In January, the CPC Central Committee issued the first policy document of 2016 entitled “Strengthening the Food Safety Responsibility System and Making Quality of Agricultural Products and Food Safety an Important Index in the Assessment of the Performance of Party and Government Leadership”. Recently Professor Sun Xianzhong was interviewed by the newspaper Legal Daily on the implication of this policy document. In the interview, Professor Sun pointed out that, in recent years, a series of major food safety incidents had occurred in China. Although the governments at various levels have adopted forceful measures to prosecute and punish the enterprises responsible for such incidents, they have not taken effective measures to investigate the administrative and criminal responsibilities of the regulators for dereliction of duty in these incidents. Up to date, very few government officials have been removed from office because of their failure to prevent food safety incidents. Meanwhile the system of responsibility for food safety incidents also has the problems of arbitrariness and lack of consistency. The newly-adopted policy document aims to solve the above problems by linking food safety with assessment of the performance of leading cadres of the governments, thereby forcing local governments to attach more importance to the food safety issue.