China's Strength in Agriculture: Conceptual and Context Exploration

China's strength in agriculture is a new policy paradigm put forward by the central government for the work of agriculture in the new era, which marks that the construction of China's strength in agriculture is formally incorporated into the strategic system of socialist modernization. We use semantic and context analysis to examine the concept of China's strength in agriculture and analyze the relationship between agricultural power and national power. The concept of China's strength in agriculture conveys dual semantics, which corresponds to the agriculture category and the nation category, respectively. The notion of being an agricultural powerhouse in the world context emphasizes the first semantics, while that in the Chinese context emphasizes the second semantics. According to the principle of connotation category equivalence, there are close relationships between political power, economic power and agricultural power, and the former is stronger than the latter. The key principle of building up China's strength in agriculture is to eliminate the conditions that lead to a mutually exclusive relationship of the double semantics, and to explore and strengthen the conditions that make the double semantics compatible. Therefore, to achieve both national development and the well-being of farmers, it is essential to carefully balance the importance of agricultural strength in relation to both political and economic power.