The Political Economy of the Chinese Food Traceability System: Cultivating Trust, or Constructing a Technocratic Certainty Machine?

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that food contamination makes nearly 10% of the world population sick in 2020. Persistent food fraud also costs the global food industry billions of dollars every year (Reuters, 2020, para. 61). More than 50,000 Chinese citizens got sick or died from numerous recent food safety incidents, such as rotting "pigwash" food in the high school canteen, stinking pork turned into packaged oil, and deceased pigs with disease re-entering the market and ending up on the Chinese citizen's table (BBC, 2019;Wang et al., 2019). Not only have these incidents stirred up public rage and outcry, but they have also undermined the public's trust in the food safety system (Kendall et al., 2019). Furthermore, in contrast to local supply, the global food supply chain no longer presents as stable and reliable due to economic, environmental, and political disruptions brought about by the e-commerce law (2019), the Covid-19 pandemic, African swine fever, and the ongoing trade war between the US and China. The sheer scale and rapid spread of Internet food-related rumours have also spurred the Chinese government to commit to boosting local food production, bolstering public trust, and collaborating with "dragon head" technology corporations to build a large-scale, highly automated, market-driven, smart and technocratic food traceability system. Understanding the food traceability system also has much broader ramifications because it has become the prototype for how other public policy issues are approached. For example, food traceability apps were quickly repurposed and adopted by the Chinese government as the basis of a mandatory COVID-19 health app distributed to all Chinese citizens. The upshot of these observations is that the rapid development of the food traceability system in China over the last decade or so is a microcosm for understanding much broader processes of social, economic, political and technological development in China.