The political economy of food and agriculture is experiencing a resurgence of interest among scholars of comparative politics. Building on foundational works such as Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) and Robert Bates’s Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981), recent studies have explored the political causes and consequences of government interventions in food markets, land redistribution programs, and rural–urban migration. The global food crises of 2007–8 and 2011–12, and their apparent association with the events of the Arab Spring, have prompted a proliferation of empirical studies investigating the relationship between rising food prices and political mobilization. Agricultural development and governments’ measures to shape the sector once again occupy a prominent place in debates on the political economy of democratization, conflict, and violence.

John K. Yasuda enters these debates by confronting us with dramatic challenges to states’ ability to make and enforce rules and to deliver services in the agricultural sector. In this enlightening study, he explains striking variation in governance and regulatory efficacy within the agricultural sector in China. The motivation is clear: Chinese food safety systems are in disarray, and in this century the country has witnessed a series of major scandals relating to agricultural production and food supplies. The dangerous chemical compound melamine was found in infant formula in 2008; cooking oil recovered from sewers was discovered to be recycled and resold in 2010; and thousands of diseased pork carcasses floated in main waterways in Shanghai in 2013, to cite but a few examples. Failures to ensure safe and reliable supplies of necessities such as food are major failures in governance, suggesting deeper weaknesses in state capacity and undermining the legitimacy of the government among the population. Why did such dramatic problems emerge in some parts of the Chinese food safety system and not others?

The argument advanced here revolves around the concept of scale: the size, limits, and relations of a governing system. Scale is not simply the population or geographic size of a system, but the “degree of zoom” (pp. 21–22) on which governance structures are located; for example, the village, municipality, region, or nation. Governance problems and regulatory politics are affected by scale problems in three ways. First they are influenced by the social construction of scale: there are no natural jurisdictional scales, but instead powerful interests negotiate and renegotiate the scale on which governance should occur. Second, governance systems typically operate at multiple scales simultaneously: actors engaged in the system at one level can be ignorant of developments at another or minimize the importance of developments on their own level for governance at other scales of governance. Finally, the transformation of governance systems from one scale to another is nonlinear: scaling these systems up or down generates technocratic problems and can spark political conflict. States can construct centralized and hierarchical, decentralized and collaborative, or multilevel governance structures to coordinate policies across scales, but when they fail to identify and address scale-related tensions, regulatory failure is the result.

Yasuda provides a brief history of the Chinese food production and food safety systems before showing that variation in scale politics affects governance strategies across the export, community-supported agriculture (CSA), and domestic food sectors, producing dramatically divergent food safety outcomes. The empirical analysis is primarily based on an impressive collection of data gathered in the field, consisting of government and private primary sources and the results of more than 200 interviews with food regulators, technical experts, corporate executives, and producers across different scales, products, and regions of China.

China’s export food sector has been growing rapidly since 2000 and is predominantly directed to Japan, the European Union, and the United States. Despite a small number of serious food safety scandals regarding products such as frozen dumplings and seafood, the safety record of the sector is good. Regulation of Chinese food exports is centralized, with authority primarily vested in a single agency, the General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine (AQSIQ); it is also hierarchical, because regulators and corporations enforce food safety standards in a top-down fashion. Crucially, AQSIQ delegates the day-to-day management of food safety to transnational firms and foreign government regulators. Importers from abroad do not trust Chinese producers and regulators and often directly control farms and food processing plants in China in order to maintain safety standards. AQSIQ allows foreign regulators from major importing nations to carry out checks and audits in China before food is exported.

China is home to a small but growing CSA sector, which will be familiar to any reader who has visited a farmer’s market or been a member of a local farm subscription service. The sector’s decentralized and collaborative governance framework based on mutual trust between consumers and producers allows for the effective regulation of food quality. Chinese CSA farmers have objected to centralized regulation, for example through state certification of organic production. Instead, they favor practices of what Yasuda calls “open surveillance” (pp. 81–82) and “green associations” (p. 90) in which consumers and other CSA farmers are invited to inspect production and even participate at important junctures in the agricultural season.

The Chinese domestic agricultural sector, by contrast, suffers from endemic food safety crises. Despite a series of government initiatives to address these problems and reassure the public, improvement has been modest. Attempts to create central coordinating bodies for all entities in food safety governance, food safety campaigns prompted by national scandals, and model food production zones have all been used by the Chinese government to address food safety but have been thwarted because they sparked contention among competing actors across different levels of scale. Large-scale, vertically integrated, modern “dragonhead” agro-processors are given significant government support, but their hierarchical control systems encounter problems in local production networks. Voluntary farmers’ cooperatives, which can more effectively maintain food safety standards, are not able to scale up because of difficulties meeting the expectations of the wholesale market. Furthermore, although the export sector is often touted as a model for domestic food safety regulation, scaling the model down is at best a long-term strategy due to the fragmentation of the domestic sector. And although the CSA sector has been successful to date in delivering safe food to customers, it does so only in small pockets and at prices several times that of the domestic commercial sector; further, its decentralized, collaborative governance framework cannot be scaled up to meet growing national food demands.

Yasuda thus leaves us with a sobering picture of the Chinese food regulation landscape. Foreign consumers in Japan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere can enjoy safe Chinese produce at low cost, and wealthy expats and urban Chinese can happily eat local and organic food in large cities. But the average Chinese consumer who lacks access to the CSA sector is subject to recurrent food safety scandals as sobering as that involving fake milk in baby formula, which led to cases of infant malnutrition. Yasuda attempts to end the book on an optimistic note, suggesting that the EU’s multilevel regulatory system could be a useful approach to solving China’s food governance problems. But he concedes that this is a distant possibility, implying a complete reconfiguration of China’s fragmented, unitary governance framework. Although communist states such as East Germany and Poland carried out comprehensive administrative reforms in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, these kinds of regulatory breaks are rare.

Indeed, Yasuda convincingly argues that “the ‘scale problem’ has been at the heart of China’s governance problem for centuries” (p. 194). This resonates with Theda Skocpol’s argument in States and Social Revolutions (1979, pp. 69–80) that the weakness of the Chinese imperial state was in part caused by what would here be termed “scale politics”: a gradual erosion of the power of the imperial government and an increase in the authority of local magistrates that led to higher taxes on the peasantry and to rural rebellion.

On Feeding the Masses offers a novel and revealing perspective on governance and state capacity in the food sector that sits somewhat uneasily with existing work on the political economy of agriculture, democratization, and conflict. Yasuda’s work suggests that consumer grievances might revolve not only around the prices that they pay for food but also around its safety. The reader is left wondering how Chinese food consumers can voice their grievances against poor food safety to their government and whether the regime would view such contention as a legitimate or threatening form of political action. Similarly, the bundle of producer prices, input subsidies, direct payments, and land titling and transfers that scholars have highlighted in previous studies of agrarian politics apparently also needs to be amended to include food safety measures. But are these different forms of government intervention in the agricultural sector discrete, or are they linked as complements or substitutes? Finally, and perhaps more consequentially, many accounts attribute a high degree of intentionality to developing and democratizing states’ policies in the agricultural sector that is predicated on significant infrastructural power. However, here we learn that China—a state that must be regarded as formidably strong across a host of other areas of governance—cannot effectively enforce basic food safety standards within its own borders. It remains to be seen how theories that draw direct lines from governments’ goals to policy outcomes can give more consideration to developing states’ capacity to enforce those policies on the ground.