America’s new attitude towards China is changing the countries’ relationship
It is getting more antagonistic in many ways
WANG JIANQIN, in a thick red jerkin worn over her working clothes, does not look like an agent of superpower reprisal. The 60-year-old farmer rears 4,000 pigs in a brick-walled compound in Shunyi district, some 45km from Beijing. About a fifth of the food that she uses to fatten them up is soyabean meal, something China has come to import in vast quantities from the American Midwest.
Over the past 30 years, as the demand for pork in China has outstripped that in any other country, Ms Wang and her peers have done very nicely out of that American soya. And in America farmers have done well out of Ms Wang. Chinese money helped them pay for lots of cheap, Chinese-made goods at Walmart—as well as for the genetically modified seeds and other high-tech inputs stuffed with American know-how that make them so productive.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "The rivals"
From the October 18th 2018 edition
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