Secret Trails: Food and Trade in Late Maoist China, 1960-1978

Abstract

The dissertation focuses on China’s international grain trade under Mao and demonstrates the important ways in which China’s food needs became embedded in its relations with other nations. The dissertation opens with an account of how China purchased large amounts of wheat from Canada and Australia as an emergent strategy to cope with the famine in the wake of the Great Leap Forward beginning in 1961. Wheat imports as such became a regular part of China’s international trade. Meanwhile, in the 1960s-70s, China exported rice as a way to counterbalance its trade deficit and even increase its foreign currency earnings. This wheat-rice exchange was an unusual economic policy that has seldom been discussed in previous scholarship of the Mao era. The dissertation stresses the multiple meanings of food in the eyes of a socialist state. The supply of food, especially grain, could be increased by applying more chemical fertilizers, or exporting more textiles; therefore, the Chinese government purchased petrochemical plants to produce chemical fertilizers and synthetic fibers in the 1970s. With a perspective of transnational history, this dissertation shows how state power intervened in the production and distribution of food sources in the second half of the twentieth century, and argues that food trade helped to consolidate the well-being of the Maoist society at the time.