China is building a matcha industry. Here are the actual numbers

Two published Chinese government plans set out matcha targets: Tongren city aims for 2,000 tonnes a year by 2026, and Guizhou province aims for over 8,000 tonnes by 2028. For scale, all of Japan produced 5,336 tonnes of tencha in 2024. If the provincial target is met, one Chinese province alone would out-produce Japan.

The published targets

Tongren, a city in Guizhou province, runs a three-year plan for 2024 to 2026 aimed at establishing itself as the "matcha capital of China": 80,000 mu of matcha tea gardens (about 5,300 hectares), 2,000 tonnes of annual matcha output, and over 1.7 billion yuan of production value. It names brand-building around "Fanjing matcha" and the construction and automation of tencha processing facilities.

Guizhou province then set a three-year plan for 2026 to 2028 aimed at becoming a "global base for high-quality matcha raw material": over 200,000 mu of gardens (about 13,000 hectares), over 8,000 tonnes of matcha, and over 8 billion yuan of production value. It also names more than 40 GAP model bases, at least five overseas sales bases, and a target of raising exports 20% a year.

What that would mean

Japan produced 5,336 tonnes of tencha in 2024 — itself about 2.7 times the 2014 figure. The Guizhou target is larger than that, from one province, within a few years.

Nothing about matcha price today makes sense without this. Japanese tencha is expensive because supply is close to fixed: shade-grown, harvested once a year, concentrated in a few regions, and slow to expand because a new tea field takes about five years to reach full production. Chinese production is not bound by those constraints in the same way, and it is being expanded deliberately by policy rather than by market response alone.

What the plans do not tell you

A target is not a delivery. Agricultural plans routinely miss, and matcha in particular is unforgiving: shading time, harvest timing, and milling all have to be right, and getting them right at 8,000 tonnes is a different problem from getting them right at 200.

Quality is the open question. Chinese matcha today is generally shaded less consistently and milled differently from Japanese tencha, which usually reads brisker and more astringent. Whether a policy-driven expansion produces leaf that holds up in a latte — let alone plain — is not something a plan document can answer.

And origin is not a quality grade in either direction. A carefully made Chinese matcha beats a careless Japanese one. The label tells you how something was probably made, not how it actually tastes.

What a café should take from this

If you buy matcha, the supply picture in front of you is: Japanese tencha stays tight and expensive, and a large low-cost alternative is being built on a policy timetable. Both of those are already true regardless of what you think of either.

The practical response has not changed. Buy on cost per drink, taste under milk, and sample before you commit to a kilogram. Those tests work the same whatever is written on the bag.

Where we stand

We sell Japanese matcha from Uji and Nara. We are evaluating Chinese-origin matcha and have not brought any to market, so nothing here is a claim about a product we sell. We will say so plainly if that changes.

Sources

The Chinese targets are from two published government plans — Tongren City’s three-year action plan for expanding and strengthening the matcha industry (2024–2026) and Guizhou Province’s three-year work plan for high-quality development of the matcha industry (2026–2028) — as compiled by the Norinchukin Research Institute in "The matcha boom and the rise in sencha prices" (May 2026). Japanese tencha production is from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Tea Situation Report of October 2025, using National Federation of Tea Producers data.