China’s Stockpiling: Domestic Resilience, Global Influence

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Project Officer - Asia Program

Pierre Pinhas joined Institut Montaigne in February 2023 as a Project Officer within the Asia program. He is among others in charge of the quarterly publication China Trends, which seeks to understand China on the basis of Chinese sources.

"It is better to shed a thousand drops of sweat than to waste a single grain of rice," as the Chinese saying goes. This mentality is heads-on reflected in China's budget for food stockpiles, which is twenty times larger than the sum dedicated to food stockpiling by all OECD countries! Every effort is made at the highest level of government, both politically and financially, to ensure a comprehensive safety net in the face of geopolitical turmoil. One thing is clear, the whole country is mobilised since China's approach to building strategic reserves also concerns energy, metals, and critical minerals.

China’s reasons for engaging in stockpiling may vary from one commodity to another: political and social cohesion, supply chain resilience or price stability. However, these motivations all converge on two strategic objectives: reducing domestic vulnerabilities at home and creating dependencies abroad. As history shows-including on the European continent-the stockpiling of raw materials is never neutral.

Therefore, in order to put in place a stockpiling policy useful in times of crisis, France and the European Union will need to reach a three-fold consensus: identify and prioritise needs, agree on how to share the cost of these efforts, and define the scale of implementation and governance. Of course, stockpiling is an undeniable cost-but in a world in which geopolitics and geoeconomics play a greater role than ever before, is this not the price we must pay to reduce our dependencies?

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(54 pages)

Headlines

July 2025

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