Xi’s increasingly ‘extreme’ rhetoric points to only one thing

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We know that Xi Jinping excited a lot of commentary last week when he decided to cancel on the big summits of the Indo-Pacific, but what did he do instead?

On Thursday, when the other leaders sat down at the East Asia Summit in Jakarta, Xi was inspecting rice paddies in Heilongjiang province in north-eastern China, the country’s chief source of grain.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

While the other leaders discussed the need to maintain peace, accelerate economic growth, and pressure the military junta in Myanmar, China’s leader offered words of encouragement to the flood-affected north-eastern region but also an instruction: “Ensuring the country’s food security should be placed as the top priority,” the president told assembled officials. He ordered them to “increase production capacity to ensure that the grain production and supply are enough to meet usual demand, and can be used as a reliable supply source during extreme circumstances”.

What does he mean, “extreme circumstances”? Xi has elevated the phrase in official discourse, beginning with an important May 30 address to China’s National Security Commission, his first after cementing a historic third term for himself.

“We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios, and be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms.” And he’s not talking about the weather. A prominent scholar of foreign policy in Beijing, Jin Canrong, says that Xi’s use of the word “extreme” was a clear warning of “the danger of war”.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, attended the BRICS summit in South Africa but not the G20 meeting in India.Credit: Bloomberg

American sinologist Bill Bishop commented in his Sinocism newsletter last week: “There is debate in some circles about whether or not the country is preparing for war, likely with the US. I think it is increasingly obvious that Xi is hardening the country in every way possible to prepare for that extreme case contingency, even if it is not his preferred outcome.”

So this is the reason Xi is pushing food security. An agricultural economics professor at Germany’s University of Göttingen, Xiaohua Yu, spelt it out for the Financial Times: “China is preparing for the worst-case scenario in which it couldn’t buy any food from abroad.”

Which is a problem. Because China is a major importer of food. “Although China’s grain self-sufficiency ratio has always remained above 97 per cent, its imports of oilseeds, soybeans, sugar, meat and dairy products have been growing,” explains Liu Chin-tsai of Taiwan’s Fo Guang University in a piece in ThinkChina.

“Within a span of 20 years, the country’s food self-sufficiency ratio has fallen from around 100 per cent in 2000 to 76 per cent in 2020.”

A peach stall at a Beijing market on Thursday. China’s food security is on Xi Jinping’s mind. Credit: Bloomberg

So Xi is working to reverse the trend. “China must be able to feed its people on our own. We will fall under others’ control if we can’t hold our rice bowl steady.”

In the process, officials dictate that land must be converted from other uses into farmland. Forests but also shops, factory sites, parks and apartment blocks are being bulldozed to make new farms for growing soybeans and corn.

When the Financial Times sent a reporter to look at more than a dozen fields of such newly converted farmland in the south-western Chinese city of Chengdu last month, the results were not impressive: “Crops were often sparsely scattered and weeds were everywhere,” wrote Sun Yu. The reporter quoted an unnamed local official as saying: “We reclaim these plots to send a signal that we care about food security. Output is not a priority.”

In other words, it’s signalling political loyalty to the leader rather than actually improving China’s food self-sufficiency. This is reminiscent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Designed as an epochal advance in China’s agriculture, frenzied demonstrations of political loyalty to Mao produced shocking famine instead.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the G20 summit in New Delhi on Saturday.Credit: AP

The lesson of history is that the only true source of food security is not self-sufficiency but open international trade. Compare North Korea’s experience with South Korea’s. The North’s Kim dynasty doggedly pursues a policy of juche, or self-reliance. Result? Recurring famines. The South trades with the world and has more than it could possibly want.

Xi is overlooking this hard-won lesson from China’s own experience. It only makes sense if, indeed, we are about to experience an “extreme scenario”. Australian analyst Ross Babbage of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington explains why: “The US and its allies are in a strong position to dominate the rimlands of the Eurasian landmass and, in any serious war, interdict most shipping and many aviation movements to and from China,” he writes in his new book, The Next Major War: Can the US and its Allies Win Against China?

Beijing is not the only capital accelerating preparations for conflict. After decades of selling weapons to Taiwan, the US most recently has started to just hand them over.

In July, the Biden administration said that it was sending military hardware valued at up to $US345 million to Taiwan directly from Pentagon stores under something called the Presidential Drawdown Authority. It’s the first time the US has used this method to arm Taiwan.

The reason? Urgency. The customary method requires protracted Congressional procedures and can take years. “Without question, bolstering Taiwan’s self-defences is an urgent task and an essential feature of deterrence,” a senior Pentagon official, Ely Ratner, has said.

Last year, the outgoing chief of US Indo-Pacific Command, Philip Davidson, said war over Taiwan was possible by 2027. Xi Jinping reportedly has told his own military leadership to be ready for combat by the same deadline.

As Xi was finishing his tour of rice paddies and preparing for “extreme scenarios”, the chair of the East Asia Summit brought proceedings to a close with a plea to all the leaders present to ease regional tensions: “I can guarantee you,” said Indonesian President Joko Widodo, “that if we are not able to manage differences, we will be destroyed.”

Neither Xi Jinping nor Joe Biden was there to hear him.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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