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I thought China was extremely food insecure. The CCP has recently been pushing to make them less extremely food insecure, but with their relatively tiny amounts of arable land and fresh water, there's only so much they can accomplish. They are very reliant on imported food from the US and in recent years are increasingly reliant.
That's actually one of the successes of international trade and comparative advantage. The US has an excess of arable land, China has no where close to enough. So we sell them food. Chinese people really like pork. When a Chinese person eats a bite of pork, that pig was fed on American animal feed. When a Chinese person eats a local soy-based dish, those are probably American soy beans. They can't grow anywhere near enough soy to feed their people. That's okay, we'll sell them 100 million tons of soy beans per year.
If China attacked Taiwan and the US stopped shipping them food, how soon until mass starvation? Which I get won't be very comforting to Taiwanese people with no electricity and also no food.
I mean, ensuring that their entire population has at the bare minimum a subsistence diet of rice porridge and millet is pretty much rule #1 of any Chinese government so there's no way they haven't planned extensively for this, especially considering that every Chinese person I know thinks about food about 5 times as often as your typical white American and has a pantry filled floor to ceiling with non-perishable goods and a freezer that rains down ziploc bags of frozen meat and seafood when you open it.
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What they import from the US is mainly soybeans for animal feed, not grain. The US is the cheapest producer of soybeans but not the only producer. If they go to war and seabound trade is cut off, China can still trade with Russia and Central Asia to partially make up for seabound imports.
Food prices will rise, they'll have to eat much less meat and ration but I expect they can manage that. Britain and Germany did in WW2. It's possible to rationalize food production, cut waste, convert parks to vegetables and so on. But the key thing is grain, rice, corn, the staple crops. Everything else is a luxury. As long as there is sufficient production and distribution of grain, nobody will starve. China is nearly self-sufficient in grain without rationing and they still have options to import by land. Thus I conclude they can withstand a long war.
The insecure countries are the ones with very low ratios of self-sufficiency, the ones that can't meet their own grain requirements. Taiwan actually will starve, there's nothing they can do to catch up from a starting point in the 20% range on grains. Especially without fertilizer (where China is a net exporter) and electricity.
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Last I checked, China supplies ~100% of the calories necessary for their people, albeit mostly in cereals that they then put to other purposes. Of course they import enormous amounts of luxuries, but no one ever fought a total war and fed every family pork for dinner.
Some other sites claim something comparable. But I didn't look very hard.
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