Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Internal spatial fix: China’s geographical solution to food supply and its limits Shaohua Zhan a, ⁎ , Lingli Huang b a Division of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University, 14 Nanyang Drive HSS 05-38, 637332, Singapore b Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Mergenthaler 533, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Spatial fix Grain production Food security Geographical restructuring Food crisis China ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, China has managed to maintain and even increase grain production in the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization through a process of internal spatial fix in which grain production is relocated to and concentrated in less developed inland regions. However, the fix created political and en- vironmental problems that will undermine it in the future. Using national statistical data and two case studies, the paper demonstrates how the fix has been a result of complex interactions between central and local actors and is a key factor shaping China’s trajectories of food politics and agrarian transitions. It also reveals that confronting the underproduction crisis of food under capitalist accumulation China has first sought to produce sufficient grain within its national border rather than rely on overseas resources. 1. Introduction The rise of China affected both food supply and demand in the country. On the supply side, the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization gobbled up large quantities of farmland and water while pollution, environmental degradation and climate change worsened agricultural conditions (Chen, 2007; Christiansen, 2009; Khan et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2014; Nath et al., 2015; Piao et al., 2010). On the demand side, rising standards of consumption and the dietary shift to resource-intensive food such as meat and dairy have driven up food demand considerably (Schneider, 2014; Tilman et al., 2011). In addi- tion, China faces extreme resource constraints in food production. Farmland per capita in the country is only 0.1 hectare, 40 percent of the world average while water resource per capita is 2039 cubic in 2015, a quarter of the world average (NBS, 2016: tables 8–1; 8–11; Wong and Huang, 2012). As early as 1994, Lester Brown sounded the alarm that China would have to import a massive amount of food, thereby causing a global food crisis. In recent years, the question of “who will feed China” has drawn renewed interest due to two emerging trends. One is China’s increasing food imports. From 2006 to 2015 its grain imports grew from 31.8 million to 114.4 million tons. In 2015, imports accounted for 15.5 percent of domestic consumption. 1 Most of the imports are soybeans, but the shares of cereals such as rice and wheat have been growing (NBS, 2016: table 11–8; Yan et al., 2016). The other trend is the ex- pansion of Chinese overseas agricultural investment, particularly its purchasing and leasing of overseas farmland (Bräutigam and Zhang, 2013; Edelman et al., 2013; Hofman and Ho, 2012; Muldavin, 2012). Although this seems to validate Brown’s warning, the volume of food imports still falls far short of what was predicted. Brown (1995, 97–99) estimated that China would import 369 million tons of grain if per capita consumption rose to 400 kg. 2 By 2015, consumption in China had risen to 534 kg per person, and it imported 114.4 million tons, a large quantity indeed but still much smaller than predicted. Why has China not imported more grain? The main reason is that domestic grain production has also increased in the past decade and a half, and it reached a record of 621.4 million tons in 2015, up 33.2 percent from that in 1995 (NBS, 2016: table 12–10). This paper calls attention to the internal geographical restructuring of grain production in China. We distinguish between two processes: external spatial fix and internal spatial fix. External spatial fix refers to the phenomenon of relying on overseas resources to meet domestic food demand through means such as importation and transnational invest- ment. As noted earlier, the scholarship has so far focused exclusively on the process of external spatial fix with regard to China’s food supply. This paper will show that the process of internal spatial fix played at least an equally important role. Moreover, the two processes are in- terrelated, and an analysis of the internal spatial fix will shed light on http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.021 Received 25 February 2017; Received in revised form 18 July 2017; Accepted 19 July 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: shzhan@ntu.edu.sg (S. Zhan), lhuang23@jhu.edu (L. Huang). 1 Sources of data: China Statistical Yearbooks 2007–2016. 2 Brown did not include soybeans in his calculation. If included, the gap would be even larger. Geoforum 85 (2017) 140–152 0016-7185/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK