Taste in Numbers: Science and the Food Problem in Republican Guangzhou, 1927-1937

Nothing has so menaced China as the problem of food supply. Many scholars have examined this subject, especially the Chinese state's efforts to manage nationwide networks of grain production and consumption. Yet these scholars have focused mostly on the thoughts and practices of the statecraft in the late imperial period; few have paid attention to the Republican period during which China experienced an unprecedented agrarian crisis that profoundly disrupted the food supply networks between the country and the city.¹ This study explores the food problem (liangshi wenti, minshi wenti) in Guangzhou, a city that relied for its food supply on foreign rice imports from Southeast Asia via Hong Kong rather than on domestic rice supplies from the northern hinterland. During the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937), Guangzhou was known as China's largest foreign-rice importing city. To supplement the provincial rice insufficiency, Guangzhou had to purchase substantial amounts of foreign rice.² By highlighting the cultural and intellectual dimensions of food, this article argues that the ways in which Guomindang dealt with the food problem should be understood in the context of their enthrallment with new scientific knowledge as well as their forward-looking stance rather than a conventional emphasis on governmental incompetence.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, China's food problem became the most urgent problem in the country. The "Land of Famine" became a widespread phrase to describe China's food situation. Western observers identified famine and malnutrition as the most remarkable characteristics of China and attributed them to China's lack of scientific mind.³ For almost every year between 1927 and 1934, foreign rice was one of China's top five most imported commodities (with the exception of the years 1928 and 1931).⁴ To the Guomindang leaders, therefore, devising and pursuing scientific solutions to the food problem meant a pivotal change in many regards. It would be the first step to end China's history of thousands of years of incompetence in responding natural disasters. It would also be a steppingstone for China's leap forward into a new scientific era that would permit China to vie with technologically advanced Western countries. At least it could represent a chance for Guomindang to prove the new regime's capacity for modern statecraft. Under such circumstances, new scientific knowledge and technical expertise, as the fundamental solutions to the food problem, were enthusiastically introduced from abroad and promptly put into practice.⁵

Yet this did not mean a simple application of new technology; rather, it was a complicated mixture of politics and science in various forms of technical expertise, such as statistics, agricultural science, nutrition science, and macroeconomics. Guomindang leaders and many reformers believed that only scientifically proven policies could change the fundamental structure of the food problem and improve domestic grain productivity. Furthermore, such a strong pursuit of scientific knowledge drove them to envision a recasting of people's mindsets and behaviors: revolutionizing planting methods in the countryside; regulating merchants' manipulation in provisioning; and directing the healthy eating habits of the urban rice consumers. By tracing the discourse and practice of new scientific disciplines, this article illustrates how the food problem not only legitimized Guomindang's political application of scientific knowledge but also how science provided impeccable credence to Guomindang's planning.

This article places the food problem of Guangzhou at the heart of the Guomindang reconstruction agenda, but does not limit the scope of study to the city's boundaries. Recently, scholarly attention has begun to shift from the conventional narrative of peasant-centered Communist revolution to various aspects of the Guomindang-ruled cities, where ongoing efforts to achieve modernity occurred as both top-down pursuits and as unanticipated initiatives from below.⁶ This paradigm shift has led to a new academic trend toward examining modernist projects in Republican-period cities as well as to some revisionist approaches to the Guomindang regime and its urban reform programs.⁷ However, an exclusive view of either city or country cannot thoroughly grasp the nature of the food problem simply because a...