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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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s chief source of grain.<\/p>\n
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Illustration by Dionne Gain<\/span>Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n While the other leaders discussed the need to maintain peace, accelerate economic growth, and pressure the military junta in Myanmar, China\u2019s leader offered words of encouragement to the flood-affected north-eastern region but also an instruction: \u201cEnsuring the country\u2019s food security should be placed as the top priority,\u201d the president told assembled officials. He ordered them to \u201cincrease 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\u201d.<\/p>\n What does he mean, \u201cextreme circumstances\u201d? Xi has elevated the phrase in official discourse, beginning with an important May 30 address to China\u2019s National Security Commission, his first after cementing a historic third term for himself.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d And he\u2019s not talking about the weather. A prominent scholar of foreign policy in Beijing, Jin Canrong, says that Xi\u2019s use of the word \u201cextreme\u201d was a clear warning of \u201cthe danger of war\u201d.<\/p>\n Xi Jinping, China\u2019s president, attended the BRICS summit in South Africa but not the G20 meeting in India.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Bloomberg<\/cite><\/p>\n American sinologist Bill Bishop commented in his Sinocism<\/em> newsletter last week: \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n So this is the reason Xi is pushing food security. An agricultural economics professor at Germany\u2019s University of G\u00f6ttingen, Xiaohua Yu, spelt it out for the Financial Times<\/em>: \u201cChina is preparing for the worst-case scenario in which it couldn\u2019t buy any food from abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is a problem. Because China is a major importer of food. \u201cAlthough China\u2019s grain self-sufficiency ratio has always remained above 97 per cent, its imports of oilseeds, soybeans, sugar, meat and dairy products have been growing,\u201d explains Liu Chin-tsai of Taiwan\u2019s Fo Guang University in a piece in ThinkChina<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cWithin a span of 20 years, the country\u2019s food self-sufficiency ratio has fallen from around 100 per cent in 2000 to 76 per cent in 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n A peach stall at a Beijing market on Thursday. China\u2019s food security is on Xi Jinping\u2019s mind. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Bloomberg<\/cite><\/p>\n So Xi is working to reverse the trend. \u201cChina must be able to feed its people on our own. We will fall under others\u2019 control if we can\u2019t hold our rice bowl steady.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When the Financial Times<\/em> 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: \u201cCrops were often sparsely scattered and weeds were everywhere,\u201d wrote Sun Yu. The reporter quoted an unnamed local official as saying: \u201cWe reclaim these plots to send a signal that we care about food security. Output is not a priority.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, it\u2019s signalling political loyalty to the leader rather than actually improving China\u2019s food self-sufficiency. This is reminiscent of Mao\u2019s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Designed as an epochal advance in China\u2019s agriculture, frenzied demonstrations of political loyalty to Mao produced shocking famine instead.<\/p>\n U.S. President Joe Biden and Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the G20 summit in New Delhi on Saturday.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n The lesson of history is that the only true source of food security is not self-sufficiency but open international trade. Compare North Korea\u2019s experience with South Korea\u2019s. The North\u2019s Kim dynasty doggedly pursues a policy of juche<\/em>, or self-reliance. Result? Recurring famines. The South trades with the world and has more than it could possibly want.<\/p>\n Xi is overlooking this hard-won lesson from China\u2019s own experience. It only makes sense if, indeed, we are about to experience an \u201cextreme scenario\u201d. Australian analyst Ross Babbage of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington explains why: \u201cThe 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,\u201d he writes in his new book, The Next Major War: Can the US and its Allies Win Against China?<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s the first time the US has used this method to arm Taiwan.<\/p>\n The reason? Urgency. The customary method requires protracted Congressional procedures and can take years. \u201cWithout question, bolstering Taiwan\u2019s self-defences is an urgent task and an essential feature of deterrence,\u201d a senior Pentagon official, Ely Ratner, has said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As Xi was finishing his tour of rice paddies and preparing for \u201cextreme scenarios\u201d, the chair of the East Asia Summit brought proceedings to a close with a plea to all the leaders present to ease regional tensions: \u201cI can guarantee you,\u201d said Indonesian President Joko Widodo, \u201cthat if we are not able to manage differences, we will be destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither Xi Jinping nor Joe Biden was there to hear him.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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