China is a very dangerous paper dragon. Yes, that’s a weird oxymoron, but it’s true. On the one hand, it’s a heavily populated country with a huge army, modern weapons, a hold on the world’s manufacturing, and plans for world domination. That’s the dangerous dragon part. On the other hand, the nature of communism means that its culture is damaged, and its people labor under the jackboot of central planning. These factors create corruption and inefficiency at every level, whether in its housing, manufacturing, or agriculture sectors. In response to this last problem, the CCP has announced even more central planning to boost food production.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s grand plan in the late 1950s to transform China from a semi-feudal (or very feudal) agrarian society into a modern industrial society that was completely self-sustaining. To that end, he used government force to implement a grand central plan that saw family farms become vast cooperatives answerable to the government for their output while shifting millions of rural people into the manufacturing sector.

Image: A propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward. Public domain in China.

When it came to farming, as happened with the Soviet Union’s grand ideas in Ukraine almost two decades before, Mao was convinced that he knew better than the farmers how to produce crops. Everything he knew was wrong, though, and crop yields dropped with once lush farmland destroyed for decades. What food the cooperatives managed to produce often rotted in the fields because one-time farm workers had been shuffled into factories. Meanwhile, the same ignorance prevailed in the factories, which turned out substandard everything, a condition that continues in China’s factories today.

Today’s shoddiness isn’t because the Chinese are still ignorant about manufacturing techniques, of course. It’s because the Chinese people learned that substandard was the standard. That’s what communism, a form of state slavery, does when people work, not for their own profit, but because they’re forced to do so at the point of a spear or gun.

In the same way, black slaves in America had only one form of protest against slave masters:  When they could get away with it, they did poor-quality work for the person who stole their labor and skills. The slaveholders castigated them as lazy, but it was, in fact, a powerful form of protest.

The reality, as one socialist experiment after another has shown, is that command and control economies don’t work. Indeed, Ben Shapiro makes the same point about Rome’s collapse, which was due not just to currency debasement, excessive government spending, open borders, and cultural decadence but also because of a command and control economy.

What’s happened in China, a vast country with huge natural and human resources that should easily be able to provide for itself, is that it’s not able to feed itself. And that doesn’t just mean it lacks the ability to produce luxury foods that need to come from overseas. We’re talking basic crop production. That may help explain China’s purchasing to much land and food manufacturing in America.

Another thing that China is doing is trying to coopt the UN’s resources to harm neighboring countries and boost its agricultural output. This includes allowing itself to use the type of chemicals that kill the environment and means that one should be very careful about buying foods made in China:

And of course, there’s that other logical response for a totalitarian country is for the government to announce how farming will be conducted in the future:

China’s first food security law aimed at achieving “absolute self-sufficiency” in staple grains came into effect on Saturday, reinforcing efforts by the world’s biggest agriculture importer to lower its reliance on overseas purchases.

The law provides a legal framework for existing guidance by the Communist Party for local governments and the agricultural industry to raise food production, although it did not give details on how the law will be implemented.

It includes protection of farmland from being converted to other uses, protecting germplasm resources and preventing wastage.

Passed just six months after its first reading, the rush to adopt the food security law reflects China’s urgency to resolve issues that have curbed production, such as a lack of arable land and water resources, labor shortages and a lack of agriculture technology.

China is a very troubled country but that means it’s a very dangerous country. It’s too big to just fade away. Thus, given the problems with its Belt and Road initiatives (the things it builds overseas are falling apart), its real estate sector, its collapsing demographics, and its military, the fact that China is worried about feeding itself shouldn’t make us smug. It should make us very worried. A hungry China will expand into the South China Sea, including Taiwan, to prop up its failing internal resources.