A key outcome has been the fall in China’s undernourished population from 23.9
percent in 1990 to 9.3 percent in 2015, even as per capita income levels ‘soared by
18
This includes mergers and acquisitions conducted by Chinese global agribusiness, challenging northern agro-industry
monopoly (Oliveira 2018).
two-thousand percent over the same period,’ following domestic grain consumption more
than doubling from 1972 to 2016 (CSIS 2017). Stabilization of the grain production-con-
sumption ratio of approximately 1.0, since the mid-2000s, reflects government agricultural
subsidies of $165 billion, compared with the next highest state agricultural subsidies in
Japan at $65 billion and the US at $30 billion (CSIS 2017). This has contributed to a
series of crop booms in sugarcane, bananas, and nut trees (Borras et al. 2018; Yunan
2018), in addition to vegetable crops such as cabbage, celery, peas, beans, lettuce, leeks
and onions, increasingly produced as green-house crops in urban proximity.
Unlike the Western model, such crop booms are anchored in a multiplicity of small
farms, either leased to agricultural firms or self-producing. The small-scale farm systems
reflect the specificity of peasant culture in China where land means social-productive
autonomy, and labor-intensive farming is the sine qua non of this culture, in contrast to
Western technological intensification (Arrighi 2007; van der Ploeg and Ye 2016b).
China’s southeastern region (Guangxi, Guandong and Hainan) is the center of the sugar-
cane boom, stimulated by central government policy for national sugar security, and local
state and county subsidies, supply management for milling, and infrastructural investment
(Yunan 2018, 6–7). Top-down management to encourage land-use change for such stra-
tegic crops does not necessarily require change in land access – even as companies
bundle their operations on the county level across a multitude of micro-plots (Borras
et al. 2018, 143, 147). Bundling may be based on contract farming or simply leased land
– insofar as many male household heads join the circular migration patterns, connecting
the urban to the rural, to work for wages to support their families. However, the resulting
‘socio-cultural decay,’ with ‘left-behind’ women and elderly performing the farmwork and
child-rearing, threatens family stability and inter-generational commitment to farming in
the longer run (van der Ploeg and Ye 2016a, 4). This is one dimension of future limits, as
discussed below.
Meanwhile, in intensifying urbanscapes grain-based meat and dairy consumption is
booming. China accounts for 65 percent of world imports of soybeans, for 50 percent of
the world’s pork consumption. To accommodate rising demand for pork meat, the
Chinese government redefined soy as an industrial crop, rather than a food crop, in the
early 1990s (Olmstead 2011), thereby freeing up 40 percent of China’s arable land for
growing higher-yielding food-grain crops (Cui and Shoemaker 2018). Imports of soybeans
rose from 0.3 million tons in 1995 to 95 million tons in 2017 (Cui and Shoemaker 2018).
Further, China is the world’s largest producer of fish products, and the world leader in
terms of both aquatic capture and aquaculture production, with the FAO noting in 2016
China was responsible for over 60 percent of world aquaculture products (CSIS 2017).
In the longer run, concerns focus on environmental degradation in China. Ploeg and Ye
note extensive ‘ecological decay’ as the high price of intensified agriculture in service of
food security (2016a, 4; see also Economy 2010; and Cui and Shoemaker 2018). Here
local governments have intensified cultivation on marginal and industry-adjacent lands,
under political pressure to expand national output (Zhang 2019, 39–9). And Brown
notes the ‘water table in the North China Plain, an area that produces half of the country’s
wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast, by over 10 feet per year in some areas,’ and at
the same time ‘water supplies are being diverted to nonfarm uses and cropland is being
lost to urban and industrial construction’ (2014). China’s water supply per capita is 25
percent of the world’s average, with inefficient water delivery to crops at 30–40
126 P. MCMICHAEL
percent, compared with 70–80 percent for Northern countries (Cui and Shoemaker 2018).
And millions of tons of crops have been subject to industrial pollution, with almost one-
sixth of China’s land ‘affected by soil contamination due to toxic runoff’ (CSIS 2017).
Growing environmental limits are expressed in processes of ‘spatial fixing’ by which the
central government has designated particular regions as domestic grain baskets – and this
policy foreshadowed the food security dimension of ‘going out,’ as noted by Zhan and
Huang:
The outcome of the internal spatial fix has a direct bearing on the patterns and changes of
China’s overseas agricultural expansion. On the one hand, the fix enabled China to lessen
its dependence on overseas resources, which explains why China imported much less grain
than it would have over the past three decades. On the other hand, the political and environ-
mental problems inherent in the internal spatial fix started to undermine domestic grain pro-
duction, forcing the Chinese state to seek external resources to ameliorate these problems. As
a result, China started to move toward an external spatial fix. (2017, 150)
One measure of this combined strategy informed the Chinese ‘National Agricultural Sus-
tainable Development Plan (2015–2030).’19 Following the 2013 elaboration of Ecosystem
Function Conservation Areas (EFCAs) in order to stem ecosystem degradation and life-
support services to vulnerable rural communities,20 Chinese geographical regions were
now differentiated according to their ecological suitability for large-scale grain production.
The report also resolved to:
Make good use of international markets and resources … According to the domestic resource
and environmental carrying capacity, production potential and demand for agricultural pro-
ducts, determine the reasonable self-sufficiency rate target and the priority of agricultural pro-
ducts import … and alleviate the pressure on domestic resources and environment … and
actively participate in international and regional agricultural policies and the formulation of
agricultural international standards. Improve the quality of opening up … cultivate large-
scale enterprises such as grain, cotton and oil that are internationally competitive, and
support agricultural production and trade cooperation with foreign countries, especially
with neighboring countries, and improve relevant policy support systems. (2015)
The ‘going out’ strategy combines considerations of domestic food self-sufficiency, initially
over-determined by the feed requirements of ‘meatification’ (Schneider 2014), with inter-
national self-reliance in terms of the capacity to exploit possibilities in the global food
system, including competing with foreign agribusiness. This plan stems from domestic
policy, in which a partnership between the Chinese state and private elites has involved
state subsidization of agribusiness to ‘source primary products from rural producers
through contract farming,’ disseminating technologies and market opportunities to
farm households via methods of vertical integration (Schneider 2017, 4). And this now
complements international engagement by dragon-head enterprises, with state
support, to complete an early twenty-first century state-guided development model.21
Determining a ‘reasonable self-sufficiency rate target’ has evolved since the institution
of the WTO in 1995, with rice and wheat staples at 95 per cent, and soybeans at 80 percent,
19
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2015).
20
Rockström et al. (2017, 10).
Whether this is a model for export, remains in question – as Benabdallah (2019, 8) claims: ‘China’s foreign policy does not
21
exhibit a particular interest in promoting its governance model as a condition for financial loans (in the same way that
democratization became a staple condition of IMF and World Bank loans).’
currently. Liberalization of soy importing anticipated membership in the WTO in 2001,

addressing the rising domestic demand for industrial pork, taking advantage of a relatively
low cost of Brazilian soybean production. This in turn informed a government decision to
adjust the relative prices of soybean and corn, leading to a significant decline in soybean
acreage in the traditional soy-province Heilongjiang. Between 2008 and 2013, the total
planting area of soybeans fell 24 percent between 2008 and 2013, registering a crisis in
the domestic soybean industry that ‘was turned into an opportunity by global corpor-
ations such as ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, to refinance and control 70
percent of soybean-processing capacity in China’ (Yan, Chen, and Ku 2016, 374, 378).
Chinese SOEs have since muscled into the soy-processing industry: today, Brazil, Argentina
and China produce 54 per cent and crush 61 per cent of all soybeans in the world (Schnei-
der 2017, 16).
The shift towards soy import dependence has accompanied combined socio-spatial
transformations of Chinese agrarian relations. With the deepening of urban and industrial
relations, concentrated in coastal regions, the grain belt has shifted toward the interior.
Coastal region peasants have registered this overall transformation by switching from
low-value grain farming towards higher-value greenhouse vegetables, fruits and animal
farming for urban markets (Yan, Chen, and Ku 2016, 376). A large-scale domestic ‘spatial
fix’ has involved expansion of substantial interior land tracts, including technological
applications – such as irrigation, new seeds and agro-inputs, and new forms of cultiva-
tion, with state financial and political support, given the government’s grain self-
sufficiency target (Idem). This spatial fix engenders its own tensions as the interior
(and northern) regions have more vulnerable eco-systems, and this, with local disaffec-
tion, conditions the fix as a moving interior frontier, accompanied by a ‘going out’
strategy (Idem). The interior frontier, itself, registers a process of land consolidation
to support dragon-head enterprise-led vertically-integrated supply chains as the dom-
estic food system consolidates.
In 2015 the Chinese government strengthened an agricultural sector adjustment repla-
cing public procurement with corporate agriculture provisioning. Here the state enables
the substitution of agribusiness for peasant farming by establishing transfers of peasant
land (which by law cannot be sold) as ‘land-use rights,’ with a ‘land circulation trust’ by
which companies acquire peasant leases to promote large-scale agriculture – with 25
million hectares of arable land transferred by 2015, representing over 25 per cent of
farm land. The financial house, CITIC, operates land circulation trusts ‘in partnership
with the German seed and pesticide corporation, Bayer CropSciences, and they integrate
Bayer’s products into the consolidated farm holdings that they manage’ (GRAIN 2015, 3).
CITIC and Bayer are joined in land trust acquisition by ‘China’s largest grain trader, COFCO,
the US seed company Pioneer, and even China’s largest e-commerce merchant Alibaba’
(GRAIN 2015, 4), which will fly Sicilian blood oranges to China for distribution, according
to the recent BRI M.O.U. between China and Italy (Sala 2019).
These developments underscore combined involvement of Chinese financial and cor-
porate entities in the internal reorientation of Chinese agriculture away from peasant
farming, and in external expansion associated with the ‘going out’ strategy of the BRI.
CITIC, for example, is heavily invested in Angolan land and Thai oil palm plantations
(GRAIN 2015, 4, 7). There are distant parallels of course with the British policy decision
to offshore agriculture to the New World, via repeal of the Corn Laws (1846). The difference
128 P. MCMICHAEL
is that the latter policy was driven by an alliance between manufacturers desiring lower
wage (food) costs and cattle producers desiring cheaper feed grains (Winders 2009,
323–4), whereas the Chinese state, in later time, is pursuing a food security policy, via
internal and external ‘frontiers’ operated by agribusiness and financial enterprises with
support from sovereign wealth funds.
Each of these manouevers represent historically-specific food regime contours. The
initial food regime involved colonization of new settler regions as developing frontiers sus-
tained by temperate food exports (grains and meat). China’s current role targets distinct
frontiers offshore in an ‘external spatial fix,’
taking a differentiated policy approach toward different regions with different goals … [thus]
China’s periphery countries, particularly Southeast Asian countries and Commonwealth of
Independent States (former republics of the Soviet Union), are the priorities as far as
China’s global agricultural policy is concerned … . given political ties, geographical proximity,
and land connectivity (Zhang 2019, 51).
Both regions represent the possibility of alternative trade routes from North and South
America through the Panama Canal and the Malacca Strait, guaranteeing a certain inde-
pendence for Chinese food imports (Zhang 2019, 51). In addition, given the costly
exchange in China of northern rice for southern consumers, and imported wheat,
soybean and corn unloaded in southern ports for transport to northern consumers,
Zhang notes that imports of Southeast Asian rice, and of other grains from Russia,
Eastern Europe and Central Asia via BRI infrastructure ‘save both time and cost’ (Zhang
2019, 52).
In 2018 it was reported that JBA Holdings, including Heilongjiang Agriculture Co. and
Joyvio Group in a joint venture, ‘will invest $100 million over three years to build a
soybean crusher and grain port in Russia amid a push by Chinese firms to diversify their
sources of crop supplies,’ in addition to plans to lease 100,000 hectares of farmland in
eastern Russia for growing wheat, corn and soybeans for China, facilitated by a new
port in the northeast ‘to create shipping routes for grain harvested in Russia by Chinese
companies’ (Bloomberg 2018b). Further, while soybeans continue to flow from the
Southern Cone region, Africa remains the region for agricultural assistance by China.
The reasoning here is that if or when African agricultural production for domestic con-
sumption is intensified, pressure on global food supplies eases, thereby constituting
‘the bulwark against China’s food insecurity,’ especially insofar as China is able to orches-
trate a set of food supply relations to optimize import independence (Bloomberg 2018b,
53–4; see also Scoones et al. 2016).22
While these various strategies involve accentuated state-direction, Chinese involve-
ment embraces market rule. Whether this reflects a ‘late-starter’ syndrome or a more ambi-
tious claim for hegemony remains to be seen. In the meantime, China is asserting itself in
the wake of Doha, via a finance-driven ‘going out’ strategy, building on prior relationships.
One pertinent dimension of this is the deepening of Asian cooperation, enabled by the
regional Chinese diaspora. As a new growth pole in the global economy, the East Asian
22
There is an extensive literature regarding the specificity of this relationship, in particular the exaggerated claims of
Chinese land grabbing in Africa, coupled with movement of Chinese farmers to work this land for food exports back
to China. These claims have been substantially critiqued by Bräutigam and Ekman (2012), and Bräutigam (2015). A
more recent investigation by Bräutigam found that ‘the amount of land actually acquired by Chinese firms was only
about 240,000 hectares’ (2018, 3).
Community and the new ASEAN frame a regional economy, anchored in supply chains
organized by China across Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, including direct investment
in Southeast Asian agricultures. The China-centered supply chains re-organizing Asian
regionalism (previously Japan-ordered) are also transposed across other regions to the
west, framed within China’s longstanding diplomatic claims for mutual state-to-state
benefits via ‘aid for resources.’
These relationships emerged prior to China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, and they
perhaps reflect China’s flexible combination of a short game of maturing trade and invest-
ment relations within the ‘globalization project,’23 and a much longer game of reorganizing
geo-political and geo-economic infrastructures of trade and investment, possibly recover-
ing a centuries-old pattern of ‘oriental globalization.’
For the short run, China has become the largest trading partner of the US and ‘surpassed
the US as the world’s top choice of foreign direct investment’ (Pieterse 2018, 11). From
2013 to 2017, China’s food imports increased annually by almost 15 percent, its food
imports in 2015 accounting for 6.7 percent of its total merchandise imports – behind
the UK at 10.1 percent, Japan at 10 percent, and Germany at 7.9 percent, and ahead of
the US at 5.7 percent, India at 5.6 percent, and Brazil at 5.1 percent (CSIS 2017). China is
now the largest farm produce importer at 10 percent of global farm produce trade, includ-
ing bulk agricultural products such as grains, edible oils, sugar, meat and milk (FAO 2019,
34; Xinhua 2018). It is also the third largest exporter of agricultural commodities in the
world, by value (Zhang 2019, 51), its food exports concentrating in fish, fruits, vegetables
and processed foods.
Related to this, there is the question of whether African countries will become signifi-
cant food exporters to China in the longer run? Bräutigam noted in 2015 only small
amounts of maize, cassava and soybeans exports from Africa to China, even as South
Africa had mounted a ‘vigorous marketing campaign’ to export maize to Asia, with
some success via Chinese maize imports from South Africa, but as a ‘minor player’
(2015, 157). And while Chinese firms show interest in expanding this grain import relation,
it is more likely to emerge as surplus exports from intensification of African agriculture to
address ‘food security’ initiatives (Bräutigam 2015).24
Recently, China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) emphasized an increased role
of imports and overseas food processing, alongside efficiency and quality environmental
improvements in modernizing its agricultural sector:
We will improve mechanisms for regulating trade in agricultural products, optimize the mix of
sources of imports, expand exports of competitive agricultural products while ensuring dom-
estic supply, and appropriately increase imports of agricultural products that are in short
supply at home. We will actively pursue agricultural cooperation and development overseas,
establish large-scale offshore centers for farm product production, processing, storage, and
transportation, and cultivate internationally competitive multinational agricultural companies.
23
The ‘globalization project’ conceptualizes ‘globalization’ as a geo-political-economically instituted discipline within the
international order, represented as ‘Washington Consensus’ and geared to market governance (McMichael 1996). As
suggested here, it is currently unraveling, even as China has participated in its market-centered framework.
24
See also Scoones et al. (2016, 4). It remains to be seen whether the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN)
initiated by the EU and the G-8 powers in 2013, together with the African Union, the New Partnership for Africa’s Devel-
opment (NEPAD), several African governments, and over 100 private corporations via Cooperation Framework Agree-
ments requiring participating governments to make land available for high-input agriculture will materialize as a
significant agro-export base (see McKeon 2014). France has already pulled out.
130 P. MCMICHAEL
We will broaden the areas of international agricultural cooperation and support bilateral and
multilateral cooperation in agricultural technology. (PRC 2016, Ch 18, section 6)
For the long game, China has, since 2013, embarked on reconstruction of the ancient Silk
Road via its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with infrastructural investments in Southeast
Asia, Central and West Asia to connect with Europe and Africa, involving 90 BRI projects
of ‘development cooperation’ across 60 countries costing $890 billion (compared with
the post-WWII Marshall Plan’s $130 billion investment in today’s dollars). This material
focus contrasts with ‘liquidity investments of central banks in US and EU (whereas)
China’s stimulus spending is being invested in the real economy of infrastructure, pro-
ductive assets, and urbanization’ (Pieterse 2018, 127). Here, China may achieve what the
US failed to achieve in Afghanistan and Iraq, via rail, roads, ports, pipelines, trade and
aid rather than geopolitics, military intervention and regime change. (Pieterse 2018, 128)
What achievement might be gained from this form of twenty-first century ‘develop-
ment cooperation’ is very much in question. First note that the world is in the throes of
a(n increasing) political authoritarianism25 to manage profound social and ecological fall-
outs from market rule, financialized instabilities, and associated expressions of nativism
and racist ‘replacement’ polemics.26 From the perspective of stabilizing a subsequent
food regime, will China’s model of ‘state capitalism’ become dominant in the international
political-economy, by default, as states move to embed markets for legitimacy (develop-
mental)27 purposes? Can the Chinese state maintain and project its political-economic
growth trajectory to re-center a future food regime based in a commanding import
complex combined with a deepening commitment to agricultural production assistance
as the ‘new development’? Is China’s small-farming system sufficiently vibrant and
flexible to model and underpin forms of agro-ecological farming for food provisioning
on the basis of a low-tech, regenerative and biodiverse agriculture?
China: rising hegemon?

China’s model of ‘state-centered neoliberalism’ is not only an apparent hybrid formation, it
is also specific to China’s temporal and spatial conditioning. One dimension is short-term
neoliberalism expressed in the opening of China to global capitalism in the 1990s, argu-
ably to strengthen the PRC state and simultaneously enrich a post-revolutionary popu-
lation. As Dirlik notes: ‘“Globalization” of the economy from the late 1990s was
accompanied by the re-centralization of decision-making, greater coordination of devel-
opment, and the reassertion of the power over the economy of state-owned financial,
energy and industrial enterprises’ (2017a, 63). The twin processes of ‘self-reliance’ (con-
trasted with earlier, Cold War-protected East Asian ‘models’ such as South Korea, Singa-
pore, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and rising consumerism represent legitimacy concerns of an
25
Stemming from the imposition of severe austerity measures on societies, north and south. Fouskas and Gökay note that
‘this new authoritariansm stems from the declining power center of the USA and spreads, especially through international
organizations and bilateral agreements, across the globe; and, as far as the EU is concerned, the monetary-managerial
centre of Germany’ (2018, 16). It is, in Gramscian terms, a ‘morbid symptom’ reflecting and managing populism from
below.
26
Camus (2018).
27
In detailing Brazil and China’s engagements in African agriculture, Scoones et al. identify a ‘new geo-politics’ involving
south-south developmentalism, where ‘a more flexible, long-term, experiential form of development cooperation may
yet emerge from the Chinese and Brazilian experience’ (2016, 8–9).
authoritarian regime. At the same time the Chinese ‘workshop of the world’ served as a
‘spatial fix’ for global capitalist under-consumption in the new millennium, reflected in
China’s admission to the WTO. Here, Chinese industrialization centered on assembly of
foreign components in its array of Special Economic Zones, as ‘exceptional neoliberal’
spaces within Chinese territory: ‘much of the Chinese economy isn’t Chinese at all. This
is especially true of its technologically leading sectors, many of which are embedded in
global value chains that are dominated by US companies’ (Babones 2017, 60). And
China’s capital reserves helped stabilize the global financial crisis of 2008.
The other dimension of ‘state-centered neoliberalism’ is the long game of (geo)political-
centered aspirations to substantive global power, that is: the re-centering of global capital
accumulation from West to East across the twenty-first century (So and Chu 2016, 87),
perhaps recovering a reconfigured ‘orientalist’ tributary system. This strategy is perhaps
best expressed in Lee’s African research, where she differentiates the operations of
global private capitals and Chinese state capitals: as ‘profit maximization’ and ‘profit
optimization,’ respectively. Here, ‘Chinese state capital was concerned more with stability
than flexibility of production and sought to capture the use value of copper as well as its
exchange value’ (2018, 12). Such a practice is complemented by ‘leaving tangible infra-
structure for public use [which] is more appealing to local populations than fungible
funds which end up being embezzled or misappropriated’ (Benabdallah 2019, 9).28
Amanor echoes this, noting that Chinese infrastructure provision to the Ghanaian govern-
ment is ‘critical to the subsequent development of agriculture, without seeing these
service provisions as unwanted costs that should be borne by the government, without
engaging in the asset stripping of government services’ (2013, 88). For West Africa,
Chinese infrastructural investments challenge the French colonial legacy, in Senegal,
Niger, Mali and Togo, but notably in the Ivory Coast, where the government awarded
the contract for its first hydropower dam to the SOE Sinohydro, with conditions for
local materials and labor (Bloomberg 2018a; see also Garcia-Herrero and Xu 2019).
The stock of Chinese investment in Africa rose from 2 percent of US levels to 55 percent
between 2000 and 2014, with the McKinsey report estimating that Chinese investments
will surpass US levels by 2030 (Feng and Pilling 2019). In context of what some view as
African ‘recolonization,’29 Human Rights Watch claims Chinese policies in Africa, following
western examples, have ‘propped up some of the continent’s worst human-rights abusers,’
and with Ethiopia pioneering the ‘Chinese model of development’ – its late prime minister
Meles Zenawai proclaiming: ‘there is no connection between democracy and develop-
ment,’ and implementing an ‘authoritarian developmentalism,’ devoid of civil rights
(Elliot 2007, 23; Smith 2014, 27).
The distinctiveness of China’s ‘state neoliberalism’ combines managing its immersion
in the global capitalist economy (‘going out’), with seeking ‘to enhance the survival of
28
Cf, ‘while Chinese engagements with Africa can be framed in terms of “new imperialism” or part of a benign process of
“mutual learning,” in practice a more nuanced perspective is needed. African states have agency in the process of nego-
tiation, and the Chinese always adopt an incremental and adaptive approach to policy in Africa as in China. There is no
single top-down plan to be forced on unwilling recipients’ (Scoones 2019).
29
Thus Ferguson writes: ‘It is worth asking whether Africa’s combination of privately secured mineral-extraction enclaves
and weakly governed humanitarian hinterlands might constitute not a lamentably immature form of globalization, but a
quite “advanced” and sophisticated mutation of it’ (2006, 12). Cf John LeCarre, The Mission Song (2006). Lee cautions that
these kinds of relations are not monolithic, the Chinese impact depending on local political conditions and the learning
curve of Chinese firms (2009, 652).
132 P. MCMICHAEL
the communist state via long-term intervention in the domestic economy’ (So and Chu
2016, 111). This has involved prioritizing foreign investment to expand markets for
Chinese firms, access technology, and capture resources for Chinese growth at home
via the services of the newly established Chinese Development Bank (So and Chu 2016,
196).30 At the same time, China has partnered with the other BRICS nations in founding
a New Development Bank, to offset the influence of the World Bank and IMF, even as
the NDB remains a dollarized entity (Bond 2017).31 Meanwhile, China projects a new
‘Beijing Consensus,’ based on a strategic ethic of pragmatism and ‘mutual benefit,’ as
an alternative to the US-initiated and volatile ‘globalization project’ for countries eschew-
ing the austerity plans of the Washington Consensus (So and Chu 2016, 211). Thus:
China’s stable, if repressive, politics and high-speed economic growth—the ‘Beijing
Consensus’—have impressed elites in places such as Thailand, where democracy seems to
have produced only graft, muddled economic planning, and political strife. China
encourages this line of thinking by each year training more than 10,000 bureaucrats from
other developing countries in economic management and various civil-service skills—in
sessions at which China’s successes in improving living standards are promoted.
(Kurlantzick 2014)
While the claims and promises of a Beijing Consensus resonate in a world order in tran-
sition as the ‘globalization project’ unravels, the PRC’s internalization of the contradictions
of global capitalism imply that such ‘international and domestic initiatives toward a new
global order may be promising but they are hampered by their confinement within the
premises of the world system to which the PRC owes its rise’ (Dirlik 2017b, 395; also see
Hung 2016).32 China offers conditional support to the institutions of international order
such as the UN, IMF, and WTO, even as it desires a more substantial role in global govern-
ance – suggesting China is outgrowing the order that nurtured its rise (Heath 2019). In
other words, for China to become a global hegemon, the terms of engagement with
the global economy would require substantial reformulation, given that the US wields
an American Tianxia (all under heaven) – that is, a world-system anchored not by the
American state so much as by a process by which it has ‘successfully disaggregated the
world into individuals’ (Babones 2017, 67), yielding ‘market rule’ subjectivity. Nevertheless,
while an ideological veneer, individualism is now problematizd by groundswells of (nati-
vist) populism across the state-system, where austerity simultaneously creates and forbids
individual realization via class polarization.
While aspirational individualism may continue to constitute an ideological cornerstone
of world political-economy, it is not unproblematic, given an uncertain future. Intensifying
30
Thus: ‘the Chinese Government has promoted pro-free trade and foreign investment policies globally through inter-
national cooperation agreements on issues ranging from tax, investment and commercial dispute resolution, intellectual
property and on sectors such as the “Digital Silk Road,” agricultural cooperation and maritime cooperation’ (Olinga-
Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest 2019, 5).
31
Especially given how relatively dominant the US dollar remains (Goodman 2019; Hung 2016). In 2015 the IMF awarded
the yuan reserve currency status, adding it to its Special Drawing Rights basket, alongside the Euro, the yen the pound
and the dollar. Amadeo claims Chinese leaders wanted to improve China’s standard of living to avoid revolution. Fixing
the yuan exchange rate with the dollar not only expanded low-cost exports to the US, but also increased its use to
become the third most-used currency (2019).
32
Cf, ‘Contrary to much of the commentary on the BRI, the Chinese Government is not seeking to overthrow the inter-
national system nor is it attempting to undermine international organisations. On the contrary the Chinese Government
is attempting to use these organisations to increase legitimacy for the BRI’ (Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest
2019, 7).
material and intersectional contradictions (overlain with forms of public and private sur-
veillance) may strengthen current authoritarian trends as socio-ecological conditions
deteriorate – whether right-wing or ‘liberal authoritarianism.’ In regard to such a trend,
the 2017 World Economic Forum’s ‘liberal internationalist embrace of Xi Jinping as a
free trader is emblematic of contemporary liberalism’s prioritization of economic rights
over basic freedoms’ (Babones 2019, 59). This is reinforced by the new respect for expertise
in China, resting on ‘the elites of China’s experts … coming to be integrated with the
global expert class’ (Babones 2019, 60).33
At Davos in 2017, Xi Jinping claimed, when organizing a country’s social and economic
development path, ‘All roads lead to Rome’ – implying that ‘today’s liberal internationalist
world could accommodate many different forms of government, including China’s totali-
tarian one-party dictatorship’ (Babones 2019, 69). The dissembling of the neoliberal world
order may well provide an opportunity for a restructuring of world hegemony, and China
under President Xi appears to be positioning itself to influence if not anchor such a
process, in the long term.
Meanwhile, what is China’s relationship to the food regime?
China, BRI and the food regime

To address this issue is to account for the current state of the food regime, and what
China’s role reveals about this. As I maintain, the so-called ‘corporate food regime,’ as insti-
tuted via structural adjustment governance and neoliberal WTO trade and investment
rules, operates within a deepening market paradigm even as it embodies transformative
forces. Such emergent forces include: ‘multiplex’ deals promoting agro-exporting,
extended commodification as in financialized flex-cropping, socio-economic contradic-
tions generating social and agri-food counter-movements and protectionist strategies,
managing cross-border capital investment to exploit farming and natural resource
systems (such as NAFSN), and bio-capitalism via ‘biophysical override’ and the ‘technolo-
gization of nature’ and ‘digitalization’ (Abergel 2011; ETC Group 2018b; Weis 2007). These
various developments accelerated in the shadow of the restive politics34 of the 2008 ‘food
crisis,’ and a rekindling of the ‘feed the world’ trope in the development agencies to
address the legitimacy crisis of the food regime.
And since this crisis threshold intensified concern for access to offshore flex-crop
sources, this is perhaps where China’s role becomes significant, given it has only 9
percent of the world’s arable land and 6 percent of world’s water resources to feed 20
percent of the world’s population. Securing these sources at the same time means
seeking stable bilateral relations, that is, forming ‘profit-optimization goals’ to ‘empower
a peculiar counter-agency – the state of the host country, which is more easily short-
circuited by finance-driven, globally mobile private capital’ (Lee 2018, 11). As noted,
China’s swelling consumer economy deepens the East Asian import complex, enabled by
its ‘going out’ strategy, through which China emerges as an agent of intensified agricul-
tural development, especially in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
33
Cf Corporate E (2019).
34
Such as food riots (Patel and McMichael 2009), and the IPC for Food Sovereignty challenge to FAO to resume its central
role in governing world food security and nutrition (McKeon 2011).
134 P. MCMICHAEL
This activity is likely strengthened by China through the devices of the BRI, even though
‘in 2015, agriculture, forestry, husbandry and fishing accounted for just US$2.57 billion of
China’s total overseas investment, which is less than 2%’ (Grimsditch 2017, 4). Comp-
lementary BRI investments constitute a rising portion of Chinese overseas investment,
also in agri-food developments: ‘the major focus of this initiative is enhancing regional
interconnectivity, which will potentially support the expansion of various industries,
including agro-industry and trade in agricultural commodities’ (Grimsditch 2017, 31).
The BRI includes an extensive network of highways, railways, energy pipelines, and
adapted border crossings: to South and Southeast Asia, and to the west through the
former Soviet republics, to Europe and Africa.35 Such physical infrastructural development
(alongside digital integration of markets) is designed to expand the use of Chinese cur-
rency, and ‘break the bottleneck of Asian connectivity,’ in President Xi Jinping’s words,
to secure energy supplies from the west ‘via routes the U.S. military cannot disrupt’
(Chatzky and McBride 2019, 2, 6). And this is complemented with the twenty-first
century Maritime Silk Road, requiring port development along trade routes.
Compared with the initial food regime, in which British cultivation of New World fron-
tiers formed an international food regime organized (against indigenous cultures) around
sourcing wage-foods for industrial labor forces in Europe, China tends to capture offshore
food supplies from extant agri-food systems offshore, provisioning wage-foods and diets
of its rising class of global consumers.36 With respect to its ‘global’ consumers, China’s con-
glomerate, Reward Group International, recently acquired 900 ha of land in central France
via a subsidiary, whose director plans ‘to put French cereals on Chinese tables’ (quoted in
Mareschal 2018). His goal is ‘to open a chain of high-end bakeries, all the while controlling
the entire industrial process, from harvesting French wheat to opening bread and pastry
stalls in China,’ and ultimately in his words: ‘To develop industry in service of the
homeland’.
What is particular to this moment is the condition of food supply. The British and
Americans deployed the food regime to cheapen wage-foods and subsidize economic
(workshop of the world) and political-economic (Cold War alliances) relationships, respect-
ively. In the twenty-first century, with the politics and depredations of the (continuing)
food crisis revealing the fragility of neoliberal WTO multilateral governance (in an asymme-
trical state system), mercantilist principles have resurfaced to protect/secure food supplies
– not simply for wage- and affluent-consumer foods, but also to stabilize political orders.
And these principles are most evident perhaps in the two countries with the largest popu-
lations: India, where the ‘right to food’ has purchase in the political system/discourse
35
According to Jones and Zeng (2019, 11), by 2015, the BRI essentially became three land routes (to Europe, and the Middle
East, through Central Asia, to India via SE Asia), two maritime routes (to Europe via the Indian Ocean, and the South
Pacific via the South China Sea), and six corridors (the new Eurasian Land Bridge, China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Indo-
china, China-Central Asia-West Asia, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar).
36
A prominent instance is China’s recent large-scale investments in Australian farmland (Hemphill 2017), to the tune of
about 15 million hectares. ‘The importance of dairy, beef, and sheep – all commodities with growing demand in
China – and trade agreements further enhance the attractiveness of this region. China has sought out both low- and
high-value commodities in the form of barley, sorghum, wheat, milk powder, cheese, live cattle, beef, and infant
formula’ (Gooch and Gale 2018, 32). Meanwhile, as pork consumption rates subside somewhat, beef and chicken con-
sumption rates rise in comparison. And growing consumer recognition of the link between healthy diets and environ-
mentalism spawns a rising consumption of fruits and vegetables – for example, according to UN figures, between
2010 and 2016 avocado imports grew from 1.9 tonnes to 25,000 tonnes (a 13,000-fold increase), largely supplied by
Mexico and Chile (Zhang 2018).
(Pritchard et al. 2016), and China, where ‘grain security’ (rice and wheat) signals an official
commitment to food security at home, complemented with expanding imports of food
and feed supplies to satisfy a rising middle class, expected to almost double by 2025
from 480 million today to 780 million. Emblematic of China’s rising middle class is the
largest shopping center in the world, located in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province,
deep in China’s interior.
‘Agro-security mercantilism,’ via offshore land acquisition and cultivation of agro-
exports, is critical to both ‘feeding the nation’ and more generally food regime restructur-
ing. It complements ‘market rule’ with food imports from land acquired overseas in order
to bypass the WTO’s multilateral trading system. This strategy substitutes direct access to
productive land for food, feed and fuel supplies rather than relying on access through a
multilateral market, given the breakdown of world food exchanges during the 2007–08
‘food crisis’ (McMichael 2013b). And it includes land enclosure by commodification,37
with the application of commercial technologies and agro-inputs. It is practiced by East
Asian38 and Middle-Eastern states primarily, and for China itself it is tendency rather
than a substantial trend on a global scale, even as the soy fields of the Southern Cone
and the Southeast Asian region are currently China’s significant offshore platforms (as
below)
Agro-security mercantilism also aligns with the appearance of a ‘post-Washington
divergence’ (Barling and Duncan 2015), which informs the notion of a ‘Beijing consensus’
as an antidote to the crisis of neoliberalism on the one hand (e.g. confluence of financial,
food and energy crises in 2008), and the growing weight of Chinese political-economy in
the world market. Belesky and Lawrence note that global economic trends reveal a re-cen-
tering on East Asia, and in East Asia on China (2018, 4), and, therefore, an ‘East-South turn’
where South-South trade overtakes North–South trade (Pieterse 2018). Whether or not this
means ultimate Chinese hegemony is unclear. Certainly the Chinese state-capitalist model
may universalize,39 given the combined crises of social inequality and global ecology,
already intensifying, but at this poing this trend is by default, as global capitalism
falters, showing its teeth.
Meanwhile Belesky and Lawrence’s notion of a multipolar ‘interregnum’ (2018, 11)
identifies a transitional hiatus in the context of US hegemonic decline, complicated by
Acharya’s notion of a ‘multiplex world,’ that is: ‘a G-Plus world, featuring established
and emerging powers, global and regional institutions and actors, states, social move-
ments, corporations, private foundations, and various kinds of partnerships,’ and ‘not
defined by the hegemony of any single nation or idea’ (2017, 16). Acharya envisions glo-
balization’s future as:
less driven by trade and more by developmental concerns. This might give more space to the
initiatives of the emerging powers, which tend to focus more on infrastructure than on free
trade. Thus, the new globalization could well be led less by the West and more by the East,
37
This refers to land acquisition by default, where contract farming becomes a ‘debt trap’ for small farmers (McMichael
2013c).
38
According to the Land Matrix data, Chinese and Korean land acquisitions for food production account for 42 projects
mainly in South-Eastern Asia and East Africa, and ar led by public or state-owned companies’ (Anseeuw et al. 2012,
30). Note also that the Land Matrix emphasizes what tends to be characteristic about ‘land-grabbing,’ namely that it
is often unrealized productively. Thus in 2012, only 35 of China’s approximately 85 land deals were reliable (Anseeuw
et al. 2012, 21).
39
In the name of ‘development cooperation’ for example (Scoones et al. 2016).
136 P. MCMICHAEL
especially China and India, as it had been for a thousand years before European colonialism.
On its own, China may not be able to lead globalization outright, but it has the potential to
reshape it with initiatives like the One Belt, One Road strategy and the AIIB [Asian Infrastruc-
ture Investment Bank]. (2017, 13; emphasis added)
The BRI initiative has the backing of unmatched foreign exchange reserves and a banking
system largely state-owned to finance global activities of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises
(SOEs) in addition to Chinese private firms. In turn such SOEs navigate the market para-
digm constituting the global political-economy, where China’s state-led capitalism
both challenges and reaffirms the concept of a neoliberal food regime by rendering visible the
“statist” dimensions of capital accumulation. Chinese state capitalism concurrently modifies
the corporate form of agribusiness and explicitly continues public support of private interest.
SOEs are an intrinsic part of the “state-capital” nexus in the Chinese context. (Belesky and
Lawrence 2018, 11)
While the ‘state-capital’ nexus in Chinese terms compares with Harvey’s ‘state-finance
nexus’ (2010, 51), symbolizing how states actively serve capital’s market under neoliberal-
ism, it specifies the Chinese development governance model. Importantly, Belesky and
Lawrence observe that China’s WTO membership ‘and its gradual move towards restruc-
turing and liberalizing some aspects of its agri-food sector – demonstrate the highlighted
paradox of state capitalism and neomercantilism in both challenging and co-constituting
the neoliberal characteristics of the contemporary food regime in transition’ (2018, 11).
Given the power relations associated with ‘market rule,’ mercantilist policies and prac-
tices abide – notably the successful undermining of a World Food Board in the 1940s by
the US, followed by exclusion of agriculture from GATT trade rules alongside PL480 as food
aid program and regime, and then the embedding of American and European agricultural
subsidies in the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, as it dismantled agricultural protections
in other member states. But the Chinese form is perhaps of a different order, given the
overwhelming nationalist legacy of the Chinese Revolution, which was ‘inextricably
entangled in the struggle for national autonomy and power against foreign interference.’
Here, Chinese neo-mercantilism coincides with ‘a use of nationalism to cover up the retreat
from socialism’ (Dirlik 2017a, 58), with food security central to PRC legitimacy, and requir-
ing food regime participation. One telling development here is the recent acquisition of
the seed and pesticide corporation, Syngenta, by China’s largest public agri-chemical
company, ChemChina: ‘the biggest outbound investment in China’s history’ (Grimsditch
2017, 24), and arguably ‘part of a broader corporate restructuring that will significantly
reshape relations of power in both the commercial seeds and agrochemical industries
and the global agri-food, feed, fuel and finance system’ (Belesky and Lawrence 2018, 16).
Whether this means that Chinese ‘neomercantilism’ prefigures a subsequent food
regime ‘model’ is an open question, given the legitimacy deficits of world-wide neoliberal
inequalities, generating new nationalisms (‘illiberal neoliberalism’), destabilizing the global
order as such and encouraging authoritarian politics.40 Meanwhile the state-owned
COFCO – an agribusiness conglomerate (and investment holding company) in its own
right, combining food processing, manufacturing, and trading (the world’s fourth largest
Thus President Lukashenko of Belarus looks ‘increasingly to China for money and inspiration: Europe has lost much of its
40
sheen as an economic model, but China offers an example of how authoritarian politics can mix with robust economic
growth’ (Higgins 2019).
grain trader now) – is poised to take advantage of and lead the BRI. This initiative includes
grain-export regions that in turn encourage Chinese large-scale agricultural investments
and related infrastructural development. At the same time the Chinese reach supports
small-scale farming with funding and technical training (in Africa especially), reflecting
the PRC’s current commitment to this national legacy.
The BRI has the potential to realign the global wheat trade into Asia by opening up
access to western supplies and reducing American presence. China has plans to establish
a grain futures market with Kazakhstan, Russia and other post-Soviet states, with COFCO as
one significant buyer. Russia, which sells most of its grain to Turkey and Egypt, is now
turning to the east, increasing its wheat exports to the region by 60 percent in 2016.
This is preliminary, as Russia has the capacity to outstrip the US as a breadbasket –
evident in the depression of wheat prices in 2017 on the benchmark Chicago Mercantile
Exchange reducing the area of US farmland devoted to wheat production (Kanao and
Bisenov 2017).
In addition to establishing such food supplies, China’s BRI includes technology trans-
fer, infrastructure upgrading, and farming enterprise collaboration. As the FAO notes:
‘Chinese science and agriculture have much to offer developing countries, since intensive
small-scale agriculture has been practiced in China for centuries’ (quoted in Buckley
2013, 43), and of course more recently one legacy of the Chinese Revolution is (a
certain) protection of its peasant sector (cf van der Ploeg and Ye 2016a; Scott et al.
2018). Central to the BRI initiative is the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), as
incubator of future developments elsewhere, even as it is tension-ridden. It ‘encompasses
some $62 billion in investments and infrastructure projects in Pakistan, including ports,
power plants, roads, and railways,’ and the ‘Sino-Pakistan Hybrid Rice Research Center
in Karachi (where) Chinese and Pakistani scientists are … developing high-yield, high-
quality, and pest-resistant rice varieties, for both domestic sale and export’ (McCormick
2018). Additional plans are for Pakistan to lease out thousands of acres of farmland to
Chinese enterprises for ‘demonstration projects’ regarding seed varieties and irrigation
technologies. Chinese government and China Development Bank capital grants and
loans will enable Chinese enterprises to ‘operate their own farms, processing facilities
for fruits and vegetables and grain’ (Husain 2017). Meanwhile concern among Pakistani
observers centers on food security issues to the extent that Chinese produce, already
prevalent in domestic markets and competitive with local produce, may also be exported
back to China, as well as on potential displacement of small farmers and farmworkers
(McCormick 2018).
Popular unease is not specific to Pakistan, as Kazakhstan erupted in mass protests in
the first decade of the new century, against government plans on two occasions to
rent large tracts of land to China, with the prospect of increased Chinese in-migration.
Such contention forced a Kazakhstani government shift to encouraging Chinese agri-
cultural investment rather than land renting. Thus, in 2016, Chinese companies pro-
posed to
invest $1.7 billion in 19 projects to produce and process agricultural products. The biggest
investments include $1.2bn by Zhongfu Investment Group into oilseed processing; $200 m
into beef, lamb and horsemeat production by Rifa Investment; $80 m into the production
of tomatoes and tomato paste by state-owned agricultural business Cofco; and $58 million
into a grain processing venture by China’s AIJIU. (Hashimova 2016)
138 P. MCMICHAEL
These issues implicate Chinese state and capital diplomacy in its ‘going out’ strategy –
Angela Stanzel, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations,
suggests: ‘This is a very fluid project. China doesn’t want to overplay its hand. They’re
testing things out and seeing what works’ (quoted in McCormick 2018). Contention is
not only populist, but also diplomatic, with the Sino-Indian relationship a case in point.
Even though India was willing to join the AIIB in 2016, long-standing and newly-generated
divisions (notably over the CPEC initiative) sour the BRI rollout in South Asia (Small 2018).
This sentiment informs African involvement also, where Chinese policymakers comp-
lement resource access with technology investments and sustainability concerns (Hu
2015). Africa is now firmly on China’s horizon, not only as a source of natural resources
such as oil, timber and nickel, but increasingly as an agricultural incubator: ‘China’s
embrace of the continent is strategic, planned, long-term and still unfolding’ (Bräutigam
2012, 43). Agro-industrial parks in Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia complement BRI’s
transport links with East Africa, via ports and ocean-going infrastructure, upgrading the
route from South Asia to Kenya and Tanzania, and from there through Djibouti to the Med-
iterranean (GRAIN 2019a, 4–5). In 2000, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC)
began triannual meetings to strengthen diplomatic and business ties, and the Ministry of
Commerce has established business-run Chinese Agricultural Technology Demonstration
Centers (ATDCs) across Africa to deepen agricultural development cooperation via high-
modernist agro-industrialization and commercial peasant farming (Scoones et al. 2016, 5).
China surpassed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009 but is now surpassing
the US aid regime by concentrating on direct investment in resources and infrastructures
for continental developments. Recent railway development in Ethiopia has strategic impli-
cations – not only to address famine, but also to improve Horn of Africa transportation,
connecting neighboring Sudan, Somalia and Kenya, as well as Djibouti’s ports, on which
Ethiopia depends for 90 percent of its foreign trade (Kaiman 2017). Amanor claims
China is bold in its investments, willing to undertake large investments, but also creates pro-
jects that aim to enable these investments to be rapidly recovered and repaid. The scale of
these investments puts OECD aid investments during the 1990s and early 2000s to shame,
where the excuse for not investing was the lack of infrastructure developed by government,
the lack of good governance and investment risk. (2013, 88)41
This reinforces the notion of South-South cooperation, expressing the multipolar pattern-
ing of the food regime. Brazil and China lead this development, having embraced this
relationship as:
informing their movement into the development sphere in Africa. However, the rapid econ-
omic growth within these countries, the extent of their investments within Africa, and the
complexity of linkages into the global framework of agri-business suggests that the simplistic
framework of South-South cooperation and development as a ‘new paradigm’ throws little
light on the nature of their investments in Africa and may actually mask the current position
in the global economy of these emergent powers. (Amanor 2013, 87–8)
Here the commercial benefits of such infrastructural support services are not viewed as ‘unwanted costs that should be
41
borne by the government’ and do not require ‘asset stripping of government services’ – associated with neoliberal ‘con-
ditionalities’ (Amanor 2013, 88). Nevertheless the BRI is subject to US (and other) claims of ‘debt trap diplomacy’ (Bräu-
tigam 2019; cf Wijayasiri and Senaratne 2018) – and indeed in a celebrated case, PM Mohammad Mahathir recently
renegotiated a price-inflated Rail Link in Malaysia with a Chinese corporation (Sharma 2018). Bräutigam disputes
‘debt trap’ claims, arguing that ‘B.R.I isn’t debt-trap diplomacy: It’s just globalization with Chinese characteristics’ (2019).
While this refers to the complexity of trans-territorial agribusiness relations under con-
struction by Brazil and China, a key difference is the former’s role as an agro-export
power and the latter’s food import dependency, with Brazil as principal supplier of soy-
beans for Chinese ‘meatification’ (Schneider 2014; Schneider and Sharma 2014).
Nevertheless, China’s import dependency shapes its ‘South-South’ relation with South-
east Asia, even as it combines food importing with regional agricultural investments, includ-
ing farm equipment, training centers and demonstration farms, irrigation systems and
transport and energy infrastructure, ‘which contribute to the development of the agricul-
tural sector and trade in agricultural commodities,’ such as sugarcane, cassava, fruits, and
other export crops (Grimsditch 2017, 71). For example, Laos and China are establishing a
‘modern agriculture development zone’ in Savannakhet Province, southern Laos, to
produce high quality rices for export to China (Grimsditch 2017, 53). But Cambodia is the
key recipient of Chinese largesse, with Chinese SOEs signing major deals to purchase rice
exports (Grimsditch 2017, 5), including COFCO signing a deal in 2014 to purchase 100,000
tonnes of rice from Cambodian state-owned firm Green Trade Co. (Grimsditch 2017, 39).
China’s Southeast Asian regional links were formalized in 2007 when its Ministry of Agri-
culture and ASEAN signed a five-year MOU on agricultural cooperation, including China’s
commitment to ‘provide training on hybrid rice, cultivation methods, fertilizer use, water
management, agro-industry, and agricultural extension’ (Grimsditch 2017, 31). ASEAN is
part of the BRI’s twenty-first century Maritime Silk Road, and this union stems from
strengthening diplomatic links between China and Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar over
several decades (Mills 2018). Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen praised the role of
China’s aid and investment in 2013:
The progress in Cambodia cannot be separated from the contribution and support from China,
particularly the aid in roads, bridges, electricity facilities and irrigation systems … All Chinese
assistance to Cambodia has not only helped develop the Cambodian economy, but also
strengthen Cambodia’s independence and sovereignty in the international arena. (quoted
in Grimsditch 2017, 71)42
Such unqualified praise resembles the ideological assessments of World Bank and
Western aid to ‘post-colonial’ states in the era of the ‘development project,’ when large-
scale infrastructure and other assistance was welcomed by newly-independent elites,
whose ‘right to self-determination had been acquired in exchange for the right to self-
definition’ (Rist 1997, 79). The difference in the twenty-first century perhaps is that for
now, the exchange with China is relatively unconditional (net of debt relations),43 given
a post-Cold War context. That is, China appears to be less interested in promoting its gov-
ernance model as a condition for financial loans, which are geared to ‘profit optimization,’
including stable access to resources (Lee 2018), and ‘human resource development’ via
‘professionalization training’ (Benabdallah 2019). And these activities raise questions for
42
In the same vein (an apparently realistic South-South perspective under controversial circumstances), the Nigerian
ambassador to China claimed: ‘China is 10 times the size of Nigeria’s population but they have developed a system
that can take care of their people. These are examples we want to adapt,’ (quoted in Feng and Pilling 2019).
43
Cf: ‘For some countries that take on large amounts of debt to fund the necessary infrastructure, BRI money is seen as a
potential poisoned chalice. BRI projects are built with low-interest loans as opposed to aid grants … Some BRI invest-
ments have required the use of Chinese firms and their bidding processes have lacked transparency,’ with contractors
sometimes inflating costs, ‘leading to canceled projects and political pushback.’ Meanwhile some argue there is a
silver lining for the US in the BRI, ‘as a way to have China pay for infrastructure initiatives in Central Asia that are
also in the U.S. interest’ (Chatzky and McBride 2019).
140 P. MCMICHAEL
some: ‘The puzzle which BRI puts before IR scholars consists in being an initiative that sim-
ultaneously reinforces international development goals established by (mostly Western-
led) international institutions, while at the same time promoting Chinese-led alternative
financial institutions’ (Benabdallah 2019, 2).44
This is a puzzle both complex and unlikely to be easily resolved soon, given the uncer-
tainty in international relations with the unraveling of the post-war international liberal
order (never particularly liberal, other than promoting ‘market rule’). China itself faces a
substantial period of negotiating its own way of articulating with a changing world
order. Given President Xi’s recent and extreme tightening of state power, it can be
expected that the PRC will move toward greater centralization of BRI initiatives, previously
quite decentralized, with some reckless offshore engagements, and lacking in effective,
coordinated governance.45
In this regard, Jones and Zeng argue that the BRI has unfolded ‘in a fragmented and
incoherent fashion’ (2019, 2), reflecting several decades of provisional government invol-
vement with offshore schemes: ‘BRI was not really a new initiative but rather a scaling up
and agglomeration of many existing bottom-up projects, typically led by provinces and
SOEs,’ especially associated with China’s Great Western Development (GWD) campaign,
nevertheless represented with grand platitudes and slogan, offering ‘atmospheric gui-
dance’ subject to local interpretation (Jones and Zeng 2019, 4, 6, 8). Further: ‘the Belt
and Road is really the expansion of a specific part of China’s domestic political
economy to the rest of the world’ (Batson 2019), or, as Bello argues: ‘the Belt and Road
Initiative does not appear to be a grand strategy for hegemony and is more likely an
effort to solve China’s industrial overcapacity crisis’ (2019, 7).46
Whatever coordination is now involved emerged from the 2007–2008 global financial
crisis, to which China responded with a massive infrastructural and industrial stimulus
package for local government borrowing. Subsequent overcapacity in the early 2010s
led SOEs to take the lead in internationalizing their domestic surplus capacity, in partner-
ship with the PRC (Jones and Zeng 2019, 8).47 Of course this is a different spatio-political
game, with consequence, and it is unlikely the PRC will allow it to continue as simply ‘a
slogan attached to the decentralized actions of SOEs and banks’ (Batson 2019), deepening
China’s growing role in the global food regime.
Concluding remarks
As noted, it is premature to define a future food regime trajectory.48 China’s current
engagement does however offer a lens on transitional processes, taking into account
44
Cf, Karatasli and Kumral (2017), who argue China is presently unlikely to challenge the global status quo (such as it is).
45
Cf Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest (2019, 10).
46
See also Olinga-Shannon, Barbesgaard, and Vervest (2019, 4). It is interesting to compare with the US food-aid program
(1954-), which involved recycling surplus foodstuffs (arising from the mid-century agricultural Commodity Stabilization
Agreements, in response to the agricultural and dust-bowl crisis of the inter-war years) to strategic states on the Cold
War perimeter, to provide cheapened wage-foods, promoting industrial sectors in these front-line states, enlarging
the ‘free world’ (Friedmann 1982), as a hegemonic project.
47
In relation to this, Harvey claimed: ‘The relative spaces of the global economy are being revolutionised (yet again!) not
because it is a good idea or desperately wanted and needed in itself, but because this is the best way to stave off
depression and devaluation’ (2018, 191).
48
Pritchard might say: ‘you’ll know it when you’ve seen it’ – given his notion that food regime analysis is a ‘tool of hindsight’
(2009, 8).
the dynamic combination of conjunctural relations, but not assuming China will necess-
arily become a new hegemon. Interestingly, the Chinese ‘moment,’ so to speak, occurs
at a time when political liberalism is in decline, as compared with the ‘moments’ when
Britain and the United States established their international hegemony, with liberalism
the rising ideology, and both states claiming to represent the particular liberal ‘high
road’ in the state system at each hegemonic conjuncture (cf Arrighi 1990). In context of
the deepening revelations of liberalism’s darker side,49 Chinese offshore practices bear a
certain resemblance to western neo-colonialism, even as China represents itself as a stan-
dard-bearer of South-South cooperation.50
With respect to food regime reconfiguration, the outlines of the relational dynamic pro-
posed may be discerned. For instance, residual relations would center on the optimizing of
Chinese participation in the WTO liberal trading regime through investment in offshore
agri-food operations to supply an expanding food-import complex – in effect turning to
its (importing) advantage the agro-export relations central to the corporate food regime
(1980s-present), and thereby reconfiguring their significance.
Dominant relations are evident in ‘multiplex’ relationships forming alternative food
regime territorialities51 – governed by firms and states within the parameters of illiberal
market rule, combining profit and ‘special administered spaces,’ and revenue and legiti-
macy, respectively. Such cross-border structuring of value flows, internal to corporate
and SOE networks of global production and circulation, are mediated by states in the inter-
ests of competitive market positioning (and their politico-financial classes). And such
defining cross-territoriality is not simply about food.52 As above, new frontiers of value
are forming, based on financialized ‘convertive accumulation’53 via monocultures of
industrially-produced inputs for ‘food-like’ and/or bioeconomic substances.54 Thus, bioe-
conomic innovation,
as currently envisioned by foresters, agribusiness, biotech, energy and chemical firms furthers
the ongoing enclosure and degradation of the natural world by appropriating plant matter for
transformation into industrial commodities, engineering cells so they perform as industrial fac-
tories, and redefining and refitting ecosystems to provide industrial support “services”. (ETC
Group 2010, 6)
Finally, emergent relations include geo-economic and geo-political restructuring of global

food relationships alongside deepening tensions between agriculture with, or without,
farmers. While the latter refers to industrial/farmerless agriculture, the former embodies
multi-functional/ecological farming systems, premised on regenerative agriculture.
49
For a historical perspective see Mishra (2017).
50
See, in particular, Bello, who observes: ‘The BRI is at heart a twentieth century top-down technocratic project being trans-
posed into the twenty-first century, along with the attendant flaws’ accompanying ‘massive construction projects’ invol-
ving large-scale extractivism and ecological damage (2019). See also GRAIN (2019b).
51
Alternative to the ‘multi-polar’ patterning. For example, China’s state-owned enterprise, Beidahuang Land Cultivation
Group, ‘has secured a deal with the governor of Rio Negro in Argentina to lease some 570,000 acres. It also tied up a
long-term agreement with Argentine land giant Credus, which controls more than 2 million acres of farms’ (Pearce
2012, 202).
52
Rather, ‘feed security,’ as well as ingredients for industrial processing – note that over the last quarter century the global
production of maize has increased by over 100% an that of soybeans by over 200% while global rice production increased
by 35%, and wheat production by 25%, even as ‘wheat dependence in poor countries has increased over the past 40
years’ (González-Esteban 2018, 19; cf Hawkes 2018).
53
As distinct from ‘extensive,’ and ‘intensive,’ accumulation regimes characterizing the first two food regimes (Friedmann
and McMichael 1989).
54
Shiva (2019).
142 P. MCMICHAEL
These systems are nurtured by forms of governance such as food and land sovereignty (cf
Andrée et al. 2014; Borras and Franco 2012; Trauger 2014), ecological sovereignty (Ali
2019), and Indigenous sovereignty (Grey and Patel 2015). Arguably, overtaking the
techno-politics and geo-political ordering of the corporate food regime footprint are
both immanent possibilities in a China-centering world. But only possibilities at this
point, in the absence of a sustained counter-hegemonic socio-ecological politics. And
here, China’s reformulation/inversion of the ‘public-private’ relationship55 has potential
to model the adoption of state-centered (as opposed to cross-national standardizing)
environmental stabilization and climate mitigation/adaptation planning – already prefig-
ured in mushrooming Green New Deal proposals.
Intensifying biodiversity and climate emergencies portend decline of high-input agri-
monoculture as such, with its destructive strategies of ‘innovative’ commodification of bio-
physical processes. Such interventions to cover its often ruinous tracks embody a self-
referential techno-politics, with solutions inherent in how problems are perceived. They
have a limited future, given their dramatic undermining of natural foundations, contri-
bution to green-house gas emissions, and continuing dispossession of rural peoples in
job-scarce economies.
‘Agriculture without farmers’56 has been the principal, global socio-ecological contra-
diction of the corporate food regime. Digitization and robotization, and even gene-drive
technologies,57 intensify this contradiction, prefiguring ‘agriculture without humans.’
Meanwhile ‘agroecology’ is gaining ground and/or legitimacy in international organiz-
ations,58 such as the FAO, and among producers – either by political-ecological motivation
or necessity (where farmers, of varying scale, are unable to afford the inflated costs of
monopolized agro-inputs, and public subsidies disproportionately target agribusiness),
matched with solidarity groupings in rural and urban alliances (Da Víà 2012). It is a practice
widespread in Europe (Levidow 2015; van der Ploeg 2018; Williamson 2019), and Latin
America, and parts of South Asia (e.g. Zero Budget Farming in India)59 and Africa. It is
also emergent in North America, where farm debt, soil decline and water shortages threa-
ten family farm viability (e.g. Greenaway 2017; Hylton 2012; PAN 2019), and ecosystem
repair is capturing the attention of food companies to modify supply chains and appropri-
ate organic initiatives, in context of a Regenerative Organic Certification movement to
restore ‘organic’ to its original meaning (https://regenorganic.org; Reguzzoni 2018; see
also Blesh and Galt 2017), and meanwhile an active National Family Farm Coalition
(NFFC) encourages agroecological farming. Not unique to ‘peasant’ agriculture, farmer
55
Cf the privileging of market instrumentality in the NAFSN as a G-8 ‘public-private partnership,’ in requiring states to
implement private (intellectual) property policies, including land enclosure for high-tech agriculture.
56
As coined by La Via Campesina (1999, 3).
57
ETC Group (2018b), and ETC Group and Heinrich Boll Foundation (2018).
58
Certainly subject to appropriation by redefinition – quite evident in the CFS 46 Plenary reception of the HLPE Agroecol-
ogy Report (2019), as delegates from the agro-exporting settler states (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina)
and the private sector challenged the showcasing of Agroecology, arguing either that it was ‘just one tool in the toolbox’
alongside precision agriculture, Sustainable Intensification and/or Climate Smart Agriculture, or that these other methods
included some agroecology. While there may be some (potential) overlap, agroecology is not simply a technique, but also
a knowledge, a farming culture, and involves a key human rights dimension insofar as small-scale low-input farming
systems (lacking public support) continue to account for around two-thirds of the world’s food supply. These dimensions
were acknowledged by CFS 46 delegates from many other states in an encouraging moment in which the discourse was
centered on the need for a fundamental change of direction away from what is usually termed, misleadingly, ‘conven-
tional agriculture.’
59
Khadse and Rosset (2019).
movement towards promoting restorative agriculture by reducing agro-inputs avoids debt

relations and the ecocide of industrial agriculture.60 It signals a palpable tension internal to
the food regime that allows/anticipates the possibility/likelihood of widespread restorative
and regenerative farming systems (cf Rosset and Altieri 2017; Gliessman 2018).
In 2016, the Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture placed China as having the
third largest area of organic farmland in the world behind Australia and Argentina, the
organic produce market growing by 25 percent annually, with central government
environmental support (Ken and Chen 2019). In some ways, the Chinese government
explicitly recognizes the value of organic or agroecological farming. What value it ascribes
is complicated, as it is as much a response to the on-going degradation of Chinese soils
and food safety as it is to retaining farm sector control and enabling small-scale organics
for employment purposes. That is, agroecology is not necessarily valued for a social logic
of farmer solidarities (Scott et al. 2018), and possibilities in a stable form of peasant farming
(Schneider 2015). The state has a strong hand in regulating and standardizing a ‘top down’
form of organic agriculture. Alongside of this sector informal grass-roots networks of self-
managing organic farmers work with participatory monitoring of organic practices. How
stable this combination and agroecological possibility is is unclear at this point. Si et al.
note the Chinese state’s contradictory relations to industrial and ecological agriculture: ‘As
environmental consequences of the agriculture sector are increasingly recognized, the
Chinese government has issued various policies to promote green and sustainable agricul-
ture in the past few years, such as zero growth of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use by
2020. Yet these recent emphases on agricultural sustainability have not completely altered
its long-lasting policy orientation that supports “agricultural industrialization”’ (2017, 202).
Given the PRC’s emphasis on food self-reliance, agro-industrialization via dragon-head
enterprises drives this period of Chinese ‘agricultural modernization’ (Ye 2015). Peasant
agriculture is complementary even as it undergoes transformation to serve urban and
internal markets for labor and food (van der Ploeg and Ye 2016b). Here, Chinese agricul-
ture is characterized by a hybrid market structure of agribusiness (with contract farming)
supplying urban consumption, alongside an extensive local small farming sector with
community-supported agricultures, ecological farmers’ markets, and buying clubs servi-
cing urban consumers (Gaudreau 2019; Si et al. 2017; Zhang and Donaldson 2010). In
addition, almost half of peasant annual grain production provides ‘grain reserves’ (for
food security), suggesting a ‘rationality of peasant economy’ (Tsui et al. 2017, 328).
Whether this kind of rationality endures to retain a combination of extensive domestic
agriculture alongside agribusiness is an open question. It may well depend on whether
and to what extent a relatively independent business/agribusiness elite class is permitted
to form, and/or a continuation of the Chinese (revolutionary) tradition, or legacy, of orga-
nizing its modernization trajectory not simply to emulate the Western Industrial Revolu-
tion, but via ‘revival of features of the indigenous, rural-based, Industrious Revolution’
(Arrighi 2007, 374; cf Zhang 2019, 97–108).
Herein lie possible scenarios in food regime transitioning over the long-term, with
Chinese example perhaps, and under the circumstances of intensifying ecosystem
break-down. These might involve state by state revivals of domestic farm sectors oriented
Ploeg characterizes this as a movement towards ‘re-peasantization’ – essentially withdrawing from commercial inputs
60
and rebuilding ecological wealth on the farm (2018).

144 P. MCMICHAEL
towards organic or regenerative farming – whether via authoritarian governance or ‘inter-

national custodianship’ (as a benign evolution of multipolarity).61 To the extent that there
is now growing recognition of the logic of ecologically-based farming systems as the foun-
dation of domestic food security, population stability, and food-system health, there is
some correspondence with what Ploeg and Ye call the ‘Chinese agricultural paradigm’
(2016b) – an epistemic blindspot from the Western viewpoint.62 And to approach this
kind of paradigm – in farming diversity in landscape, culture and foodstuffs, where
multi-functional farming serves cuisines, environmental and employment purposes, with
some self-management by farmers and their communities – counter-hegemonic mobiliz-
ation is necessary to link rural producers and urban consumers in multi-scale alliances con-
testing class-based market rule63 in the food system, expressed in the ‘negative
consequences of the commodification of food production, distribution, and exchange at
the expense of livelihoods, health and the environment’ (Escher, Schneider, and Ye
2018, 107).64
These scenarios imagine potential reorganization of agricultures across the world in a
climate-challenged future. Ecological uncertainties are certainly more predictable than
current geo-political/economic power dynamics in a world ‘lacking a singular global
order, liberal otherwise’ (Acharya 2017, 12). Acharya’s claim that ‘the new globalization
is likely to be more economic and less political or ideological (especially compared to
the West’s promotion of democracy and human rights)’ (Acharya 2017, 14) squares with
the notion that a post-Western hegemonic ‘liberalism’ today is content to prioritize
markets. This doesn’t necessarily portend well for agroecology, even as the agri/business
world now recognizes ‘sustainability’ under threat from ecosystem degradation, and con-
sumers (if not governments).65
Nevertheless politically, as incubator of economic rights via interlocking financial and
trade relations, ‘multipolarity’ operates as a common denominator. And yet the East
Asian state-system dynamic predates that of the West, and even though the former was
eventually subordinated to the latter over the last two centuries, that incorporation has
61
Note here Arrighi’s reference to the formation of the G-20 in 1999, noting ‘a lack of awareness – in the South no less than
in the North – of the extent to which the monetarist counterrevolution of the early 1980s has backfired, creating con-
ditions more favorable than ever before for a new Bandung to bring into existence the “commonwealth of civilizations”
that [Adam] Smith envisioned long ago’ (2007, 384, emphasis added).
62
Echoes here of Arrighi’s observation that Chinese political culture embodies a Confucian (‘social harmony’) vision of an
‘industrious revolution’ rather than the labor-saving ‘industrial revolution’ of Western origins, including supporting a
‘natural’ rather than rapacious path of development (2007).
63
Resembling the current Polanyian anti-commodification alliances underlined by Harvey (2018), reflecting the contempor-
ary condition of financialized capitalism.
64
This lens complements Day and Schneider’s claim that a pro-peasant/cooperative politics has lost salience over the last
decade, given the precarity of the ‘peasantry’ in the PRC, suggesting that the potential political force today, most subject
to relations of inequality, is ‘an increasingly less demarcated surplus population that shifts between spheres for subsis-
tence in both countryside and city’ (2018, 1240; cf Yan and Chen 2015) – and this population is, in Escher et al.’s terms,
subject to ‘in-place urbanization and commercialization’ as a government strategy recognizing the limits of continuing
large-scale peasant migration to large cities (2018, 104). See, for example, Shepard (2015).
65
Recognition is one thing, the footprint of a ‘corporate-environmental’ food regime: Unilever, Pepsi, General Mills and
ConAgra have invested in niche market start-ups claiming green nutritional standards. But given market volatility via
current tcchnological, digital and financial relations, the recent IPES report, Too Big to Feed, observes, for example
that with the dominance of specific firms, with the ability to gain representation in industry associations and ‘exert down-
ward pressure on standards,’ ‘the process of continual buyouts may in itself undermine firms’ ability to meet their stated
commitments to sustainability … and consider more fundamental shifts in their business models.’ When Coca-Cola’s
acquisition of a 10% share in Keurig Green Mountain was followed by the coffee roaster’s acquisition in 2015 by
private equity firm JAB Holding Co., the company has ‘progressively reduced its spending on social responsibility pro-
grams’ (Mooney 2017, 59–61).
involved a reciprocal transformation of the Western system, resulting in ‘a hybrid for-

mation that has provided a particularly favorable environment for the East Asian economic
renaissance’ (Arrighi 2007, 313). Under these conditions, Arrighi asks:
Would it not be in China’s best interest, one, to let the United States exhaust itself militarily and
financially in an endless war on terror; two, to enrich itself by supplying goods and credit to
the increasingly incoherent US superpower; and three, use its expanding national market and
wealth to win over allies (including some US corporations) in the creation of a new world order
centered on China, but not necessarily dominated militarily by China? (Arrighi 2007, 312)
This is affirmation of Acharya’s claim, where ‘only a plurality of states acting in concert with
one another has any chance of developing a new world order’ (Arrighi, Ahmad, and Shih
1999, 269).
With respect to China’s renaissance, confusion remains regarding China’s apparent
pragmatism. For example, at the 2017 World Economic Forum, China was referred to as
the ‘present champion of economic globalization’ (cited in Zeng 2019, 578),66 and yet
China’s domestic debate regarding its grand strategy remains unresolved, as noted:
‘Mixed perceptions regarding China’s power enable Chinese diplomacy to sometimes
act as a great power or a developing country, so China is reluctant to assume the costs
of leadership in some agendas, notwithstanding its proactivity in the economic agenda’
(Trindade d’Ávila Magalhaes 2018, 1742). Insofar as the BRICS, including China, gained pro-
minence under the auspices of American hegemony and still rely on its aspects, ‘some
American observers believe the liberal order created under American hegemony will
endure’ (Beeson and Zeng 2018, 1965).
China, however, is not just any BRIC. It deploys the AIIB to develop support for the BRI,
‘emphasizing credit infrastructural projects [as] architect of the global economic order
without undermining, but rather by reinforcing and adjusting, some features of economic
globalization’ (Trindade d’Ávila Magalhaes 2018, 1741). One such adjustment is of course
China’s ability now to offer states investment and trade alternatives to US and European
partnerships, and of course financial loans. Even so there remains, at least now, a critical67
symbiosis between China and the US, embedded in the dependence of China on the US-
centered global neoliberal order. As Hung notes:
Since 2008, China has replaced Japan as the biggest foreign creditor to the United States, and
such financing enables the United States to continue living and fighting beyond its means.
This investment in U.S. Treasury bonds in turn facilitates the perpetuation of the global
dollar standard, which has been the single most important foundation of U.S global power
… In short the China boom relies on the free market instituted and warranted by the
United States. (2016, 174)
However, there are counter trends at work, but with a long tail. Arrighi has noted:
US hegemony, as opposed to sheer domination, in all likelihood has already ended; but, just as
the pound sterling continued to be used as an international currency three to four decades
after the end of British hegemony, so may the dollar. (2007, 384)
66
In relation to this, Tooze remarks that with the trumping of the US Republican Party, ‘it is an open question whether the
American political system will support even basic institutions of globalization, let alone any adventurous crisis fighting at
a national or global level’ (2018, 610).
67
In both senses of the term.
146 P. MCMICHAEL
At the interstate level China certainly challenges dollar hegemony:

Since most countries have substantial economic relations with China, some have been accept-
ing agreements to conduct trade using local currencies, diminishing the dollar as a medium of
exchange. By 2016, Beijing had already signed currency swap agreements with 30 countries.
(Trindade d’Ávila Magalhaes 2018, 1740)
The difference here is to replace the dollar as international currency requires a significant
change in China’s creditor relation with the US.
As a closing thought, it may well be that such uncertainty represents a conflation of the
short- and long-game dimensions of China’s current pragmatism, even as the games
combine temporally and spatially. It is too soon to tell by/in what ways/direction the inter-
national order may resolve, given US uncertainties, possible EU weakening, and Russian
strengthening in the West, as Chinese political-economic power consolidates. And a
similar unpredictability holds for the outcome of food regime transitioning, given the
uncertainty of inter-state relations, high-tech agriculture futures, and the possibilities of
a broad transitioning to restorative, resilient methods of food provisioning.
Acknowledgments
The author is very grateful for helpful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, in addition to
those of Mindi Schneider, Xu Huijiao, and Kiah Smith.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This research was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924243).
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Philip McMichael is professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. He is author of Food

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1984); and has edited Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, 2010),
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with the Civil Society Mechanism in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and has con-
sulted with UNRISD, the FAO, La Vía Campesina and the IPC for Food Sovereignty, and IPES-Food.

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Does China's ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new

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Does China’s ‘going out’ strategy preﬁgure a new food

ﬁnancial crisis, this includes ﬁnancial investment in agribusinesses as well as enabling

Food regime dynamics

Food regime rearticulation via ‘multipolarity’

Domestic context of China’s ‘going out’ strategy

currently. Liberalization of soy importing anticipated membership in the WTO in 2001,

China: rising hegemon?

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movement towards promoting restorative agriculture by reducing agro-inputs avoids debt

and rebuilding ecological wealth on the farm (2018).

towards organic or regenerative farming – whether via authoritarian governance or ‘inter-

involved a reciprocal transformation of the Western system, resulting in ‘a hybrid for-

At the interstate level China certainly challenges dollar hegemony:

Philip McMichael is professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. He is author of Food

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