Item Details
Skip Navigation Links
   ActiveUsers:1467Hits:21001933Skip Navigation Links
Show My Basket
Contact Us
IDSA Web Site
Ask Us
Today's News
HelpExpand Help
Advanced search

In Basket
  Article   Article
 

ID142573
Title ProperWhy food safety fails in China
Other Title Informationthe politics of scale
LanguageENG
AuthorYasuda, John Kojiro
Summary / Abstract (Note)This article examines food safety failures in China to cast light on how scale has deeply affected its regulatory politics. Contrary to studies that view China's food safety challenges as primarily resulting from corruption, local obstructionism or weak state capacity, I argue that China's massive production system, unwieldy bureaucracy, and geographic size pose regulators with a more fundamental policy challenge. As they attempt to build an integrated national regulatory regime, regulators must make difficult trade-offs in cost, policy design and applicability that emphasize the interests of certain stakeholders over others, resulting in a contentious “politics of scale.” The article assesses four failed scale management initiatives: food safety coordination bodies, campaigns, model production zones, and regulatory segmentation. As China transitions to scientifically assessed, risk-based forms of regulation, its pervasive food safety problem suggests the adaptive limits of China's unitary regulatory structure to manage scale and its ensuing politics effectively in a complex multilevel context.
`In' analytical NoteChina Quarterly , No. 223; Sep 2015: p.745-769
Journal SourceChina Quarterly No 223
Key WordsChina ;  Governance ;  Regulation ;  Scale ;  Food Safety ;  Standardization ;  Central–Local Relations


 
 
Media / Other Links  Full Text