As the era of globalization ends, China has become obsessed with food security

N.S. Lyons, Why is China so Obsessed With Food Security? The Upheaval, September 1, 2022:

The reality, which China’s leaders appear to have grasped at least since the outbreak of the U.S.-China trade war in 2018, is that the golden age of globalization is now over. That era, defined by a truly global marketplace, and by globe-spanning supply chains, was built on the transient peace of a global order produced by hegemonic post-Cold War American power. Now that global order is falling apart, and the world and its once-global market is fragmenting into blocs and spheres of influence. Despite the ambitious efforts of the globalists, it is nationalism and regionalism that is everywhere succeeding in reasserting itself. In this environment, complex, world-spanning supply chains may soon no longer be sustainable given the growing (and already demonstrable) risks involved. We instead seem to be moving quickly toward a future of regional and separated supply chains, shorter shipping routes, built-in redundancies, and greater national protectionism and self-sufficiency. Necessary as this may be, it will have serious consequences for a world economy based on shipping everything from one corner of the planet to another.

In 2017, Xi Jinping traveled to Davos and delivered a speech portraying China as the world’s new champion of globalization. This wasn’t a completely implausible claim. No country in the world has benefitted more from globalization than China. Globalization is the machine that allowed it to implement the most rapid and wide-scale industrialization in history, lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, and become the near-superpower it is today. But, since 2020, Xi appears to have largely given up on trying to save globalization and accepted the inevitable – the foreseeable future will be defined by a global struggle between China and the United States, along with the actions of every enterprising opportunist on the margins. China’s new overriding goal is therefore to achieve “self-reliance” amid what Xi has described repeatedly as a period of “changes in the world unseen in a century.”

As Xi put it in an article published in May, “the international situation is complicated and severe,” and in this context, “In the future, the demand for food will continue to increase, and the balance between supply and demand will become tighter and tighter.” Which is why, as he put it in his speech in March, China “cannot rely solely on the international market to solve” its food security problem anymore.

There's more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.