In China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population but just seven per cent of the world’s arable land, food security is a national obsession. Pesticides and enhanced fertilizers no longer improve crop yields as markedly as they once did, and staple crops, such as rice, may not grow as reliably in the temperature extremes brought on by climate change. As a result, the government has begun to invest heavily in research on genetically modified crops. Last fall, the Communist Party’s Literature Research Office published the text of a speech that President Xi Jinping had given before the Central Rural Work Conference, an agricultural-policy body, calling on domestic scientists to “boldly research and innovate, [and] dominate the high points of G.M.O. techniques.” The most recent Five Year Plan names biotechnology, including enhanced agriculture, as one of seven “Strategic Emerging Industries.”
Recently, I met with Caixia Gao, a prominent plant geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, in Beijing. For years, the institute’s facilities were housed in a drab, Soviet-style building, but this spring they were expanded and renovated to include Ping-Pong tables, coffee lounges, and, on one floor, a so-called open lab with new microscopes, centrifuges, and other equipment that is shared among lab groups. (One young researcher, hunched over a petri dish, wrinkled her nose and wondered aloud whether the openness would foster collaboration or simply be distracting.) Gao ushered me into the new greenhouse, and her glasses quickly misted over from the sudden humidity. In 2009, after working in Denmark for a decade, Gao returned to China to lead a gene-editing research group under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She has researched engineering rice for herbicide resistance and corn for drought resistance. Her recent work has involved editing out segments of the wheat genome in order to make the plant less susceptible to powdery mildew, a common fungal disease. (The condition can be controlled with fungicides, but these expose farmers to noxious chemicals.) Last year, her team’s results were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, where they attracted international attention. Gao pointed out a series of red clay pots, each containing spindly green wheat shoots, with strips of white tape around their brims. “The ones with labels have been genetically modified,” she said proudly.
But, like many plant geneticists in China, Gao has yet to see her experiments on wheat, rice, or corn move beyond the lab or the greenhouse. For all of the government’s investment, genetically modified food faces zealous public opposition and is largely banned from the marketplace. “The technology is getting better and more predictable, but the controversy is also getting bigger,” Gao said. In 1997, China granted the first commercial license for a G.M. crop, cotton, which is now widely planted. The last commercial license, issued in 2006, went to papaya. Since then, commercial prospects have stalled; very few Chinese scientists have even received biosafety certificates to test the impact of G.M.O.s on the surrounding environment, a necessary step to evaluate safety before considering commercialization.
Zhang Qifa, one of the few scientists who did receive such experimental permission—in 2009, for Bt rice, which expresses a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that repels insect pests—has endured public attacks and threats to his personal safety. In 2010, as Zhang was delivering a lecture on G.M.O.s at China Agricultural University, in Beijing, a man in the audience threw a ceramic mug at him, narrowly missing. A woman in the audience yelled: “Zhang Qifa is a traitor!” Public anxiety about G.M.O.s has been stoked by people and organizations from across the ideological spectrum—by Greenpeace; by a Maoist group called Wu You Zhi Xiang (Utopia); by popular TV anchors speculating about horrible illnesses; and by expressions of general anti-Western sentiment. An online survey by the China Daily revealed that eighty-four per cent of respondents believe that genetically modified foods are unsafe.
The mixed messages over G.M.O.s reveal profound divisions within China’s government, as well as an uncharacteristic sensitivity to public opinion. Much of the research has been funded through the Ministry of Science and Technology, with a mandate to elevate China’s scientific prowess to world-class status. But the licenses for testing and final commercial approval are granted by a joint-ministerial conference made up of representatives from twelve agencies; it is convened by the Ministry of Agriculture, which is subject to State Council influence and the imperative of maintaining “social stability”—that is, avoiding public unrest. “Put simply, the problem mostly lies in the rising resistance of the public to G.M.O.s, which has made the political leadership hesitant to go ahead with commercialization,” Cong Cao, an expert in China’s science policy at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom, told me. President Xi’s speech noted the schism: “We must be bold in studying [genetic modification, yet] be cautious in promoting it.”
China is hardly alone in its popular worries. Recently, in the United States, when Chipotle moved to ban genetically modified ingredients from its burritos, the company initially attracted plenty of public praise. But a sharp backlash followed, drawing on the findings of mainstream research organizations, such as the American Medical Association, which have pointed out that there is no data to prove that eating G.M.O.s is bad for one’s health. In China, science bloggers and state media outlets have often made the same point. But, because independent arbiters aren’t allowed to thrive, the public doesn’t believe them.
To live in modern China is to worry constantly about food safety. Scandals—from libidinous, corrupt officials to rigged TV talent shows—abound in the news and on social media, but few grip the public imagination like stories of poisoned food: the milk powder, tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, that killed at least six infants and sent more than fifty thousand ill babies to the emergency room in 2008; the watermelons that, in 2011, after receiving too much growth hormone, exploded; the admission, in 2013, by Guangdong’s provincial government, that forty-four per cent of the local rice that had been tested was laced with dangerous levels of the heavy metal cadmium. The skeptical public has little faith that authorities will enforce food-safety regulations.
This mistrust makes it difficult to introduce new food technologies, even if China needs them. “If the government says that G.M.O. food is safe, Chinese people won’t readily believe it,” Sam Geall, an anthropologist at the University of Sussex who has been conducting field research recently in Beijing, told me. For the past eighteen months, Geall has been studying public opinion regarding G.M.O.s in China. The chasm of credibility and the lack of a trusted referee make it hard for the public to sift rumor from fact, he said: “This may be the clearest example where public opinion in China has likely played a role in stalling or stopping an innovation pathway that the government backs, for better or worse.”
In many areas of national planning—from rerouting and damming the Yangtze River to clearing fields for the construction of airports and railways—China’s leaders don’t give much thought to public opinion. But food is personal, tangible, and essential. In recent years, ordinary Chinese citizens have gone to great lengths to avoid foods that they believe are inadequately regulated by the government. The smuggling of milk powder is on the rise, such that British supermarkets frequented by Chinese tourists have imposed limits on how many boxes a single customer can purchase. Geall’s early research indicates that China’s most educated citizens are among those most opposed to G.M.O.s; they want choices, especially where their dinner is concerned. Not even a government as powerful as Beijing’s can force-feed a wary public.
