A little more than 60 years after its creation, questions about the future of the Alliance emerge at the intersection of three observations. First, the complexity of the world, which makes the Alliance ‘inevitable,' since it is a rare source of stability and solidarity in a world marked by uncertainty. Second, American doubt. If the United States was the global policeman for some simple minds at the start of the 1990s, others see the US as having used up its power in the adventurism of the Bush Administration. The future will wipe out these two caricatures. For members of the Alliance, the US will long continue to be a necessary friend, whose power and possible abandonment are feared. The third observation is, obviously, Europe's incurable ethnocentricity: if Europeans knew how to look at the world and their place in it, they would rapidly give up their mediocre powerlessness. History is moving on elsewhere and raises questions on its chaotic path to which others are replying more quickly. In the years ahead, therefore, the Alliance may lorge ahead without Europe or nearly without it, despite the fact that Europeans' specific know-how could be useful.

The move away from a planned economy and the apprenticeship of capitalism, which is sometimes uncontrolled in the real estate sector, have led to a series of imbalances between cities and the countryside. It is possible to think that the worst imbalances (in terms of the human and environmental costs of urbanization), which were wittingly accepted for a long time in order to allow the country to open up and to promote break-neck growth, are tolerated less and less and becoming politically intolerable. Urbanization has definitively and deeply modified daily life in China and the expectations of the population, even if these are not expressed in the ballot box. This article assesses China's unprecedented urbanization movement and describes the changes in China's rules of the game, together with the emergence of a more-or-less chaotic real estate market.

Nowadays it is not so much food security but food safety that is the preoccupation of the Chinese authorities. China seems to have recently discovered that without an adequate regulatory system in place it is impossible to curb food-related crises. Consumers' growing mistrust as well as the sometimes-tainted image of Chinese food products overseas - essential for exports - has spurred the authorities into action. After an initial review of the safety context in China, this article explains the measures taken by the authorities to curb the incidents and will try to assess the weight of consumers in this system in progress.

This content is published in French only: Consommation alimentaire et sécurité sanitaire des aliments en Chine