Abstract: China presents typical characteristics of a risk society at the present stage. With the rapid development of informatization and globalization, new food safety risks are emerging and overlapping with traditional ones, increasing the difficulty of food safety governance. This problem has become a major global concern. In this paper, we statistically analyzed 1 110 representative papers in the field of food safety risk governance in China from the core journal database of Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure using the visualization software CiteSpace. It was found that research on food safety risk governance in China did not start until the early part of the new century. The annual number of published papers has steadily increased recently. Over the past 20 years, fruitful achievements have been achieved in seven major topics, which are characterized by three aspects: the transformation from a one-dimensional to a multi-dimensional governance concept, the cross integration of various research methods and disciplines, and the convergence of research forces. As China had entered a new era, future research on China’s food safety risk governance should start with grasping the responsibility in the new era, refining new practical experience and exploring new academic value, so as to make greater contribution to the modernization of China’s food safety governance system and governance capacity.

Key words: food safety; risk management; map of scientific knowledge; CiteSpace; clustering analysis