On Feeding the Masses

China’s food safety system is in crisis. Egregious scandals, as varied as the sale of liquor laced with Viagra and the distribution of fake eggs, reveal how regulatory practices have been stretched to their limit in the world’s largest food production system. On Feeding the Masses focuses on the oft-cited but ultimately overlooked concept of scale to identify the root causes of China’s regulatory failures in food safety. The ‘politics of scale’ framework highlights how regulators disagree on which level of government is best suited to regulate (‘the scale of governance’), struggle to address multilevel tensions (‘multidimensional scale integration’), and fail to understand how policies at one level of government can affect other levels of government in unexpected and costly ways (‘scale externalities’). Drawing from over 200 interviews with food safety regulators and producers, the study provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of China’s food safety crisis to date.

Author Biography

John K. Yasuda is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Yasuda’s research includes the study of regulatory reform in China, governance, and the politics of regulatory failure. He has published in the China Quarterly, the Journal of Politics, and Regulation and Governance. Yasuda has commented on food safety issues for The Guardian, The New York Times, and China Dialogue. Research for On Feeding the Masses was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award, the NSEP Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.Phil. from the University of Oxford.