Among the many sectors shaping China’s economic strategy toward the United States and other Western countries, few are as important as food and agriculture. As one of the world’s largest importers of agricultural products, China has frequently used access to its vast markets as leverage in trade negotiations. In 2025, for instance, it suspended soybean imports from the United States for several months—a major setback for U.S. farmers—in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. As part of Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s fragile trade truce in May of this year, China agreed to purchase at least $17 billion per year of U.S. agricultural goods for the remainder of Trump’s presidential term, and it restored market access for U.S. beef and poultry imports from certain U.S. states.

The United States is not China’s only target for this strategy. In 2026, China similarly stopped importing a range of Canadian agricultural products in retaliation for Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. And in other cases, Beijing has gone further, wielding its market for food products as a weapon in political disputes. When, in late 2025, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi signaled the potential for Japan to intervene in a conflict over Taiwan, China suspended more than $86 million in purchases of Japanese seafood and sake. 

Yet Beijing’s enormous market for agricultural products also reflects a precarious reality: China is heavily dependent on imports to meet domestic demand. As the Chinese peoples’ incomes have grown, so has their appetite for meat, dairy, and other goods. Despite major efforts to shore up domestic food production, China has grown more reliant on imports—for animal products as well as feed to produce them. China’s food imports reached $215 billion in 2023, the world’s largest at the time, with nearly 85 percent of its soybeans, more than 67 percent of its oil crops and nuts, and nearly 25 percent of its beef coming from foreign suppliers. China’s food-import bill has receded slightly in recent years but has remained above $200 billion, a figure greater than the total imports of most countries.

Given China’s shrinking labor force and the effects of overproduction and climate change on its arable land, Beijing is likely to remain reliant on foreign food products in the coming years. While its strategy of leveraging its import market for geopolitical influence has served it well so far, Beijing also seems to recognize its great vulnerability. As a result, it is taking steps to become a leader in agricultural biotechnology, such that China could ultimately wield not only its vast food import markets but also select agricultural exports for political gain.

The threat of food insecurity looms large in the minds of Chinese Communist Party officials. Uprisings over food have contributed to political crises throughout China’s history. As many as 25 million Chinese starved in the famine of 1906–7, an event that accelerated efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty. Even worse was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–61, which was brought on by severe mismanagement amid Mao Zedong’s revolutionary zeal. It claimed the lives of roughly 30 million people and is widely considered the deadliest famine in history. In the late 1980s, surging food prices inflamed the popular discontent behind the Tiananmen Square protests, which resulted in the massacre of protesters in 1989.

Given this dark history, Beijing has long sought to shore up the national food supply, and in recent decades has made enormous gains in its ability to feed its population. Economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s ushered in market-oriented policies that ended the food rationing system and provided new incentives to increase agricultural yields. The transition from collective production to a “household responsibility system” brought about rapid marketization and shifting dietary patterns, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 flung open the doors of........

© Foreign Affairs