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.
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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Are you calling for the CPC to indiscriminately arrest people on rumors alone? Because last time I checked “getting caught” was a prerequisite for any kind of fair justice system.
They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at.
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
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
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.
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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Yeah some people are dying lmao
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
Nooooo, it’s all Western lies!
- lemmy tankies
I don’t consider myself a tankie, but I’ve been called one here, and I don’t think it’s a lie.
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.
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
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.
apart from solar and batteries, they also seem to be doing quite well on wind and train infrastructure
Demographic collapses don’t happen overnight, they take decades to unfold. Demographers were able to predict China’s demographic collapse since they started seeing the demographic shifts that happened due to the implantation of the one child policy back in 1979. That’s why you’ve been hearing about it for so long and why you’ll continue to hear about it for years to come. As time marches on, those demographic collapse went from being predictions to becoming reality, and as time continues to pass, the current trends will continue to get worse and worse. The damage these demographic trends will inflect on the system will incrementally increase year by year until the system can’t support itself any longer.
The thing is that they can’t reverse the demographic situation. Even if China started forcing people to have kids or opened their borders to allow for millions of immigrants, it won’t mean anything. It’s already too late, the demographic collapse is going to happen no matter what the CCP does. Keep in mind, Japan is in the same position and they will face the same fate regardless. The only difference is that Japan is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy, so it can at least slow down the inevitable and buy itself some time. China unfortunately doesn’t have this luxury.
For the record, I don’t want China to collapse like this because the effects are going to be devastating. However, the numbers don’t lie and every metric is showing us that they are heading towards a collapse at full speed. The CCP can’t handle this, no government can in their position. There’s really nothing like what China is going through in history. The scale and speed at which this collapse is happening is unprecedented. It’ll most likely go down as the most defining event of the 21st century.
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.
Except Chin’s dictator is grown up.
The single most accurate predictor of a country’s future is their demographic structure, and China’s is one of the worst, not just in the world, but in history. It’s pretty normal for nations to go into cycle of prosperity and despair where they expand and shrink, however, what China is going through is unique. China’s population is predicted to shrink down from 1.4 billion people to just 587 million by 2100. That is insane. It’s scale, speed, intensity is something we’ve never seen before. China’s demographic collapse is going to be worse than Europe during the black plague or China during the Great Chinese Famine or Germany after WWII. China is about to go into uncharted territory. We don’t know what things will be like on the other side because we’ve never seen it before and we have no model or system to deal with it. One thing is for certain though, China as we know it today under the CCP is going to go away.
As for the US, if it were to continue on it’s current demographic trends, it’ll reach China’s current demographic situation at some point in the second half of this century, that’s a lot of time to figure things out. At that point, other countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, as well as China would have been decades into their demographic collapses. That’s a lot valuable time to learn from what these countries went through and proceed with more knowledge captiously based on what minimized the damage and what didn’t.
Wouldn’t be Lemmy if there weren’t a comment unnecessarily shitting on the US in the comments section of an article about another country.
Maybe I overreacted, but the person that was shitting on China themselves seemed to just spout US propaganda talking points, when in reality both have huge issues and also their good parts.
If I had to chose, I’d lean in the US’s favor overall, but not by much, thankfully I don’t live in either of them.
What country are you living in that isn’t threatened by some or all of these?
Thank goodness. Otherwise people outside the U.S. wouldn’t know how bad it is there.
The US Supreme court also just overturned Chevron deference. Shit sucks everywhere.
While that is true, I think it is important to note that as bad as our problems are, and some of them are pretty bad, that there are countries that have it way worse than us. China is one of those countries. Some of their problems are genuinely mind boggling. Imagine going through our current problems right now but with an irreversible demographic collapse. It’s nuts to think about.
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?
It’s not feeling based, China is truly going through a devastating collapse that can’t reversed. Take their demographics as an example. Here are some interesting pieces of information about China’s demographics:
- There’s a gender imbalance of 110 males per 100 females, which is the highest in the world. That means there’s over 30 million males that don’t have a female counterpart.
- The population is expected to shrink down to 587 million by 2100 according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
- The country is going to have more retirees than workers at some point in the 2030s
- The fertility rate is less than 1.2, which is either the second or third lowest fertility rate of any non city state country in the world (sources differ slightly)
- The country’s fertility rate is one of the fastest shrinking in the world (regularly ranks among the 5 worst)
- China’s has one of the fastest aging populations in the world
- China is expected to have worse demographics than the US by 2035 in all metrics despite the US being a developed country and China is not
- China’s median age already surpasses that of the US
- Officially, the country has been shrinking since 2022
- According to Yi Fuxian, a demographer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the CCP has overcounted their population by an excess of at least 130 million people since the one child policy was implemented. This means that China’s demographic problems are worse than we thought and that China’s population probably peaked 10-15 years ago
- China is not a destination for immigration by any stretch, China currently has around 1.5 million immigrants and about half of those are from Macau, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.
How does a country recover from this? This is beyond devastating. In fact, it’s terminal. No amount of authoritarianism or nationalism or desperate wars or anything can save the country from what it’s going through. It’s too late to damage control and there’s really nothing to turn things around. The system is going to collapse, and we’re going to see China’s power and influence disappear from the world stage in the upcoming decades. China in it’s current form under the CCP is going away. Pay attention and take notes because we’re witnessing the greatest collapse in human history.
Not being able to take care of your old when they can’t work anymore does not equal the greatest collapse in human history. I guess we will see though.
Freaking madlads making life interesting. I want it boring.
Things are going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. It’ll be a long time since the world is going to feel stable and boring. So buckle up, we’re in for a weird ride.
We have to learn to better frame the issues. When Japan was ascendant, everyone projected them to overtake the US in economic power and we got all afraid and passed a bunch of protectionist rules about car imports. Think pieces get written about how their economic model was better than the US and the US is a crumbling empire.
But it turned out it was a huge real estate bubble combined with/caused by the demographic benefit coming from a boom generation going into their prime labor years and once that generation started aging out there was a real estate slump and a balance sheet recession that lasted a decade, and they never recovered to the levels everyone was projecting 10 years prior.
Now literally the exact same thing is happening with China and everyone is all shocked. Guess what, it’s going to happen again.
It’s not to say the US will never fall to 2nd place in the global order, but it’s not going to be from some country growing at 10%/year forever, that doesn’t actually ever happen.
Perhaps the lesson that will come from all these demographic collapses will be that economic growth should be slow and steady. Countries that try to rush rising up the ranks of standards of living by doing whatever they can to generate economic growth regardless of consequences will end up trading their long term future for short term prosperity.
Profits over people’s wellbeing as they say in China.
Very related story Poop suction truck carried drinking water
I’ve never heard that. Do they really say that in China? All I can find is mentions of common prosperity.
Sorry, Meant as the do in China.
You meant as they do in capitalism?
Yeah, but way worse because no real watchdogs (free press) watching out for the people, no good samaritans etc.
Some heads will literally roll for this. Is embezzlement worth death penalty?
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?
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”
If you’ve tried Tsingtao beer, it’s just watered piss anyway.
you would be surprised what is considered normal.
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…
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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Stop, an empty tanker truck can have a huge amount of fuel in it. You do know that fuel has a lot of impurities right? If you don’t believe me just pull up some pictures of fuel tanks on cars being opened. They can be caked with sediment and heavy metals at the bottom even after a few years.
You are a bad dangerous shill.
A simple, “your scaling argument doesn’t really apply since the amount of residue left behind scales with the volume, not area” would have sufficed.
Gasoline is a pretty powerful solvent; would residue left behind that doesn’t come off from gasoline be liberated by cooking oil? It’s an honest question.
And I sure hope the regulatory agencies and shipping companies in my country do a better job than in China. This sort of thing is terrifying; I’m just curious as to an emotionless analysis of how bad this likely is. What concentration of benzene is acceptable? “None” would be best but we already breathe it. Would contaminated cooking oil likely be equivalent to…inhaling once at a gas station? A wet martini with diesel instead of vermouth?
Some people like asking hypothetical questions, others just take every random question as a personal affront.
Put your money where your mouth is. Take an old gasoline can and fill it with cooking oil then feed it to your family until it’s empty. Record the results. You won’t though.
No shit.
My question was an honest scaling law question. Of course this is bad. Which is what I said.
My question is how bad, which is a legitimate question, and is not in any way saying these are defensible actions. They are not.
If you fill a thimble with diesel, drain it, and then fill it with water, that’s gonna be super gross — the diesel will probably form a thin layer on the thimble which is then diluted with a thimble full of water. Super gross. But by the time you get to a fuel can, the thin layer of diesel on the can is now diluted by a can of water. Because surface area scale like length squared but volume like length cubed, this is a better situation (for a given amount of water). Now when this is scaled up further, the diesel gets increasingly diluted. This is the root of my question, it’s not saying that we should accept this or that it’s good, I’m just curious.
If a cup has a few drops of water after you pour it out,
Say a drop is 0.05ml (20drop/mL is rule of thumb for chemistry). Say your glass cup holds 16oz (mine does), that’s 473mL.
(4*0.05mL / 473mL) *100 = 0.04228% of the original concentration. Now scale that volume up. That ratio is going to be much smaller, since you’re right about volume vs surface area.
5ppb is the cutoff for benzene in stunning water in Oregon apparently. EPA says 5ug/L.
5ppb is apparently 0.0000005%. That’s about 84,000x higher than the cutoff for that one potential contaminant.
Given how small the minimum acceptable level is for many chemicals in gasoline or fuel… Yeah I bet it would increase cancer rates in a statistically significant way.
So 84,000 for a glass assuming 100% of the fluid is benzene (unless I misunderstood your calculation). Benzene concentration is about 1% of gasoline, and a tanker is about 20,000L, or ~40,000x more than a cup. Cube root of 40,000 is about 34 (cube root for the surface to volume factor). 34*100 is 3400, which is about 25x off from the 84,000 reduction required to be “safe.” So it’s roughly 25x worse than the Oregon cutoff (but seemingly within EPA limits, which appears to be ~1000x less stringent [!!!]). Unless I made some errors or misunderstood.
In any event I’ll try to source my cooking oil from uncontaminated trucks!
(As an aside, thanks for taking my question seriously and putting thought into an answer, unlike some of the other more “colorful” responses!)
Test it out bro. Since you believe the impact of putting gasoline in food is so contentious. It’s funny how you still deflect by implying it was “a thimbleful” when you have no idea how much it was or how dangerous it is.
B-b-b-but you’re just asking the questions right?
…scaling laws. They are best illustrated with different sized items. Like a thimble, a coffee cup, or an oil tanker, all representing volumes of different orders of magnitude.
Consider this:
When the cooking oil is heated, the distillate contamination will flash off, leaving a nice clean cooking oil.
If distillate is slightly contaminated with with cooking oil, probably not so bad that engines burning it can’t deal with the slightly differing heat rate and specific gravity of the new mixture.
😂
Nope.
I don’t even feel like I should tell you why you’re wrong, but here we go.
You assume that the fuel oil is more volatile then cooking temperatures, but what fuel oil? Diesel? Diesel has a boiling temperature between 160c and 360c(diesel varries because there are different compositions and blends). Deep fry is between 160c and 190c. That assumes we’re deep frying. Plenty of ways to use cooking oil without heating to those temperatures.
Also assumes that there’s nothing else in the fuel oil. Plenty of additives that might not boil off or if they do, be toxic if inhaled. I have of stories of transformer oil being used for deep frying.
I’m taking the piss.
Reasoning like the stupid idiots who decided this was a good idea.
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This is why I refuse to purchase or consume ANY food products from China. There system can’t be trusted period.
On China’s heavily moderated social media platforms, many members of the public called for product recalls and greater industry oversight.
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.
“Even the cooking oil essential to people’s daily lives has now become problematic… Ordinary people cannot be properly safeguarded… Now I just want to scoff at (phrases like) ‘rule of law’ and ‘serving the people’ whenever I see them,” read one comment on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo, that garnered thousands of likes.
I thought China was heavily censoring criticism and you couldn’t voice your opinions publicly? lol
Basically a food scandal has been uncovered by their media and the government takes action in the public’s interest. Something you’d expect a functioning government to do. And this article makes you think it’s a bad thing.
Summed up:
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.
Based.
The entire article has so much coping and seething and was a really fun read. Thank you for sharing.
I think you can’t really voice your opinion. But that’s due to the consequences, you can’t post illegal shit to your Facebook too, i.e. you’ll be reported very quickly and it’ll be taken down but you can still do it if you want to run the gauntlet.
