Horses for courses: China's accommodative approach to food standard‐setting in response to the internationalization of regulation

Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of China's food standard‐setting procedures from both domestic and international perspectives, particularly in the context of the internationalization of regulation. After the reform and opening‐up in 1978, state actors and leading enterprises monopolized the process of national food standard setting. With further participation in the global economy in the 21st century, China has become familiar with the international standard‐setting procedures and has modeled its domestic policymaking on these practices. This has resulted in a more transparent, inclusive, scientific, pluralized, and consensus‐based form of decisionmaking. By contrast, the standards of the strategic industries have been harmonized to the standards of international counterparts through a top‐down and authoritarian approach. This paper argues that China uses an accommodative approach, trichotomizing suitable standards and decisionmaking procedures in terms of inclusiveness and transparency, which suits the developmental needs of the domestic market, food export markets, and strategic industries.

International Standardization and Trade Regulation

“…Standards can also function as strategic tools (de Vries, 2006;Delimatsis, 2015b;Larouche and van Overwalle, 2015;Chu, 2020) and competitive devices (Heires, 2008) for industrial promotion (Victor, 2000) with which actors can exploit the presence of asymmetric information and organizational differences (Delimatsis, 2015c;Mavroidis and Wolfe, 2017). Indeed, technological innovation usually precedes standardization and different previously existing standards compete for becoming the international standard to which harmonization will take place.…”