Available evidence for April 2022–April 2023 shows the opposite of what was predicted:

• China hoarded grain instead of using its stockpile to export calories. By mid‑2022 China held roughly half of global wheat, 60% of rice, and about 70% of maize stockpiles, keeping reserves at “historically high” levels and contributing to higher world food prices, rather than releasing them to world markets.
• China was a large net food importer, not a major exporter “bridging the calorie gap.” In 2022 China imported about $218 billion of food and agricultural products and exported only about $70 billion, making it the world’s largest net food importer. Analyses emphasize that China has been a net importer of agricultural products since 2004 and increasingly relies on foreign supplies of soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, and dairy. This is inconsistent with the idea that it became a primary emergency calorie supplier to food‑insecure countries.
• The main mechanisms that alleviated the 2022–23 food crisis were not Chinese grain exports. The Black Sea Grain Initiative reopened Ukrainian ports and enabled tens of millions of tonnes of grain exports, and Ukraine’s separate Grain From Ukraine program plus substantial U.S. and World Bank funding were central to supplying vulnerable countries and stabilizing prices. These efforts are widely credited in contemporaneous reporting and analysis; China’s food exports are not.
• China’s food assistance and agricultural cooperation did continue, but at modest scale and as a continuation of earlier policy. Chinese official and media sources highlight long‑running South–South food aid and agricultural projects (e.g., donations of a few thousand tonnes of rice or wheat to countries such as Zimbabwe, and financial contributions via FAO/WFP), and stress that this role dates back many years, not as a new, dramatic 2022–23 shift. The quantities involved are tiny relative to global calorie shortfalls.
• Analyses of “grain diplomacy” and food‑security geopolitics over this period focus on Russia and Ukraine, not China, as the actors using grain exports for leverage in Africa and other food‑insecure regions. There is no broad recognition in the literature or news coverage of an “incredible” increase in Chinese geopolitical leverage specifically tied to exporting stored grain.
• Chinese policy in this period emphasized self‑sufficiency and import diversification, not leveraging exports. Strategic documents and commentary stress boosting domestic grain output, increasing stockpiles, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers—again pointing to a defensive, inward‑focused food‑security posture, not the outward‑focused export diplomacy the prediction envisioned.

Given these points, China did not become “one of the very few potential solutions for bridging the calorie gap” by deploying its stockpiled calories abroad, nor did it obviously accumulate an exceptional new level of geopolitical power in food‑insecure countries via such deals during April 2022–April 2023. The core mechanism and magnitude of change described in the prediction did not materialize.