What is the significance of China for the future of the agri-food system? We have shown throughout the previous chapters that the agendas contesting the dominant agri-food system developed since the 1980s by social movements, both rural and urban, and successively incorporated into global policies and conventions, also embracing the academic and scientific world, have begun to invade the mainstream with the creation of sustainability departments, the adoption of socio-economic and environmental criteria of accountability, and adherence to climate targets. These agendas mainly addressed a global agri-food system dominated by ‘Northern’ players and markets (including Japan), where changes in consumption patterns in these countries (lower per capita consumption of staple foods, concerns with health and wellbeing, including animal welfare, and environmental preservation) could be, at least partially, accommodated in corporate quality product strategies.

China's explosive economic growth since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, with its population larger than that of the ‘Northern’ countries combined, only began to have an impact on the global agri-food system with China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and its definition of soy – a key component of animal feed for its rapidly expanding meat industry – as an industrial input whose supply could therefore depend on world markets. For China, from time immemorial and reinforced by memories of the famine of the 1960s, food security understood as self-sufficiency in staple foods has been seen as central to the legitimacy of the state. The definition of soy (and later corn) as industrial products alongside cotton, tobacco, cellulose, and other non-food raw materials, allowed the state to maintain the discourse of food security understood as self-sufficiency, but quickly transformed the dynamics of world trade in agricultural products, particularly the food chains linked to the transition to a diet of animal protein resulting from China's industrialization and urbanization.

Thus, from the 2000s onwards, the world agri-food system was once again dominated by the dynamics of commodity markets, now no longer meeting the demands of Europe and Japan as in the post-war period but those of China and other ‘emerging’ countries. In China, as an authoritarian country, civil society agendas hardly influence the policies or strategies of companies, many of which are state-owned in the agri-food sector.