The regulatory regime of food safety in China: a systemic not accidental failure

Abstract

During the previous decade from 2004 to 2013, people in China witnessed both skyrocketing number of food safety crises, and aggregating regulatory initiatives attempting to control these crises. Indeed, numerous food safety crises promoted intuitional reforms and innovations, together with adoption of complex rules and legislation within the regulatory regime of food safety, multiple cycles of “crisis—regulatory efforts”, however, still indicated the systematic incapacity of the food safety regime to tackle with crises. Therefore, the fundamental research problem that structures this thesis is to understand the causes of this systemic failure in the “social foundations” for the regulatory governance of food safety. The thesis locates the proximate causes of the regulatory failure of food safety regime in China in the regulatory segmentation of the regime. This thesis is supported by the differential impacts of the food regulatory regime on various consumer groups. Through compartmentalised regulatory arrangements, the regulatory segmentation reduced the political incentives for enforcement and compliance of food safety regulations, directly leading to unbalanced distribution of regulatory incentives and resource in which the benefits of the food safety regime were felt mostly by well-connected and affluent consumer groups. Conversely it impacted adversely on poorer and vulnerable consumer groups. Such uneven food safety level has further been intensified through a compound of emerging factors in China: politicised social stratification, deepening economic liberalisation, modernisation of the food industry, food trade, and growing food chain and demand. This thesis analyses how this system of regulatory segmentation has been historically embedded into the food safety regime in China, and how it has further been stabilised and institutionalised over time. Based on the theoretical framework construction and historical review, the thesis explains how this segmented food safety regime has been delivering benefits and burdens among different sectors of population, unevenly unfortunately, through analysing different aspects of food safety management. A key contribution of this thesis is to identify and locate the social foundation for this segmented regulatory system, which in turn helps to explain the systemic failure of the food safety regime in China.