FPI / August 7, 2025
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping knows that if he is to wage war he must be able to feed the country’s 1.4 billion people.
With that in mind, China’s food security law, which went into effect in 2024, aims for “absolute self-sufficiency.”
“Xi has been urging the Chinese to leave cities and return to farming, and, in a replay of the Cultural Revolution, he is sending college graduates to work the soil,” Gordon C. Chang noted in a July 30 analysis for Gatestone Institute.
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“China, which scores high in country rankings of self-sufficiency, is, in reality, not food secure,” Chang wrote. “It is, after all, the world’s largest food importer. Last year, it imported 157 million metric tons of grains and soybeans. The country buys about 80% of its soybean requirements from outside its borders.”
Xi is emulating Mao Zedong, who infamously demanded that China’s peasants “grow grain everywhere.”
And the Xi regime is serious about storing its crops. In March, the central government increased its agriculture stockpiling budget to $18.1 billion for grains and edible oils, a 6.1% increase over last year.
“The increased measures to safeguard food security underscore Beijing’s efforts to prepare for a long trade war with the U.S. and increasingly complex geopolitical challenges,” writes Reuters, paraphrasing Genevieve Donnellon-May of Oxford Global Security.
Chang noted: “That is a relatively benign explanation for something ominous. Xi Jinping cannot stop talking about fighting, and has been readying both the military and civilian society for conflict. Xi, in short, appears to be stockpiling grain in preparation for war.”
There is one more element to Xi’s food plan: Attack American agriculture.
In June, three Chinese nationals were charged with attempting to smuggle biological agents into the United States.
One of them, Yunqing Jian was arrested for trying to bring in Fusarium graminearum, a “potential agroterrorism weapon” that causes “head blight.” This fungal disease hits wheat, barley, maize and rice, and “is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.” In humans and livestock, head blight causes vomiting, liver damage and reproductive defects.
The actions of these Chinese researchers, according to U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon, Jr., represented “the gravest national security concerns.”
“Fusarium graminearum is a common pathogen affecting crops in China, and numerous Chinese research institutes, including the Institute of Rice Biology at Zhejiang University, have been actively studying it,” Sean Lin, a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told Chang.
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