We asked a Taiwanese military expert about the food situation in China.

――President Xi Jinping issued an important declaration to stop wasting food and drink and to start saving on August 11. Could you elaborate on the background of this statement?

Mr. Xi must have long-term considerations. In other words, China now is preparing for war with the U.S. and the possible famine in the future because of the intensification of the U.S.-China hegemony war.

There has been no major famine so far, but the shortage of food such as soybeans, pork and wheat, etc. has forced the Chinese to change their eating habits, especially with their food wastes. The Chinese government believes that food security policies need to be strengthened from different perspectives such as grain production, storage, distribution and consumption

――The Chinese government has announced that the food supply is stable, but how do you think the actual food situation is?

I think the figures released by China officials may not be true, but this cannot be verified. However, it can be observed from some certain signs, such as whether the people are robbing food; when the people have no food to eat, they switch to alternatives such as weeds, dog, cat, mouse meat and other things they wouldn’t normally eat in order to survive.

If China’s local government launches a new system of food distribution or people are unable to freely buy and sell from the market, etc., it indicates that China’s food crisis has worsened to what can be called a famine.

Currently, the Chinese government has released a large amount of poor quality public food to the market and purchased food from Southeast Asian countries, which should be able to make up for the food shortage. China may also make up for the shortage in about three months by forcing farmers to rush the growth of grains.

Powerful Leaders Must Stand Up

――It has been pointed out that the Communist Party system is shaking due to food shortages. Is there any possibility that the current food shortage will result in the overthrow of the Communist Party system?

According to Chinese history, there have been peasant uprisings caused by famine, such as the Taiping Rebellion(太平天國), the Yellow Turban Rebellion(黃巾之亂) andthe Qin Dynasty’s collapse due to the peasant revolution. But as long as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls the military and police, unarmed peasants under strict supervision of the CCP will find it difficult to shake the Communist Party’s system.

In the past, during the Great Famine of 1959-1962 whennatural and man-made disasters struck simultaneously, Mao Zedong stepped down as chairman of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Liu Shaoqi took over, allowing them to barely overcome the crisis.

However, if the food shortage becomes more severe and the people fall into serious famine, it will cause much public grievances. In order to overthrow the CCP system, powerful leaders from within the country must carry these dissatisfactions and stand up against the communist system.