Defying Slow Death: Unsafe Food, Governance and Quiet Social Movements in China

• In Event: 20481 - Section on Sociology of Development Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Mobilization and Social Movements

Abstract

As a developmental state, China has undergone dramatic neoliberal transformation in the past four decades. It effectively overcame hunger and achieved food security, agricultural modernization and urbanization. However, this developmental transformation came with massive environmental, social and public health costs. The contamination of land, water, and air has become an environmental catastrophe. Moreover, China now faces some of the largest epidemics of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer the world has ever seen, compounded by increasingly deadly outbreaks of pandemic diseases like SARS and COVID-19. These problems of public health, environment, and development become entangled in an intractable food safety crisis, which exploded in 2008 when hundreds of babies died due to contaminated infant formula. This incident galvanized the Chinese state and society and became a turning point in food safety governance and social mobilization. Stricter laws were written, new regulatory institutions were created, and health-conscious consumers and NGOs created “alternative food networks” (AFNs) to procure healthier food for themselves. Yet food safety incidents continue to generate scandals year after year. Trust in food safety, governance, markets, and science erode. And people continue to die slowly from unsafe food, chronic illnesses, and environmental contamination. Drawing upon interviews with 212 individuals, oral histories, government document analysis, and participant observation, this paper uses political-ecological and political-economic analysis that situates contemporary case studies in the past century and global context. Research was conducted mainly from 2013 to 2017, with follow-up investigations into the present. The paper addresses what causes this food safety crisis, why does it persist, and what are the roles of the state, science, and civil society in this process.

Author

• Li Zhang, Amherst College