Abstract
The complexities of the Chinese party-state system and their consequences on China’s regulatory effectiveness are not new research subjects. Working from a fresh, illuminating perspective of scale politics in the masterly book On Feeding the Masses, John K. Yasuda delivers a timely, meticulous diagnosis of the pathologies of China’s authoritarian governance giant rooted in its nested, multi-scaler state system. Drawing on more than 200 interviews conducted in eight provinces and municipalities and voluminous archival data in China’s food sector, Yasuda carefully analyzes organizational disintegration and interest conflicts of different scales and the resulting poor food safety governance in today’s China. Overall, On Feeding the Masses reveals how the Chinese state is deeply trapped in its scale politics and why its governance quality suffers from a dilemma bigger than those facing other large-size, multi-level governance systems, for example, the United States, European Union (EU), and India.
Admirably, Yasuda seeks to elude the conventional debates on the relative merits and weaknesses of centralized and decentralized controls in assessing governance issues—both of which seem to offer “single scale” solutions (p. 37) that concern Yasuda. Instead, On Feeding the Masses aims to establish a new theoretical approach to studying China’s governance issues that involve regulators, political actors, and other social agents, such as producers, market participants, consumers, and community organizations across different scales. Throughout the book, the core theoretical concept—“scale”—serves as a powerful tool that allows Yasuda to identify important institutional and political dynamics contributing to China’s regulatory failure to govern food safety nationwide.
Chapter 2 offers a fascinatingly written theoretical discussion regarding various scale-related dynamics, which maps out a guiding conceptual framework and well prepares the reader before they travel through the book’s proceeding empirical chapters. It is thus worth offering some details about this chapter. Briefly summarized, Yasuda’s first important theoretical argument is that the scale of governance, as an outcome of a highly contentious political process, is “socially constructed” (p. 22). A lack of consensus on the scale of governance among the actors existing throughout a multi-level system can lead to inefficient resource allocation and fragmented policies and cause system-wide coordination problems. Second, a nested, multi-scaler governance system is faced with severe challenges from “scale externalities” (p. 25). That is, actors tend to focus mainly on the issues at their own scale and disregard or minimize the spill-over effects at other scales, which aggravates the overall governance system’s disintegration and incoordination. Furthermore, the transition between small-scale systems and larger ones, that is, scaling up (e.g. a process where local products are circulated on a national or global scale) or scaling down (e.g. a process in which international practices or national laws are transmitted at regional scales), is “nonlinear” (p. 26). Such scaling transitions demand the creation of political coalitions across different scales and policy coordination and the enforcement of standard institutions, generalizable knowledge, and shared management practices. Together, these scale dynamics dictate the governance challenges such as those found in China’s food regulation. They add new insights for understanding China’s regulatory crisis to what the frequently debated accounts concentrating primarily on the more linear central-local political dynamics have offered.
Yasuda amasses an incredible amount of evidence in support of this framework of scale politics. One impressive feature of the book’s empirical chapters (Chapters 3–9) lies in a well-done comparative analysis of three different subsectors in China’s food governance system—the elite export sector, the newly arising community-supported agriculture (CSA) sector, and the vast domestic sector. The reader who loathes top-down hierarchies may feel surprised by how a centralized, hierarchical governance model employed in the export sector has successfully enabled China to regulate food security for a small set of regulators and well-selected producers. The central state’s heavy hand and direct control have helped enforce a consensus on the scale of governance and policy coordination among actors across all scales and resolve the problems associated with scale externalities. The CSA sector, recently originating in large metropolitan areas and mainly serving upper-middle-class, urban consumers, offers a contrasting governance model that also effectively mitigates scale politics. Unlike the elite export sector, the CSA is governed by a decentralized, collaborative network system where local producers, local governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and consumers negotiate food safety processes and production protocols. Building on social trust and strong local norms shared by actors across multiple scales, this bottom-up, self-regulating approach facilitates a unified scale of governance, shared local knowledge, standards, and management practices. Again, anybody debating on the relative strengths or weaknesses of centralized or decentralized governance frameworks would be warned by Yasuda’s strong message. Here, what matters most is a consensus on the scale of governance and institutional coordination across different scales, regardless of the governance model as a top-down or bottom-up one.
With this compelling idea in mind, the reader may find it quite reasonable to understand why China’s cumbersome domestic food sector has considerably failed and why neither scaling up the practices of the small CSA sector nor scaling down the protocols of the elite export sector can get the domestic food sector out of the trap of scale politics. Yasuda painstakingly examines the food safety governance system in the domestic sector, as characterized by “a conflicting mix of centralizing and decentralizing mechanisms” (p. 95). For example, the central state has established a centralized coordinating agency but kept a fragmented regulatory system untouched at other scales. With its good intention to show a solid commitment to strengthening confidence in food safety, the central state has frequently launched food safety campaigns and initiated “model production zones” in selected localities. However, these state-led initiatives have failed to develop institutional measures or facilitate concerted policy and actions across multiple scale dimensions. The collaborative regulatory efforts between the state and industry have been a failure too. The small framing networks, regional wholesale systems, and large-scale processors have struggled to respond to developments at higher scales or chosen to ignore what has occurred at other scales. As Yasuda insightfully points out, fierce scale politics have paralyzed China’s food safety governance system—“a fragmented, unitary system” (p. 180) that lacks clear templates for both the central authority and local regulators and suffers from the constant flux of regulatory authority between central and local scales.
Even scholars who might not be entirely convinced by Yasuda’s theory of scale politics would find many of his arguments inspiring. When the book places China in a comparative framework where the United States, EU, and India, each having a large-size, multi-scaler governance system, are analyzed as more effective referential cases, Yasuda’s theory is more sound. How and why China’s scale politics haunt its governance system presented vigorously by Yasuda, like it or not, can hardly be forgotten. On Feeding the Masses is an excellent book, advancing the scholarly discourse on China’s political economy in general. As China is in its fast transition to a risk society, Chinese citizens have joined the global civil society and become more concerned about their overall well-being in addition to the country’s economic prosperity. It is critical to examine whether and to what degree China’s authoritarian regime can mobilize its unyielding governance giant and manage a wide range of risk-related issues (e.g., environmental pollution, public health crisis, etc.), in addition to the problems threatening food safety studied in this book. Scholars and practitioners interested in governance policies and risk management should welcome and appreciate Yasuda’s On Feeding the Masses.