“…Whilst official food safety governance in China has improved significantly in past decades, problems still remain (Liu, 2010;Lam, Remais, Fung, Xu & Sun, 2013;Holtkamp, Liu & McGuire, 2014;Unnevehr & Hoffmann, 2015). Suggested reasons for this include: unclear and overlapped responsibilities for different authorities (Liu, 2010;Holtkamp, Liu & McGuire, 2014;Verbruggen & Havinga, 2017); poor coordination and communication between departments and regions (Liu, 2010;Jia & Jukes, 2013), lax enforcement (Pei et al 2011;Yang, 2013), low penalties (Liang, 2011), inferior legal requirements (Jia & Jukes, 2013;Yang, 2013); numerous small-scale producers (Peng, Li, Xia, Qi & Li, 2015;Verbruggen & Havinga, 2017), and fragmented consumer groups (Zhou, 2017). In this nexus, third-party governance began to develop.…”