Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Food Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodcont Review Food safety governance in China: Change and continuity Yi Kang Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Food safety governance in China Legislation and regulation Industry compliance Civil society ABSTRACT This review article brings together English-language studies from a wide array of social science disciplines using diverse methodological approaches to provide a roadmap of the developments in real practices, theoretical concerns, and research agendas in four major realms of food safety governance in China: legislation, institutional constellations, consumer responses, and industry incentives. Food safety problems pose tremendous threats to public health in China. There have been outbreaks of large food scandals, such as the melamine-tainted milk powder problem that incited widespread fear and fury and the domestic and foreign media reports on numerous food safety incidents in China, including food contamination by heavy me- tals, food poisoning from additives and preservatives, and fake foods. While food safety problems are a global focal point of government regulation and scholarly research, the damage they do to social and political trust in China is incomparably worse than it is anywhere else. What has been done to improve food safety in China in the past several decades? This review article seeks to answer this question by examining the change over time in the three “poles” of the food system: the state's legislation and institutional constellations, consumer responses, and industry incentives. While safe food mainly relies on production/pro- cessing processes, food safety governance composed of state regulatory control and societal efforts to improve food safety has continuously (re) shaped food producers/processors' motivations and actions. The 2015 Food Safety (2015 FSL) defines the scope of food safety governance in China, encompassing production and processing, sales and catering services, the production of and trade in additives and food- related materials, the use of additives and food-related products by food producers and traders, the storage and transport of food, safety man- agement, additives, and food-related products (Article 2). This multi- dimensional scope entails broad and diverse food safety research con- cerning the food itself, the environment, food-related hazards, public health, education, consumer behaviour, industrial management, reg- ulatory systems, etc. In this article, English-language studies from across the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, law) using diverse methodological approaches (case study, ethnography, survey, content analysis, archival research) are brought together to provide a roadmap of developments in real practice, theo- retical concerns, and research agenda in food safety governance in China. These studies largely complement each other in addressing dif- ferent problems and adopting different angles. By combining them, we can see that food safety governance in China is characterized by a paradox of inadequate state regulatory capacity and exclusive state domination. The government has a strong political will and faces a great deal of pressure to shoulder sole responsibility for food quality, despite its difficulty in regulating on a dauntingly substantial scale. Citizen-customers who have strong motivations to fight food-related risks remain excluded and suppressed by the state to maintain social stability (weiwen 維穩). Under circumstances in which regulatory en- forcement remains lax and clumsy and customers do not have adequate information and channels through which to identify and punish dis- honest food producers/processors, the various state and social efforts to improve food safety have not yet translated into adequate incentives for food producers/processors to enhance the quality of their products. A caveat should be noted: two rich bodies of literature, one on the distinct production relations and consumption patterns in different food sectors and the other on cross-country comparisons of food safety governance, are not systematically reviewed here due to space con- straints. Particular attention is paid to agricultural production, which is located upstream in the food supply chain. Cross-policy domains and cross-national comparative research are cited to explain how food safety practices are shaped by the Chinese context and informed by foreign experiences. 1. Progress in legislation Since food is an “essential” item of daily life, states have long as- sumed major responsibility for guaranteeing food safety through reg- ulatory systems. However, the complexity and scale of contemporary food provision, the geographic dispersal of food-related public health threats, and the intricate intersections of food safety and a broad array https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2019.106752 Received 21 February 2019; Received in revised form 14 May 2019; Accepted 4 July 2019 E-mail address: yikang@hkbu.edu.hk. Food Control 106 (2019) 106752 Available online 09 July 2019 0956-7135/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T