As a DFH far-left liberal progressive cynic, I believe there are important services only government can provide, and yet major limits to what an overly powerful government will provide. America’s “paper of record” goes to China, and provides a narrative on the failure of the positive pole and the success of the negative.
From last Saturday, “Despite Government Efforts, Tainted Food Widespread in China“:
It has been two years since China’s government, reeling from nationwide outrage over melamine-contaminated baby milk that sickened 300,000 infants and killed at least 6, declared food safety a national priority. Since then, it has threatened, raided and arrested throngs of shady food processors — and even executed a couple.
__
But a stomach-turning string of food-safety scandals this spring, from recycled buns to contaminated pork, makes it clear that official efforts are falling short. Despite efforts to create a modern food-safety regimen, oversight remains utterly haphazard, in the hands of ill-trained, ill-equipped and outnumbered enforcers whose quick fixes are even more quickly undone.
__
“Most of them are working like headless chickens, having no clue what are the major food-borne diseases that need to be addressed or what are the major contaminants in the food process,” said Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety expert with the World Health Organization’s Beijing office.
__
In recent weeks, China’s news media have reported sales of pork adulterated with the drug clenbuterol, which can cause heart palpitations; pork sold as beef after it was soaked in borax, a detergent additive; rice contaminated with cadmium, a heavy metal discharged by smelters; arsenic-laced soy sauce; popcorn and mushrooms treated with fluorescent bleach; bean sprouts tainted with an animal antibiotic; and wine diluted with sugared water and chemicals. Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin. Instructions can be purchased online, the Chinese media reported.
__
Scandals are proliferating, in part, because producers operate in a cutthroat environment in which illegal additives are everywhere and cost-effective. Manufacturers calculate correctly that the odds of profiting from unsafe practices far exceed the odds of getting caught, experts say. China’s explosive growth has spawned nearly half a million food producers, the authorities say, and four-fifths of them employ 10 or fewer workers, making oversight difficult.
__
China’s iron political controls ensure that no powerful consumer lobby exists to agitate for reform, press lawsuits that punish wayward producers or lobby the government to pay as much attention to consumer safety as it does to controlling threats to its own power. Instead, like Alice after falling through the rabbit hole, consumers must guess what their food and drink contain…
Yesterday, a report on how “Jasmine Becomes Contraband in China“:
Since Tunisian revolutionaries this year anointed their successful revolt against the country’s dictatorial president the “Jasmine Revolution,” this flowering cousin of the olive tree has been branded a nefarious change-agent by the skittish men who keep the Chinese Communist Party in power…
__
Even if Chinese cities have been free from any whiff of revolutionary turmoil, the war on jasmine has not been without casualties, most notably the ever-expanding list of democracy advocates, bloggers and other would-be troublemakers who have been pre-emptively detained by public security agents. They include the artist provocateur Ai Weiwei, who remains in police custody after being seized at Beijing’s international airport last month.
__
Less well known are the tribulations endured by the tawny-skinned men and women who grow ornamental jasmine here in Daxing, a district on the rural fringe of the capital. They say prices have collapsed since March, when the police issued an open-ended jasmine ban at a number of retail and wholesale flower markets around Beijing…
__
Although some vendors were given vague explanations for the jasmine freeze — that the plant was “symbolic” of those people who wanted to sow rebellion — most people involved in the flower trade have been largely left in the dark about why they should behave with such vigilance, and some professed ignorance of the ban altogether. Thanks to a censored Internet, most Chinese have never heard of the protest calls in China, nor are they aware of the ensuing crackdown.
__
In the absence of concrete information, fantastic rumors have taken root. One wholesale flower vendor at the Jiuzhou Flower and Plant Trading Center in southern Beijing said he heard the ban had something to do with radiation contamination from Japan. A young woman hawking floral bouquets at Laitai, a large flower market near the United States Embassy, said she was told jasmine blossoms contained some unspecified poison that was killing people. “Perhaps you’d like some white roses instead?” she asked hopefully.
__
Wu Chuanzhen, 53, a farmer who tends eight greenhouses of jasmine on the outskirts of the city, said other growers had insisted that adherents of Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement deemed an “evil cult” by the authorities, might use the flowers in their bid to overthrow the governing Communist Party. “I heard jasmine is the code word for the revolution,” she said. Her laughter suggested she thought such concerns were absurd.
So… keeping entrepreneurs from selling poisoned garbage as edible is “beyond the capabilities of the ruling authorities”, but warning people away from selling something that might be interpreted as a purely symbolic protest against those authorities is something else again. I don’t know why the NeoCons of our own GOP are so paranoid about the ChiComs — sounds like their ruling philosophies have a lot in common.
djork
Don’t confuse paranoia with jealousy. To compete with China, we must become China.
Just Some Fuckhead
How prevalent is food-borne illness in Mississippi? Do we have far to go there to catch China?
Chris
@djork:
Uh huh.
Ever hear a Randroid type gloating about how the hardworking Chinese workers are showing us up and delivering the Judgment of God/The Invisible Hand upon our lazy, unionized, minimum-waged workforce for daring to defy the Free Market? Yeah, that. There’s more than a few Randroids who fervently wish we were like them.
WereBear
It turned out the problem they had with the Communists in the first place was… envy.
Maude
All the hype about China out doing the US is not true. They have tons of problems. The mine deaths, serious environmental toxins, lack of factory inspections and they are using 10% more oil than a year ago.
Mike G
The rightards’ real problem with the commies wasn’t their authoritarianism, conformism, corruption, elitist privilege, miserable living standards, oppression and brutality – they seem to enjoy those aspects of ruling when they are in power – it was their lack of cronyism toward business people (witness their coziness with murderous ‘pro-market’ Latin American dirtbags like Pinochet). Now that the ChiComs have turned that problem on its head, they look upon China with a longing gaze.
Zifnab
I don’t think the Chinese authorities are overly successful at either. I mean, if the state wanted to ban pork in its entirety in order to avoid toxic produce, that would be easier than playing poisoned-pork wack-a-mole. But the fact that citizens aren’t really aware of **why** jasmine is banned strikes me as an indication that the state is simply over-thinking itself and wasting a lot of energy.
Meanwhile, the government has been executing people over bad food. So I don’t think you can accuse China of failing in zealotry. They just haven’t seemed to achieved competency yet. :-p I’m more curious to see if the Chinese are learning from their mistakes and improving their version of the FDA, or if they’re just ducking heads and patting backs and pretending the problem is going away.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Zifnab:
Rarely is the question asked: Is our Chinese learning?
aimai
@Zifnab:
If they wanted to improve their FDA they would. And if they wanted to put local producers of toxic products out of business they would simply publicize all outbreaks locally and let the local people take care of it. The nationwide ban on jasmine, though stupid, simply shows that they are well aware of their power when they choose to use it in a national way.
These same problems existed in the USSR and were basically invisible internally as well as externally because of extremely strong controls over information sharing and nationalist paranoia. I remember a friend of mine, a forester, coming back from a flight over the USSR years ago and telling me about flying over acres and acres of dead land which were unexplained and unstudied locally or internationally–local people knew about it but officially and in terms of the media it was a secret. It all only came out after the fall of the wall.
This is not a failure of government regulation–it is all happening in the absence of both true government regulation and a real, activist, media.
aimai
anticontrarian
I believe you just answered your own question.
alwhite
Why don’t the Gautian masters of the universe there threaten to remove their productivity from the moochers & leaches? That always works here.
fhtagn
Is this a coy way of telling us you are legion?
Lysana
So what you’re saying is that China is the 19th century in the US all over again. Truly, a capitalist paradise. (And if the snark isn’t obvious, why are you reading this blog?)
slag
@Chris: Don’t forget all those job-killing environmental regulations the Chinese Masters of the Universe don’t have to put up with. The ability to breathe clean(ish) air is hardly a good tradeoff for the joy of having a slave-waged job, after all.
BGinCHI
@aimai:
I have a feeling you’ll be forced to write this again the next time a Republican occupies the White House.
Mark S.
Newt’s Greatest Hits. My fave:
If you read the article, you’ll find that Newt compared almost everything to Hitler.
BR
OT: You all read that TEPCO has announced that Fukushima plant 1 is in actual meltdown?
Ecks
@fhtagn:
He surrounds us.
Martin
So, the failure of communism implies the failure of democracy? Are they sure that’s the comparison they want to draw?
The left would do well to remind the nation that the assault on government is fundamentally an assault on democracy. That’s the process by which the government has reached its current state, and the right has deemed that process a poison to the nation.
PeakVT
but warning people away from selling something that might be interpreted as a purely symbolic protest against those authorities is something else again.
It’s a little more complicated to clean up staple foods than it is to ban a minor luxury. Still, I am sure the Chinese government is not doing all it could because a lot of the companies that are selling toxic food have bribed local officials or have other kinds of connections.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@aimai:
I think they’re part and parcel of the same thing. What these two vignettes show is that the Chinese government is infinitely more concerned about appearances than anything. You may think Democracies are bad in that way, but elite oligarchic totalitarian governments are even more concerned because they live in a constant state of insecurity and fear of the people. They’re too afraid of hurting their “image” to publicize food dangers the way they ought to; much as they’re too afraid to admit the reason why they’re banning jasmine.
A lot of people think China has disproved the theory that prosperous economies require liberal democracy. That may be true, but I’m not convinced totalitarian societies are equally capable of producing a high standard of living, because there are some regulations/initiatives that can only be successful when grassroots motivated.
I think it ought to be interesting to compare China to India in the next 20 years. India isn’t enjoying quite the same explosive economic growth as China, but I fully expect them to become a modern developed nation sooner.
Anonne
Well, this is one way to curb population growth. :p Let the Randiots rule the roost.
punkdavid
I remember watching the Beijing Olympics and they had one of those between event fluff pieces on, and it was about all the different foods you could buy from street vendors near the arenas. There seemed to be every part of any animal that could be caught and slaughtered, every manner of insect and any animal that might swim, crawl, or just fucking float there in the ocean. I recall thinking that I didn’t see a single thing that could pass muster as “kosher”.
It was at that moment when I realized why there are 1.3 billion people in China. They will eat fucking ANYTHING.
Zifnab
@aimai:
Going after “jasmine” in aggregate is much easier than going after “bad pork” specifically. Jasmine is very easy to spot, and a blanket ban is very simple to implement. It’s not like you have to test every flower in China to figure out if its actually jasmine or not. The power they are wielding is the power of a sledge hammer, not a scalpel.
Like the article said:
If you’ve got a thousand companies, each with a dozen employees, and all the meat is going – untagged and untraced – to a dozen big distributors who gets busted selling bad meat, where is your problem? Is the problem with the distributor? Is it with one of the thousand supply companies? Half the companies? Is literally everyone fucking up at once?
It does actually look like the word is getting out, abet perhaps entirely too late. This really doesn’t strike me as a messaging problem at all. And they aren’t lax about enforcement either. Lots of raids. Lots of arrests. A few executions even. It strikes me as an organizational problem, where the Chinese officials really don’t know how to properly administer thorough screening and inspections.
kdaug
@Lysana:
Thought the same thing, complete with snake-oil salesmen. Eventually, perhaps, they’ll have their Upton Sinclair and a hundred years or so after they’ll have standards.
Or they’ll execute their Upton Sinclair. Media control’s a bitch.
gex
@Mark S.: Newt was Godwin before Godwin was cool.
Ecks
@Zifnab: If they’ve got a few big distributors and lots of growers (I’m picking this up from you said, I have no info myself), then surely the big distributors are the administrative choke point. You let them know that they are going to get a ton of inspections and harsh punishment for violations, and that THEY are responsible for screening out contamination before it leaves their doors. That gives them an incentive to do a bunch of their own checking, and start filtering out fly-by-night suppliers.
Mark S.
@gex:
That attack on Newt is just like 1938 Munich.
Zifnab
@Ecks: Well, that’s definitely the right approach off the cuff. I’m sure it gets more complicated than that – truckers / trains, retailers, and resalers all get a hand too.
I was just trying to highlight how meat contamination inspection and symbolic flower bans aren’t on the same level.
I mean, from where I sit, it’s the difference between successfully organizing a really sweet photo op on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and actually waging a successful war in the Middle East.
Sko Hayes
I have a friend that is working over in China- actually she travels there several times a year to visit a fabric plant owned by the company she works for.
Their attitudes in this plant about inspections and quality control are completely apathetic and it drives her insane (she’s a QC person).
I think I’m going to tell her to start carrying her own food when she goes over there.
Pork soaked in borax, holy shit.
PeakVT
@BR: TEPCO is now saying that there is probably a “hole of about several centimeters” in the RPV of reactor 1.
For those with nothing better to watch, a live feed of Fukushima I.
Amir_Khalid
@Lysana:
More precisely, it’s the Industrial Revolution all over again. China’s replay of it is happening on much the same scale as in the west two centuries ago, and all in one country: the environmental devastation; the brutal exploitation of labor; the rise of unscrupulous operators and robber barons; a government unprepared for the burden of regulation, and indeed often in denial about the need for fundamental change. And to top it off, China has the paradox of a totalitarian government sitting atop a very mercantile culture.
One way or the other, it’s going to look very different over the next few decades. I wouldn’t even necessarily bet on what is really a multinational empire still being a single nation in 2111.
Suffern ACE
Could someone who knows more about meat than I do take a guess as to how soaking pork in Borax would even fool people into thinking it was beef?
BGinCHI
@Suffern ACE: Packaging clearly says “Beefe, Now with Xtra Borax for Pork Flavor.”
WereBear
The simple answer: they don’t care. They have too much population anyway.
I can’t believe a totalitarian government who shoots people in the back of the head for this can’t get a grip on it.
Suffern ACE
@BGinCHI: I guess I’m assuming that it is cuts of meat, not a canned meat. Maybe borax pork tastes and looks something like corned beef. I’d go home and try it out, but it doesn’t sound as fun as, say, dropping a mentos in a bottle of diet coke.
BGinCHI
@Suffern ACE: Countdown to Jeffrey posting pics of delicious concoctions involving pork, bleach, and truffles.
You can’t stump that guy.
Amir_Khalid
@Suffern ACE:
I’m guessing that it would look and smell (and taste) different enough from unboraxed pork that the seller could claim pretty much whatever he wanted to about what it was. And he’d surely grind the meat, or at least debone it, to further disguise its origin.
fhtagn
@Amir_Khalid:
If China does split, which is a possibility, although not a likely one these days, it won’t be because of multi-nationalism. Han immigration into what were once minority areas is reducing ethnic diversity at a rapid pace, and has been for nearly 30 years now. The only “problem” areas are Xinjiang, with the Uighurs, and Tibet, and even there it’s pretty clear that separatism will not be tolerated, and doesn’t have nearly enough traction.
mr. whipple
I think Borax can be used as a preservative, but never heard of it being used that way for things eaten by people.
Amir_Khalid
@WereBear:
Fixelated.
mr. whipple
wiki:
“Food additive
Borax, given the E number E285, is used as a food additive in some countries but is banned in the United States. In consequence certain foods, such as caviar, produced for sale in the U.S. contain higher levels of salt to assist preservation.[5] Its use as a cooking ingredient is to add a firm rubbery texture to the food, or as a preservative. In oriental cooking it is mostly used for its texturing properties. In Asia, Borax (Chinese: 硼砂; pinyin: péng shā) or (Chinese: 月石; pinyin: yuè shí) was found to have been added to some Chinese foods like the hand-pulled noodles lamian and some rice noodles like Shahe fen, Kway Teow and Chee Cheong Fun recipes.[6] In Indonesia it is a common, but forbidden, additive to such foods as noodles, bakso (meatballs) and steamed rice. The country’s Directorate of Consumer Protection warns of the risk of liver cancer with high consumption over a period of 5–10 years.[“
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Gawdammit I cannot wait for President Obama to kick Mitch the Bitch’s depraved ass back to 1865 on this, in full view of the American People, as well as the entire Republican party.
.
.
BGinCHI
@mr. whipple:
I think I know what the “fun” part is.
Omnes Omnibus
@mr. whipple: It’s a
floor waxlaundry detergent and a dessert topping.Litlebritdifrnt
@punkdavid: I can confirm this, I spent two years in Hong Kong and the things that the street food vendors would sell would make most westerners hurl their entire days food intake just looking at it. Luckily for me I was a vegetarian for my entire stay there, so I ended up with noodles and tofu for the most part. The only down side was that they used Sesame Seeds and Sesame Oil alot in their vegetarian dishes, both of which taste like rotting flesh. I went to a Buddhist Monestary and ate lunch at their restaurant, the food was absolutely vile due to the said sesame oil.
mr. whipple
@Omnes Omnibus:
LOL. Exactly what I was thinking.
Litlebritdifrnt
This entire thread reminds me of a Robin of Sherwood episode where the local butcher was selling rotten meat from the Sheriff’s house to the local populace after it had been liberally painted with new blood to make it look fresh. I know there was a reason I was a vegetarian before I moved to the US.
BGinCHI
@Litlebritdifrnt: Just put that in my Netflix queue!
That’s the one from the 70s, yes? Is it good?
Couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it.
/back to regularly scheduled Chinese Cultural programming
MikeJ
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Because it protected you from things that happened in fiction?
Davis X. Machina
Might as well elect Newt. After all,
Seanly
I’d love to see McMegan cooking shitty 1950’s cakes with those. Free Market FTW! Caveat Emptor in the grocery store, biatches!
Omnes Omnibus
@Seanly:
Elves are great bakers.
Davis X. Machina
@Omnes Omnibus: Ha! They look friendly, and competent, but the hygenic conditions in that hollow tree would curl your hair if you knew.
Omnes Omnibus
@Davis X. Machina: I tend towards Pepperidge Farm anyway.
Jeffro
Ditto to all of the above comments that basically say, “China’s got a lot of issues”. I was over there back in February, and upon returning shocked quite a lot of people here when I told them the Chinese had a lot to learn from the U.S. about organization. No, really. Oh, and also how incredibly neat and clean America appears now in most every aspect – I’ll take a declining American neighborhood over an up and coming Chinese one most any day.
Every Chinese person I met wants to live like an American, if not come to live in America itself as soon as possible. They were literally like, “Jesus! Too many people over here!!”, with all of the problems that come with that.
And the one American that wasn’t with our exchange group was a guy trying to straighten out quality control problems in a factory his motor company had contracted out to. He’d had enough, that was clear.
It’s amazing how much silliness our great wealth and location allows us to get away with. But anyway, I do laugh at people worried about the Chinese eating our lunch…just another boogeyman, I guess.
joeshabadoo
As someone who has lived in China I find the ignorance here amazing.
Policing food there is an absolutely gargantuan task.
Problems can occur at all levels and not only that but people make fake stuff and can replace the real stuff with it to make a profit at any point in the chain. The number of small restaurants and farmers is off the charts and they can literally open and close within a matter of weeks. There are small markets everywhere and people on the street who sell produce all over the place. There are no real choke points in the chain to make it easy. This isn’t something that can just be done, especially in a country where so many people are still so poor and has no shortage of corruption.
Someone here even suggested that people solve it locally. That would just invite even more corruption and complicate the process to such an insane degree.
When you see someone selling fruit off of a wagon pulled by a donkey down the street from a high end electronics store in the absolute center of one of the biggest most congested cities in the world you quickly realize that things are very, very different.
To compare it to banning jasmine, a product that is not a necessity and has no real underground market, is ridiculous.
cinesimon
It really is staggering just how much like China the Tea Party folk want American food safety to be. Not to mention environmental and labor protection.
It’s criminal the way the republicans are systematically destroying even basic food safety standards – they even don’t have a problem with their coffer-fillers selling poison-laced toys to kids.
If there were ever a god case for the death penalty in America ala China with regards to tainted food and toys, a number of tea parting republicans have so earned it.
Though the death penalty is to good. I say sentence them to life serving as a support worker in a children’s brain trauma/severe Autism unit(symptoms are often be very similar, so kids with such conditions are often placed in the same unit), 12 hours a day minimum for 25 to life.
cinesimon
It really is staggering just how much like China the Tea Party folk want American food safety to be. Not to mention environmental and labor protection.
It’s criminal the way the republicans are systematically destroying even basic food safety standards – they even don’t have a problem with their coffer-fillers selling poison-laced toys to kids.
If there were ever a god case for the death penalty in America ala China with regards to tainted food and toys, a number of tea parting republicans have so earned it.
Though the death penalty is to good. I say sentence them to life serving as a support worker in a children’s brain trauma/severe Autism unit(symptoms are often be very similar, so kids with such conditions are often placed in the same unit), 12 hours a day minimum for 25 to life.
djheru
@joeshabadoo: Which is why people who constantly bitch about the amount of regulation in the food production and service industries in the U.S. should STFU. Maybe it’s a GOOD thing that we don’t allow any random Joe to sell food from a wagon on the street…
Ecks
@joeshabadoo: As one of those totally underinformed people, my worthless 2 cents is that the culture or corruption is probably the biggest part of the problem. One of the big theories in poli sci is that exactly what ism system your government runs (capitalism, commu/feudalism, etc) is less important than the strength of institutions in your country. Japan and Germany both have very strong public faith in orderliness, and expectations that institutions work in efficient manners to resolve things relatively impartially, and so have tended to do well regardless of (sometimes rapidly changing) systems. Nigeria and Alabama have very weak institutions, and so they are full of corruption that choke off attempts to organize successful systems that can improve life. Similarly, Tuscany has strong institutions, Sicily has weak institutions (and hence the Mafia stepping in to fill an organizing role).
I have no idea where China falls on this scale, but from your description, somewhere in the middle, with a bit of a lean towards corruption.
Suffern ace
How can I get in on the artisan egg craze. Ive never thought of eggs as a DIY kind of thing.
Mnemosyne
@Suffern ace:
It says a lot about the cost of labor in China that it’s apparently cheaper to hire a person to make fake eggs than it is to buy a few chickens to lay real ones.
RSA
The obvious problem is too much regulation; China appears to be just shy of a libertarian paradise.
Katie5
Don’t forget that the US and Canada are not immune to the problems in Chinese food. North America receives huge amounts of Chinese food and food additives. The FDA has very weak food inspection so we can eat the tainted Chinese food just as easily as the Chinese can. Moreover, ingredients (fillers!) like melamine can find their way into any number of US products. It was probably largely a fluke that the contaminated dog food–the dog and cat food recalls were only four years ago!–was ever connected back to China.
cinesimon
Katie5 – and if it were up to the right wing, we would never have known, and there would be no accountability.
Apparently consumer protection – even if it means saving the lives of children – is anti free-market & anti ‘freedom’.
Apparently the only relevant(and constitutional, of course!)accountability in their sick and twisted little world, is that of the wallet of the consumer.
In other words, AFTER a child or ten is killed, the company who killed them may well be held financially accountable because nobody will buy their product anymore. That is, if a court agrees it was definitely their product. In other words: the public may know about a deadly product years after it began killing people(aahh, freedom…).
Because individuals within a business responsible for the deaths(due, for example, to their knowing addition of poisonous ingredients to their product in the name of profit) are above the law and should never be held accountable for their actions, according to the sick, twisted nitwits on the right.
This may sound extreme, but as we have seen with a number of new republican governors, this is exactly the type of profit-driven inhumanity they have actually been putting into practice and making law.
And republicans in Washington want the same thing on a national level.
TenguPhule
The penalty for being a Randian Anti-regulation droid should be to be a quality inspection and food taster for all Chinese Consumable Imports.
Cheaper then lab rats!
bjacques
China has a philosophy of “killing chickens to scare monkeys.” Since policing food safety is a gargantuan job there, all they can really do is kill someone as an example. But if they’re well-connected, maybe screwing a PLA general’s daughter or son (or both), they get off with a warning. No political connection? Hot lead injection!