Analysis Xi Jinping’s new agricultural reforms sound very much like Mao-era policies. Like a board game, it involves moving people and resources around, planning the increase in food production and how much will be stored for the future, who will receive which resources, and who will be favored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao’s agricultural policies killed 30 million people. Xi will probably do better, but only because of food imports from France, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. In 2020, as a result of the pandemic, flooding, and a number of other external factors, China was facing a food shortage, as food prices shot up. While certain aspects of the pandemic economy are better this year, China is still facing the same systemic problems, namely, that the country has too many people and not enough arable land—about 60 percent less arable land per head than …