One of Your Colleagues Just Woke Up, V

[Anomalocaris]

What do the Chinese do with soybeans anyway?

Make tofu.  Seriously.

China is incapable of feeding itself with its own agriculture because even though it is similar in size to the US, the amount of land suitable for agriculture is small.   Urbanization and industrialization has paved over some of its best agriculture land.    The remaining prime agriculture lands are increasingly  being used for cash crop, not staple crop, thanks to capitalism, so they make money, but not calories.   The secondary agricultural land are on hilly or otherwise second rate land, and are unsuitable for mechanized agriculture.  Consequently their productivity are low relative to the amount of human labor input.

Chinese Agricultural tariffs is in someways not a bad thing for the world.  By making American agricultural surpluses more expensive in China, it decreases Chinese consumption, and force the Americans formers to sell at lower prices to the world market outside China to make up the difference.   There are several other major countries that also rely on food import to meet domestic needs but are,generally unable to afford the prices levels created by demand from China.

It would also not be unfair to say one of the fundamental, but unattributed, cause of the upheaval in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia that contributed to the rise of ISIS was the industrialization of China, which turned China from a poor agricultural exporter to a comparatively wealthy major agriculture importer willing to pay high prices to secure large imports of food stuff.  This has been an amazing boon for farmers in the food exporting countries,   But this greatly worsened the fiscal situation and materially increased the social stresses in major food importing countries in the Arab world like Egypt.