Beancounting: What a legume tells us about China’s astonishing economic rise

Behold, the mighty soybean.

Enduring and indispensable fuel for thriving populations, fodder for geoeconomic wrangling among giants. China needs enormous amounts, mostly to plump up livestock as it progresses through the nutrition transition – where an increasingly urban and prosperous population swaps out cereals for meat.

Yet unlike solar panels, rare earths, or electric cars, the country can’t produce nearly enough soy of its own. The bean is believed to have originated in China thousands of years ago, but it has since evolved into a mainstay mostly grown elsewhere.

“It’s quite a vulnerability,” said Dr. Zhu Chunquan, an advisor to the Tropical Forest Alliance and former country representative to the International Union for Conservation of Nature in China. It’s also a choice; food-security staples like wheat got priority for China’s finite farmland, imports fill the gap for animal feed.

Of course, farmers around the world are eager to supply the country with what it needs. Brazil and the US rely on shipping billions of dollars worth of soybeans there every year. Though China’s end goal, Dr. Zhu said, is really to cut its reliance on soy-based protein entirely: “They’re looking for other sources.”

Ultimately, the legume tells a broader story about China’s dizzying development and decisive influence on global trade. It was among of the “Five B’s” headlining recent talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump, and it’s the stuff of high-stakes intrigue away from the spotlight.

It also points to an increasingly complicated relationship with the natural world, which is a problem shared by many countries.

America’s own history with the bean is a bit shorter. In 1764, a sailor brought a Chinese variety home for cultivation. By 2008, the US was sending its own version to China to the tune of $8 billion every year, which rose to $12 billion in 2024. Still, that pales in comparison to shipments from Brazil – the value of that country’s annual soybean exports to China had already hit $32 billion by 2024.

Farmers in the US are eager to stay in the game. The American Soybean Association spent upwards of $900,000 last year to lobby the federal government on issues like tariff disputes with China that had cratered exports. When a trade deal between the countries was announced in the autumn, it guaranteed China would buy a minimum quantity of American beans through 2028. Meanwhile, Brazil’s share of overall exports to China continues to grow.

But the trade with Brazil also doesn’t come without risks. Scientists see climate change potentially exacting a heavy toll on that country’s future production.

So, why doesn’t China simply grow more soybeans of its own?

“The issue is China doesn’t have enough arable land,” Dr. Zhu said. Like many things related to the country, a widened perspective is required. Sure, it has as much as 9% of the world’s productive land, but also nearly a fifth of its population. The numbers don’t match up, so the policy choice is to import.

For a long period after its first cultivation in China, the soybean remained marginal as far as foodstuffs go. Farmers eventually figured out how to grow bigger, meatier versions around 2,000 BCE, when the global population still wasn’t much larger than the current size of Shanghai.

Samuel Bowen saw real potential of the legume in the 18^th century. The ex-seaman spirited Chinese varieties back to the American colonies and managed to plant them in Georgia.

By the 20^th century heavy machinery was being used to harvest beans with relative ease, and the US was soon producing more than China (Illinois, now the most prolific soybean state, harvested them on a surface area bigger than Belgium in 2024).

There was a boom in the use of ground-up soybean meal as animal feed in the 1950s. Rich in sustenance, highly digestible. A couple of decades later, Brazil’s soybean cultivation began to surge thanks to an accommodating climate and a surplus of relatively inexpensive land. It’s now the biggest producer in the world, with exports to China that increased 18% last year as America’s declined by nearly 73%.

The fuzzy pods packed with oil, protein and fibre endure as an enviable cash crop. That’s particularly true in a world of relentless meat consumption.

Meat is central to Bennett’s law. It plays out differently in different places, but in general: the further people ascend from poverty, the more carnivorous they get.

In Barcelona, consumption of a wide variety of “carcass meats” crested in the late 19^th century, as infrastructure modernized and railways expanded. Meat eating in Europe generally rose in the 20^th century alongside wealth per capita, as it did in the US. Africa’s meat consumption will likely increase 33% in the coming decade.

Consumption has plateaued within wealthier countries (and reversed in some of the wealthiest), but in general the global population still can’t get enough. The average person is projected to be eating nearly a kilo of additional meat per year by 2034.

China’s adding more varieties into its diet beyond pork, a standard favourite. Beef and veal consumption there is expected to more than double in the first few decades of this century, according to the OECD. Wealth per capita is projected to grow nearly 20-fold in that time.

The soybeans fuelling this stage of development are an exception to China’s “industrial policy of everything,” a DIY effort of epic proportions that enables self-sufficiency in many of the raw materials and technologies the country needs.

Another exception to self-sufficiency has been cutting-edge computer chips, but that seems to be changing. Oil is also mostly imported, though China’s (probably) massive reserves can make it seem more like of a buffer for global petroleum markets than an interested buyer.

Not so with soybeans.

The roughly 80% of soybeans that get crushed into animal food can fatten up everything from chickens and hogs to farmed fish and dairy cows. “This makes soy the invisible backbone of the global meat, egg, and dairy industries,” Dr. Zhu said.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has throttled exports of fertilizer, so American farmers are growing even more soybeans than usual this summer because it’s a less fertilizer-intensive crop than corn. The supply shock has been yet another reminder of the downsides of relying on a limited number of suppliers for essentials.

China is trying to address that kind of risk by finding soybean alternatives, Dr. Zhu said, as part of a broader protein-diversification push. Genetic modification to boost production (standard in Brazil and the US) is also on the agenda, though the Chinese tend to be wary of the practice.

In the meantime the country will continue to import in large quantities. Extensive internal migration to cities has freed up more potential Chinese farmland, though becoming urban dwellers means people “might even eat more,” Dr. Zhu said. That means “overall demand is not relieved.”

What’s playing out is a constant and uncomfortable series of trade-offs between growth, security, and natural resources that’s a fact of life just about everywhere. There’s only so much land and water in a warming world that can be used to produce food.

It’s possible that bioscientific breakthroughs will make it a lot less resource-intensive to cultivate that food. For now, though, it seems that it will only become more difficult to be selective about where it comes from.