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.

  • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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    6 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

    • ammonium@lemmy.world
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      6 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.

      • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        apart from solar and batteries, they also seem to be doing quite well on wind and train infrastructure

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 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.

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

      • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            What country are you living in that isn’t threatened by some or all of these?

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Thank goodness. Otherwise people outside the U.S. wouldn’t know how bad it is there.

    • MashedTech@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

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

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • rekorse@lemmy.world
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      6 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?

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • rekorse@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          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.

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.