China has established a relatively comprehensive institutional framework for the collaborative governance of food safety. According to the relationships and institutional composition of governance entities, this framework can be deconstructed into three parts: an authoritative regulatory system centered on the government, a market self-regulation system under government guidance, and a social participation system supported by the government. However, the collaborative governance of food safety still faces multiple challenges: At the level of authoritative regulation centered on the government, collaborative difficulties exist among internal governmental entities. At the level of market self-regulation guided by the government, there are bottlenecks including a lack of endogenous motivation for individual self-regulation and insufficient institutional development and resource coordination for collective self-regulation. Social participation supported by the government faces practical challenges such as dual limitations in public participation motivation and governance capacity, the alienation of rights-protection motives leading to malicious claims, and the role conflict and functional weakening of social organization. Regarding this, efforts should be made to enhance the effectiveness of government regulation guided by holistic governance, stimulate the potential for market self-regulation under the principle of classified guidance, and cultivate a social co-governance ecosystem under the principle of supportive guidance, gradually developing towards a food safety collaborative governance model of “an active government, an efficient market, and an orderly society”.

Illegal addition has always been a difficult point in the governance of food safety crimes. At present, there has been a high number of criminal cases related to illegal addition, which involve a wide range of criminal objects and a wide variety of additives. According to its manifestation and harmfulness, illegal addition can be divided into ‘prohibited addition’ and ‘restricted addition’. The judicial interpretation No. 24[2021] of the Supreme People’s Court has improved the criminal regulation system for crimes related to illegal food additives, transmitting the concept of scientific regulation and precision crackdown. However, there are still some problems, such as unclear standards for criminal conviction and inconsistent rules for the application of criminal charges. Therefore, we should break the barriers of scientific and technological standards and legal norms between administrative and criminal regulation, make legal fictions based on scientific research, and clearly delimit the boundary between administrative and criminal regulation in a quantitative way on the basis of the fact that the current judicial interpretation is only qualitative. In addition, in the field of criminal regulation, based on the hierarchy, overlap and inclusiveness between articles 140, 143 and 144 of the criminal law, we should further clarify the legal application logic and rules of ‘restricted addition’ and ‘prohibited addition’ cases, as well as cases involving illegal additives whose toxicity is not clear yet.

Food safety is not only important for the nation, but also for its people. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the governance of food safety in our country has undergone comprehensive and profound transformations. This article conducts an in-depth analysis of the evolution of China’s food safety governance system from the perspective of historical institutionalism. Within the structural framework of historical institutionalism, the process of institutional change is influenced by factors such as the macro-social background, meso-level ideas, and micro-level actors. The evolution of China’s food safety governance system can be divided into five stages: the administrative control system led by the food sector (1949-1978), the mixed governance system led by the health department (1979-2002), the multi-departmental parallel segment-wise governance system (2003-2012), the professional governance system led by the food and drug administration (2013-2017), and the comprehensive governance system led by market regulatory authorities (2018 to present). From a historical institutionalist perspective, the evolution of the system reveals a profounder internal logic. Under the constraints of path dependence as well as the joint influence of external key nodes and internal adaptations, China’s food safety governance system exhibits a continuous interaction between institutional balance and institutional transformation, demonstrating strong institutional resilience.