To modernize food safety governance, we must carry out basic restructuring of its internal logic at the national level to reflect the features of contemporary Chinese society that shape food safety. This will entail establishing an overarching, macro-level conception of food safety that integrates “baseline safety”, “hub safety”, “co-constructed safety” and “endogenous safety”. These four dimensions of safety represent four fundamental requirements of food safety governance in modern Chinese society, which is a “risk society” (Beck 1992) and one that is also complex, open and pluralist. These requirements are: maximum legal liability, a unified, authoritative and efficient supervision system, a concept of social co-governance, and enterprises being the primary entities accountable for food safety. This article uses this analytical framework to interpret the basic contents of the newly revised Food Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China, and uses a focus on social co-governance to present the institutional highlights of this law and the transformation of the internal logic of food safety governance.

One of the characteristics of food safety regulation in China is the separation of agricultural food products (agro-food) from other kinds of food. To this end, a Law on Quality and Safety of Agricultural Products (LQSAP) was enacted to provide for official control at the stage of primary agro-food production. With the enactment and revision of the Food Safety Law, one change in the legislative arrangement is the extension of the scope of this new law to cover the marketing of agro-food and the use of agricultural inputs. However, safety regulation at the stage of primary production of agro-food is still subject to the Law on Quality and Safety of Agricultural Products. It is also important to note that thee LQSAP refers both to agro-food and to agricultural products for non-human consumption; and that it provides rules both for safety assurance and for quality promotion. In the context of intensified official control to ensure food safety and diverse consumer needs for food of higher quality, a revision of the Law on Quality and Safety of Agricultural Products has been initiated. This article describes the goals of this legislation, its institutional arrangements and the directions the revisions are taking in order to provide a better understanding of food safety regulation in China in general and agro-food regulation in particular.