5. Food Safety Crises in China

In Chapter 5, Zhou reviews the food safety crises that have occurred over the past four decades, focusing on the decade from 2004 to 2013. She identifies seven categories of food risks that occurred mainly in Chinese domestic food market. The majority of them, both in category and number, had the most impact upon ordinary domestic consumers, especially the vulnerable and the poor from the lower and lower-middle classes in underdeveloped regions. The key contention of this chapter is that such varying food safety levels and unevenly distributed food risks are effects of regulatory segmentation, which further created differential impacts on each of these fragmented consumer groups. And this differential impact is at the heart of the research problem in this book.