Food security and power struggle in the Chinese ‘battle of the beans’

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mid-2000s foreign headway over China’s soybean downstream complex, known as the battle of the beans, reinforced an uncritical nationalist discourse over food security based on a Sino-foreign dichotomy. This article demonstrates through an empirically rich analysis based on four crucial Chinese SOEs that such a discourse ignores diverging capitalist accumulation strategies as two SOEs (COFCO and Chinatex) took advantage of global soybean price fluctuations to grow in association with foreign agribusiness. Instead, I suggest that food security reflects dynamic state-capital relations in China evidenced by the political reaction of two state-owned competitors (Jiusan and Sinograin), endorsing its nationalist appeal.