Based on the opening column by Nobuyuki Kaji in the monthly magazine WiLL, this essay examines the core of President Trump’s strategy toward China.
By looking at the U.S.-China trade imbalance, soybean tariffs, China’s food supply, dependence on imported wheat, and the risk of rising pork prices, it explores the real card the Chinese regime fears most.
It argues that China is not an agricultural superpower and that instability in food supply is directly tied to political instability, revealing the connection between food, politics, and grand strategy.

March 27, 2019.
Chinese people like pork and eat it almost daily.
What happens if both pork and wheat, the staple food of northern China, do not sufficiently reach the people.
When human beings do not have enough food, they will invariably resort to force.

Those who subscribe to this month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL must all have groaned in admiration, saying this is the real thing.
The following is from the opening serialized column by Nobuyuki Kaji.
The emphases in the text are mine.

I, an old man, have no command of English.
Therefore, if I wish to know something about America, for example, I have no choice but to rely on information from the Japanese media.
For that reason, I have often been deceived by Japanese media information.
But that is the fault of my own shallowness.
In short, it means that when it comes to other countries, one should hold the feeling that one does not truly understand them.
However, even without English ability and without direct American information, one can still see President Trump’s strategy toward China and what card he holds hidden in his breast.
That is because I have some knowledge of China.
So let me speak about that card.
As for economics itself, specifically trade itself, I of course understand nothing.
Yet when I listen to what Trump says in a loud voice, I immediately understand its essence.
First is the trade imbalance.
In relation to China, China has the surplus and America has the deficit.
The strategy is to turn that trade imbalance against China and threaten the collapse of the Chinese regime.
As a tactic for that, he first informed China that he would impose higher tariffs on imports in order to reduce his country’s trade deficit.
However, the policy was to change this in three stages.
Looking back 150 years, the Meiji government suffered from a trade imbalance.
Ordinarily, in order to correct its trade deficit, a country protects its own economy by imposing tariffs on cheap imports from abroad so that their prices become equal to domestic products.
However, under the treaties concluded with the Western powers at the end of the shogunate, Japan did not have the right to impose tariffs independently.
Therefore, Japan struggled toward treaty revision in order to obtain that right.
It later succeeded in revising them.
But in the modern age, if the price of imports is unfairly low, it has become standard practice to impose tariffs in order to protect domestically produced goods.
Now, to return to the subject, when America invoked punitive tariffs against China over the U.S.-China trade imbalance, China retaliated by imposing a 25 percent tariff on soybeans imported from America.
When written like this, many people are surprised.
China imports soybeans, they ask.
That is because they misunderstand China as an agricultural country.
If the world’s cultivable land is taken as 100 percent, China has only 7 percent.
It has no choice but to import agricultural products.
In China, soybeans are used to extract edible oil, and the soybean meal is used as feed for pigs.
In effect, China raised by 25 percent the price of this pig feed imported from America.
Naturally, the domestic price of pork rises.
To be sure, 53 percent of imported soybeans come from Brazil and 34 percent from America, so for the time being Brazil’s soybeans can cover the gap, but beyond that the future cannot be seen.
China’s tactic was presumably to reduce the income of American farmers, who are part of Trump’s support base, through tariffs and thereby shake support for Trump, yet astonishingly China is now obediently complying with Trump’s various demands.
Why is this.
The answer is clear.
It is because China is terribly, terribly afraid of the next card Trump will play as a countermeasure.
Although the data are more than ten years old, China has been importing large quantities of wheat, which is its staple food.
That is because it is not an agricultural country.
The amount of wheat imported from America, Canada, and Australia totals 30 million tons.
Since the annual consumption of 100 million people is 10 million tons, China has continued importing enough wheat for 300 million people.
For northern China, where wheat is the staple food, difficulty in importing wheat would become a matter of life and death.
Chinese people like pork and eat it almost daily.
What happens if both pork and wheat, the staple food of northern China, do not sufficiently reach the people.
When human beings do not have enough food, they will invariably resort to force.
That being so, the card hidden in Trump’s breast, namely a reduction in wheat exports to China, is something China fears beyond measure.
Therefore, I believe the Chinese government hopes that the trade issue will be brought to an end around the soybean issue.
As the ancients said, govern disorder before it arises, and secure the river before danger arrives.