Ways That Are Dark

The United States, Europe and other countries are becoming increasingly concerned about quality and safety failures involving Chinese goods. Chinese mainlanders have always known that products made for export are far superior than domestic products, so it was no surprise when an investigation of local food and household items found that at least 20 percent of products tested were substandard or tainted.

In the above photo, Chinese officials are checking barrels of bean sprouts at a workshop being run without a business license in Xiamen. The workshop was found to have used bleaching powder to lighten the color of the bean sprouts.

The New York Times reports on the recent product safety investigation in China Finds Poor Quality in Its Stores:

The government said, for instance, that canned and preserved fruit and dried fish contained excessive bacteria; that 20 percent of the fruit and vegetable juice surveyed was deemed substandard, and that some children’s products were defective or laced with harmful chemicals.

Regulators said, in effect, that goods sold in China were far more hazardous than the exports that were driving the country’s economic growth and now partly the subject of safety and quality debates.

Rather than earnestly tackling this seemingly urgent problem, China warned the western media this week against hyping the hazards of Chinese products. In todays article, China Says Media Is Hyping Food Problems, The Washington Post reports:

China warned the international media against exaggerating its food safety problems and stirring consumer panic, even as its inspectors found substandard children’s snacks and more fake blood protein in hospitals.

Tainted children’s snacks and fake blood protein are problems that have dogged China for years. The government position is that reporting on these issues is a bigger problem tha the fraudulent actions themselves.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Food Contamination, Product Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.