Tropes of Change

In the post-economic reform era the Chinese society has witnessed the emergence of newly rich class enjoying the benefits of economic prosperity. There is growing awareness over delivery of services, quality of products, protection of legal rights, i.e., based on the weiquan movement of early 2000s, as argued by Jonathan Benney (2013) in his celebrated work Defending Rights in Contemporary China. In recent years China has taken a number of effective measures to strengthen the supervision of food quality and safety measures. However, the greatest obstacle to China’s food quality safety management is that China’s ‘farm to fork’ food supply chain has too many stages, the members on the supply chain have not formed a stable and consistent relation and lack a sense of social responsibility. In their overview the authors point to the interesting shift in China’s food safety issues gradually expanding from being a ‘quantity to quality security’ concern (p. 4). In addition, the frequent incidents of low quality food products points to the serious problem of the illegal use of food additives, agrochemical residues, and polluted soils and waters in China (p. 12).