Society

China's hunger is cascading across global markets, pushing prices of food commodities sharply higher lately. Back home, this boom is becoming a source of worry.

Over the next decade, China's annual grain demand is likely to reach 573 million tons, which is above its current production levels. With marginal increases in crop yield shrinking and arable land harder to find, the bet is on that Beijing may swiftly become more reliant than ever on global markets for an essential class of commodities it is desperate to keep mostly home-grown.

Soybeans traded in Chicago are at their highest price in 14 months, largely because of the strength of Chinese demand. Palm oil on the Malaysia Derivatives Exchange breached a 27-month peak this week. Thai rice prices are nearing a six-month high.

Inside China, this has already gone from just market play to a matter of public interest. In October, the price of staples such as cooking oil and sugar sold in China's supermarkets jumped 10% to 13%. News of food shortages—in corn, wheat, garlic, mung beans and sugar—have dominated local headlines this year.

Can a political campaign ad be hoist by its own petard?

We wrote last week about how “Chinese Professor,” a Hollywood-quality U.S. campaign ad depicting a dystopian future in which China rules the global economy, had raised the bar for China-bashing political messages. Now, after attempting to stifle a parody of the ad, the group that funded it, Citizens Against Government Waste, stands accused of taking a page out of Beijing’s own political handbook.

For those who missed it, the original ad – apparently inspired by a similar Reagan-era spot directed by Ridley Scott – shows a group of Chinese economics students in the year 2030 laughing victoriously as their professor explains how deficit spending and health-care reform doomed the U.S.

In the parody, produced by the liberal group Campus Progress, the subtitles have been altered to deliver a different message.

Chinese media recently reported an alleged conversation between Wang Yinfeng, the Party Secretary of Jiangjin District in Chongqing, and a local property developer. Wang allegedly told the developer to stop the construction of a high-rise residential compound that would tower above the building of the Jiangjin Party Committee once completed. With the new building overshadowing the Party Committee building, Wang said, the latter’s feng shui would be damaged.

The Chinese Communist Party has long dismissed feng shui — the traditional Chinese belief in the connection between the orientation of buildings, interiors and gardens and the fortunes of people living in them — as “feudal superstition,” but in recent years many officials seem to have begun to embrace it. In a number of scandals, local officials have demolished or rebuilt perfectly functioning buildings perceived to have bad feng shui, or constructed useless bridges to create good feng shui.

China's consumer-safety agency, at the urging of U.S. and European officials, plans to tighten product-safety regulations in an effort to stamp out defective and dangerous exports and to ease trade tensions between China and the U.S.

Chinese manufacturers will be held accountable for the safety of their products, said Zhi Shuping, head of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, in a meeting Tuesday with European and U.S. counterparts. The government aims to provide them with safety and testing standards created in cooperation with the U.S. and the European Union. Regulators are particularly eager to rid products of materials containing high levels of caustic metal, such as lead and cadmium.