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submitted 9 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.

The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.

It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.

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[-] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 67 points 9 months ago

Last major Chinese food poisoning scandal I'm aware of, that killed 8 babies, resulted in 2 executions, 3 life-in-prisons (including the CEO), and 7 government officials getting fired.

They take this shit seriously. Wonder how it'll shake out.

[-] geekwithsoul@lemm.ee 59 points 9 months ago

They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at. Remember the government essentially has its finger in every pie so this kind of thing is not bad because it endangered people’s lives, it’s bad because it makes them look bad and might impact their exports.

[-] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at.

This is it exactly. They (gov) literally don't care if anyone gets hurt, they just care what the world's perception of them is.

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[-] pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 32 points 9 months ago

It's a shame when China takes things more seriously than the western world.

Like, a there's a million reasons to hate them, but how they deal with companies endangering lives isn't one of them.

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Kind of. It depends on how egregious it is. Companies endangering lives by pitting melamine in mile - jail. Foxconn endangering lives by overworking people in work camps - 👨‍🦯

But I definitely give you that some of the more egregious cases are taken more seriously than in the west.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 10 points 9 months ago

Oh, Foxconn again. a) Suicide rates of Foxconn workers match that of Mainland university students (and is way lower than the overall average but that would compare the young often male workers against elderly rural ladies) and b) it's a Taiwanese company.

Don't get me wrong though they're still awful but they're not that awful. Also they're pulling out of China, wages are getting too high.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Suicide rates of Foxconn workers match that of Mainland university students (and is way lower than the overall average but that would compare the young often male workers against elderly rural ladies)

I like how you think that's somehow a defense of Foxconn and not showing that it sucks to live in China overall.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Not really. 14 in a year out of 1m employees makes a rate of 1.4/100k let's see how that number compares to WHO statistics. Armenia has a rate of 1.4 in the 25-34 age range, and it's the second lowest. China average in that group is 5.9.

What you're looking it is the suicide rate of people of a population which thinks it has a future: Students got into university, kids from poor villages made it into Foxconn to make money -- yes, minimum wage, but they're making money. Their alternative would be working on the family farm for much less than that (though including room and board). Or work in construction, a much more physically demanding and dangerous job. There's not many options in China for rural people.

There's a fucking fuckton to criticise about Foxconn not to speak of China or tankies or capitalists in general. This isn't one of those things. On the contrary, focussing in on a false narrative detracts from actual issues such as worker's safety, forced overtime, the right-out military company culture, etc. When did you last hear about those things? Did you hear about them, ever? Nah, it's always the suicides.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm pretty sure less than 14 people in a year jumped off of Google's headquarters.

(Insert virtually any other non-Chinese corporation or factory not located in China in Google's place.)

I'm also pretty sure Google didn't have to install suicide nets.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Google doesn't have a million employees. It also doesn't have company barracks, if a google engineer wants to off themselves they're probably going to do it at home or on the Bay Bridge, not at headquarters. Where you probably can't open the windows on the upper floors.

But if you can find suicide rates of google employees -- not just on-site, but overall, I'm all ear. You can look at literally any population, it's never going to be zero.

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[-] SeattleRain@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

If that were true it wouldn't happen in the first place. They only take it seriously when it's so bad they can't cover it up anymore. Something like this take ALOT of corruption.

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[-] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 53 points 9 months ago

And that's not even the most disgusting thing related to cooking oil in China...

https://youtu.be/zrv78nG9R04

[-] Psythik@lemmy.world 30 points 9 months ago

I don't even have to click to recognize that you more than likely linked to the video about people turning raw sewage into cooking oil.

[-] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 8 points 9 months ago

Yes... Unfortunately, yes.

[-] wieson@feddit.org 10 points 9 months ago
[-] bfg9k@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

It was fooken one of yss

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[-] SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world 41 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

China is collapsing before our very eyes, and it's already too late to turn things around. There's literally nothing that the CCP can do to get themselves out of this hole. The demographics are cooked, the economics are cooked, the public infrastructure is cooked, the foreign policy is cooked, the domestic politics are cooked, their environments are cooked, and the list goes on and on. China is one big clusterfuck right now and we should watch everything as it unfolds and take notes on it. China's downfall is going to be the biggest and most devastating self inflected collapse in history.

We should also do the same with Russia because they're also collapsing as we speak and it might be the end of Russia as a multiethnic empire for good. We're living in interesting times people

[-] Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 9 months ago

This sounds very close to the description of the US in this very moment. From an outsiders perspective China seems to be doing about as good and bad as the US all things considered.

[-] Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Except Chin's dictator is grown up.

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[-] ammonium@lemmy.world 41 points 9 months ago

I'm the first one to hate on the CCP, but people have been saying that China is going to collapse anytime now for 20 years.

The demographics are a real problem, but nothing that will cause an immediate collapse. Housing, youth unemployment and inequality are real imminent issues, but the CCP has survived much worse and I think they will survive this as well.

Economical they have made some good bets, investing in solar and batteries, for that alone we should hope they don't collapse, it would be a setback of several years or maybe decades.

I believe China will more go the way of Japan, stagnate but not collapse.

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[-] MashedTech@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

The US Supreme court also just overturned Chevron deference. Shit sucks everywhere.

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[-] rekorse@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

I dont understand how your post has so many up votes when you said not a single specific thing. Can you explain any of the reasons you say China is obviously in a death spiral?

Is it just a feelings based thing from reading posts on here?

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[-] SeattleRain@lemmy.world 37 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Nooooo, it's all Western lies!

  • lemmy tankies
[-] Objection@lemmy.ml 12 points 9 months ago

Nobody's denying this, there's plenty of Chinese sources reporting on it.

Funny how even when you actually have a true story to talk about you can't resist making shit up.

[-] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 11 points 9 months ago

Because it's easier to call anything that disagrees with your world view as "lies" than to accept that the own world view is wrong.

Tankies are the masters of rejecting reality.

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[-] stephen01king@lemmy.zip 9 points 9 months ago

Can't find this posted in !worldnews@lemmy.ml. Can you link to one?

[-] Objection@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 months ago

Posted it myself, just now, just for you.

To be clear, what you're suggesting is that stories that the Chinese government is actively talking about would be censored on lemmy.ml. Let's see if that's true! Can't wait to find out!

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[-] Deceptichum@quokk.au 31 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

.ML working mods in overtime.

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[-] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 24 points 9 months ago

Some heads will literally roll for this. Is embezzlement worth death penalty?

[-] tiefling 20 points 9 months ago

In the US it would be a fine equal to 5% of one year's profits, spread over a 10 year period

[-] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 8 points 9 months ago

Hey whoa, some low-level employee would go to jail too.

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[-] Cyberjin@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

I don't think so, companies usually gets away with it unless related something anti nationalist like Japan.

Tsingtao: Video shows Chinese beer worker urinating into tank https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67191242

The guy who recorded the video of the guy pissing in the beer got in trouble for "disturbing the peace"

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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

For the right price, sure. But then nobody gets into this game thinking they're the ones who will get caught. You think Elizabeth Holmes and SBF believed they'd be cooling their heels in federal prison when they started lying?

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[-] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 23 points 9 months ago

This is obviously not good, but I don't have great intuition.

If I have a mug full of gasoline (or worse, diesel or something cruder), and reuse that for coffee, I can imagine that being bad. But a tanker truck is humongous, and the contamination would, I imagine (???), scale roughly like a surface area-to-volume kind of thing, meaning that contamination for a huge container should be substantially "better" than my coffee example. (Perhaps this scaling law is a bogus assumption though?)

Of course it is still bad, gross, and probably dangerous...

[-] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago

The additives and chemicals in fuel are straight up cancerous. Your coffee in this example, would now come with a hint of crippling disabilities for your children.

Your supposition about surface area is correct but with contaminants this powerful it's not really valid.

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[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yup, and that's why they got away with it without anyone noticing. Eating that oil your whole life is probably not good for you though, because fuel chemicals can be pretty nasty. They say there's no safe level of a carcinogen.

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[-] Cyberjin@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

Profits over people's wellbeing as they say in China.

Very related story Poop suction truck carried drinking water

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[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


State broadcaster CCTV earlier this week called the alleged practice and the potential contamination of food products from left-behind fuel in the tankers “tantamount to poisoning” and showing “extreme disregard for consumers’ lives and health.”

Some also appeared to link the situation to broader issues in the country, where an economic downturn is driving social frustration and there are deep-seated concerns about the limits of accountability for powerful and government-linked entities.

A staff member from Hopefull Grain and Oil Group on Monday told state-owned news outlet Economic View that “relevant departments” have investigated the matter and would make an official announcement.

Despite rising living standards in recent decades, food safety has been an ongoing issue in China, where dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s, sparking tighter government regulation.

In a 2013 speech cited in a People’s Daily report last year, Xi said the ruling Communist Party’s ability to “provide satisfactory assurances on food safety” is a “major test of our governance capabilities.”

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the directive to investigate the current scandal likely came “from the very top” – noting that food safety is both a key issue linked to government legitimacy and the allegations are landing at a sensitive time when economic hardship in China is causing a more “volatile society.”


The original article contains 1,285 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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