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.
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.
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.
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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Wut. I’m not sure if this is a distinction without a difference, or a subtle distinction that I need a better grasp on continental philosophy to comprehend.
It’s like saying a state doesn’t take murder seriously - they take getting caught seriously. It’s technically true if you parse it a certain way, but ultimately meaningless
Something can be bad for multiple reasons. Also, there’s multiple actors here. The operators of the state-owned enterprise have different incentives than the regulators
What I’m saying is that because most large businesses in China are either directly controlled by the government or run by ranking party members, someone in power probably already knew this was going on and didn’t care because it made them money. What they do care about is getting caught, made to look foolish, and ruining China’s ability to export cheap, unregulated, and often dangerous crap across the globe. That’s what gets you punished in a situation like this in China, not the actual endangerment of people.
That’s just how an effective political system works. The governor and the people they appointed to cut expenses for Flint MI’s water system didn’t care enough about the potential consequences for the people of Flint because they knew there wouldn’t be severe consequences for them.
No system functions because it depends on people being good kind caring people.
Since you seem to be willfully misunderstanding what I was saying or what I was replying to, I think we’re done here.
I understand exactly what you’re saying, you are saying that Chinese officials don’t really care about endangering people’s lives, they just care about the consequences for doing so.
I’m telling you that’s how all political systems work.
.ml
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.
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.
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.
I like how you think that’s somehow a defense of Foxconn and not showing that it sucks to live in China overall.
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.
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.
Google isn’t the equivalent to Foxconn. It would be more like Ford or some Detroit automaker.
Which one of them has suicide nets?
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.
What? You mean other corporations don’t require their employees to sleep at their jobs?!
But I’m sure that can’t possibly have anything to do with mental illness leading to suicide, hence all the suicide nets on the buildings of all of those other factories. Oh wait.
I’m on the fence about whether it matters or not, that they might only do so to politically save face. ⚖️
At least they save face… Wouldn’t mind some more face saving over here.
Where is “over here” for you?
If all you save is face, THEN YOU HAVE SAVED NOTHING. What do you mean we don’t do this over here, this is all we fucking do. We don’t solve problems, we just market them.
I can’t recall any other countries executing their rich for things like this. Can you?
Especially in the west. In the west they just take a part of their profits as a trivial fine.
I can’t have a conversation with someone advocating murder and wondering why I’m not impressed.
Advocating the death penalty for people who’ve committed mass social murder is not murder.
White collar crime like this is the only case where the death penalty might be useful, since these people actually do a risk-benefit analysis.
the flip side is they tend to take court cases involving individuals less seriously. Rulings are designed to be done in a quick manner and reletively speaking, cam be harsh with sentences. Culturally they care more for someone possibly related(but not guaranteed to be) get punished over verifying if said person is actually guilty of something.
its a system thats good if said perpetrator is caught fast, but terrible for the person who just happened to be there at the wrong time if a perp gets away.
tl;dr swift justice, but dont take as many precautions on whether they got the right person or not.
China just straight up doesn’t prosecute if they don’t have to, and when they do it’s typically following a civil law system that’s generally easier to prosecute than common law. It’s the same reason why Japan has a prosecution success rate of over 99.8%.
Japan has a rate that high because MacArthur was a quasi-fascist who half assed reconstruction and they don’t have the judicial concept of innocent until proven guilty.
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.
When it serves them. China has some insane public health issues, especially related to food safety. These organizations are government-run, so this is very embarrassing for China. Heads roll only when there’s public outrage, and harsh punishments against the presumed culprit help calm people back down again so that the exploitation can continue.
I remember this happening, and the pet food scandal just before it. Melamine was being added to pet food and milk powder to falsely increase their protein values. Enough to cause kidney failure and sometimes death. I used to do protein analysis for food products, and could see how easy it would be for food companies to cheat like this. The percent nitrogen content in a sample is used to estimate the protein value. Melamine powder contains a lot of nitrogen, so it’s blended in to bump up the final protein values. Really shitty thing to do, knowing that it’s toxic.
Yep, so seriously they shut down the app that brought this story to life https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/12/app-that-tracked-fuel-tankers-in-china-used-to-transport-cooking-oil-is-disabled
Almost like they care more about getting caught than the actual crime committed
Yeah some people are dying lmao