Security as a Condition for Development: Legitimation Hierarchy in China's Official Food Security Discourse under External Shocks during the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025)

Food security is one of the core strategies for national security and economic stability under China’s Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025). During this period, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war, and China–US trade frictions increased instability in food production, distribution, and trade through pressures on domestic supply, global markets, and external dependence. These shocks placed pressure on authoritarian legitimation centred on economic development and governance performance. This article examines how different shocks affect the balance between economic development and political-security concerns in China’s official food-security discourse. Existing theories of authoritarian legitimation tend to treat different legitimation claims as parallel or substitutable political resources. This article argues that when Chinese official discourse mobilises multiple legitimation rationales, these rationales are not necessarily parallel or mutually substitutable. Instead, they may form a stable hierarchical structure. Crises can change the salience and combination of secondary rationales without necessarily altering the core principle of legitimation. Using China’s authoritative official television news and propaganda programme, News Simulcast, as its corpus, the article identifies three categories of legitimation rationales and the relationships among them: economic development, domestic political security, and geopolitical security. The findings show that economic development consistently occupies the dominant position in China’s official discourse. In response to different shocks, official discourse temporarily elevates different types of security rationale while framing security as a condition that enables development to continue, rather than as an alternative objective for which development must be sacrificed.