Why Food Safety Fails in China: The Politics of Scale

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"The apparent success of the 'Big Thirteenth' Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 1987 doesn't explain the mystery of how a billion Chinese live together under the dictatorship of a party whose forty-six million members equal the population of one of our European allies. How can so big a polity cohere?"

John K. Fairbank, "The Chinese behemoth," New York Review of Books, 1988

For most students of governance, the scale of the "Chinese behemoth," whilst hovering in the background of our analyses, rarely serves as our primary focus. This article examines China's food safety failures in order to cast light on how China's scale has deeply affected its regulatory politics. With over 240 million farmers, 1 million processors, and many millions of distributors, China has struggled to develop a national food safety regime that can effectively integrate diverse interests within a common framework of governance. China's massive production system, unwieldy bureaucracy and geographic size present regulators with unique policy issues of cost, design and applicability.

Interviews with food safety experts reveal a system in disarray despite concerted state efforts: microbiological hazards remain unchecked, supply-chain management is weak and policies are uncoordinated. The number of adulterated food complaints recorded by the China Consumer Association in 2011 had increased by 22 per cent since 2010.¹While Chinese statistics artificially deflate the number of poisonings and inflate food inspection pass rates, a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that, in 2012, 41 per cent of respondents identified food safety as a "serious problem," which was up from only 12 per cent in 2008.²Food safety now represents one of the top three governance concerns of China's population, along with inequality and corruption. Why is China's food safety system failing and becoming worse?

In this article, I argue that China's food failures must also be understood as a result of the scale of its food safety system and its ensuing scale politics. In regulatory governance, "managing scale" describes a process of developing a common regulatory framework that effectively integrates numerous actors across multiple levels of governance in highly heterogeneous circumstances. In large-scale systems, regulators must harmonize local best practices with transnational standards, coordinate actors...