November 11, 2024:
The Chinese Communist Party is energetically seeking food and respect. First priority is food. China has not got enough of it and is taking extreme measures to fix the problem. At the time China had to import about 40 percent of its food for a hungry population of a billion people. Since the 1990s China has been assisting Russia to develop thinly populated areas in central and eastern Russia to feed the hungry Chinese.
The original Russian farmers and their families left during the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Soviets prohibited privately owned farms. Instead there were state owned collective farms where farmers did the work as employees of the state. This arrangement was unpopular with Russian farmers and when the Soviet government disappeared, so did the collective farm workers. This left thousands of square kilometers of prime farmland in central Russia unused. Chinese farmers sought to gain access to that land so they produce more food for hungry Chinese. China needed the food, but Russia already had markets in the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
The situation changed in 2014 and 2022 when Russian aggression resulted in economic sanctions that included food exports. Russia went looking for more reliable markets and found it in China. Russia accepted the Chinese proposals for allowing Chinese farmers to enter the underused central Russian and far eastern farmlands. The large number of Chinese farmers would produce a lot more food, which the Chinese were willing to pay for. Russia needed the money and this seemed like an excellent way to monetize the food produced on some of the most productive Russian farmlands.
This doesn’t leave the Middle East, Africa and Europe hungry because North American and Australian farmers are major, and flexible producers of food. The Americans and Australians were able to keep everyone supplied with affordable food.
The new Central Asian food arrangement for the Chinese had significant political implications. Now the food supplies were coming overland, not by ship. The use of ships was always threatened by blockade by a hostile American navy if there was war with China. Now the larger Chinese navy could confidently threaten to attack the Americans Pacific fleet without worrying about U.S. Navy nuclear submarines blockading Chinese ports.
The food arrangement provides Russia with sanction-proof food income from China. Food is a major Russian export and now it is safe from disruptions by sanctions or unreliable shipping. For China, conquering Taiwan is now more likely because the Americans can no longer threaten the Chinese food supply. Yet the Taiwanese do not feel threatened. Taiwan has increased its defensives and is still a vital source for scarce electronic components and production equipment. China cannot ignore that risk and that means Taiwan is still safe.
While Taiwan is not threatened, international use of the South China Sea, China wants to control this body of water and thus control seas through which over 40 percent of the world's waterborne traffic moves. Without the threat of a food blockade, China can now be more aggressive in gaining complete control of the South China Sea. China has asserted such control for over a decade, but now they can afford to use violence to enforce their control. The Chinese don’t believe the Americans would risk a war against a larger Chinese fleet in waters close to Chinese territory and land-based bombers and fighters. For the U.S. Navy, this is not a good place to fight a war.
Gaining control over the South China Sea would be a major accomplishment and indicates the growing power of China to get what it wants and feels it deserves. With these changes China finally becomes a true superpower, with a secure food supply and a population willing to risk war without the threat of privation when come to food supplies and the quality of the food available.