Expert Perspectives
From Regional Governance to Systemic Fairness: Structural Dilemmas and Future Reshaping of China's Food Safety Governance
Based on an in-depth analysis of China's food safety governance practices, this paper discusses structural contradictions such as the uneven distribution of governance resources between regions and urban and rural areas, and the lack of process fairness, and points out that achieving health equity requires a fundamental reshaping of institutional design and collaborative mechanisms.
Core argument
<SEGMENT id="1">China, as a major global base for agricultural and food production, faces severe challenges to social equity due to the complexity of food safety risks. Based on the AHP-FCE model, this study reveals the structural imbalances existing in food safety governance in regions like Jilin Province, concerning urban-rural gradients, regulatory capacity, and the implementation of corporate responsibility. It emphasizes that structural and procedural fairness are key to achieving governance effectiveness and calls for the construction of a more collaborative and transparent multi-dimensional assessment system.</SEGMENT>
Against the backdrop of rapid economic restructuring in China and the deep integration of the global food supply chain, food safety is no longer just a sanitary issue but a systemic challenge interwoven with deeper socioeconomic contradictions such as regional development imbalances, the dual structure of urban and rural areas, and capital flows. Especially in a major agricultural country like China, the effectiveness of food safety governance directly concerns regional economic stability and public health, but reality shows that this governance system still has significant cracks in terms of structural and procedural fairness.
This study focuses on practices in regions like Jilin Province, constructing a multidimensional collaborative governance assessment framework by integrating the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation (FCE) models. The research finds that although the overall collaborative governance score is at a medium-to-high level, its inherent structural imbalance is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed. On one hand, there is a significant gradient in the allocation of governance resources between regions—regulatory density, detection coverage, etc., vary across different geographical areas, which directly leads to an "uneven gradient of governance capacity." On the other hand, at the level of implementing governance elements, there is a structural imbalance of "strong government, weak society and enterprises": the government's regulatory capacity score is the highest, but the implementation of corporate responsibilities and the depth of third-party testing participation are relatively insufficient, leaving the governance system lacking effective social force intervention and information sharing mechanisms.
More critically, the study reveals that structural fairness and procedural fairness are the decisive factors in determining the effectiveness of governance. Groups with higher socioeconomic capital are more likely to benefit from the existing governance system, while groups on the margins find it harder to obtain effective protection and information channels. This indicates that the existing collaborative mechanisms have systemic breaks in information sharing, collaborative cooperation, and accountability. This break is not a simple implementation issue but a structural problem rooted in institutional design and power allocation logic.
Faced with global restructuring and increasing systemic risks, traditional top-down regulatory models are unable to cope with these multidimensional and dynamic risks. Future food safety governance must shift its focus from "outcomes" to "processes" and "fairness." This means building an assessment tool capable of systematically capturing multidimensional differences and transforming structural imbalances into intervenable policy levers. Only when the governance system can truly achieve the balanced allocation of resources and risks, and when channels for social participation are truly activated, can food safety governance evolve from a regional compliance effort into a resilient and inclusive urban civilization security system to cope with the complex shocks brought by climate change and economic transition.
Reading boundary · Global City Review
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