Archive for the ‘Corruption’ Category

Schools Fell While Other Buildings Held

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

China’s deadly earthquake on May 12 was a tragedy. It is already reported that over 50,000 people lost their lives. Now that rescue efforts are winding down attention is turning to other matters. In a country where families are only allowed to have one child, many are asking why so many schools collapsed. Some disturbing things are emerging.

The Washington Post reports in: Schools Fell While Other Buildings Held

Since the quake, parents’ grief has turned to anger.

Why, they ask, did the school collapse when other nearby buildings, including government offices, the teachers’ dormitory and even an old classroom building housing pet rabbits, withstood the quake?

The same question is being asked all over Sichuan, as residents have started to notice that, on street after street, schools collapsed while most government buildings did not. In Mianzhu county, a quarter of the 43 primary and secondary schools caved in, leaving more than 1,000 students dead, while the gleaming government complex remained fully operational and is now a staging area for emergency rescue and cleanup operations.

In total, nearly 7,000 schools have been reported destroyed in Sichuan by the quake; that figure could rise as reconstruction crews reach the hardest-hit areas.

The earthquake was a devastating tragedy. Sadly, it reveals a few unpleasant things about safety and where priorities were not in good alignment.

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Kill the messenger

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

Until recently, the problem with Chinese goods has not been one of quality. The real problem is that people keep complaining about the quality of goods. What really irks the iron-fisted rulers, is the whistle blower, the one who points the finger at corruption and shoddy manufacturing and demands something be done about it.

This week The Washington Post has an exposé on the consequences and hard times faced by the whistle blowers, who have been trying to warn us of certain dangers for a long time. The article tells the stories of several concerned citizens, who passed on stories about fake medicines, counterfeit vitamin drinks, and drugs with poisonous ingredients. Invariably those who spoke out were arrested, lost their jobs, and were threatened and intimidated.

Read The Washington Post article, Safety Falters As Chinese Quiet Those Who Cry Foul, for yourself.

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China Executes Ex-Food Regulator

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

The Associated Press reports:

China executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog on Tuesday for approving untested medicine in exchange for cash, the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis.

During Zheng Xiaoyu’s tenure from 1998 to 2005, the State Food and Drug Administration approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to previous state media reports. One antibiotic caused the deaths of at least 10 people.

”The few corrupt officials of the SFDA are the shame of the whole system and their scandals have revealed some very serious problems,” agency spokeswoman Yan Jiangying said at a news conference held to highlight efforts to improve China’s track record on food and drug safety.

The government also assured athletes, coaches, officials, and others could count on safe meals at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, and that food would be free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance enhancing drugs.

Food safety authorities, meanwhile, promised to investigate a newspaper report that more than half of the water coolers in Beijing used counterfeit branded water.

Scandals over contaminated Chinese food exports have underscored chronic problems with adulterated ingredients and fake products in the domestic supply, raising questions of how well China can guarantee the purity of food for the Olympics.

Yan acknowledged that her agency’s supervision of food and drug safety remains unsatisfactory and that it has been slow to tackle the problem.”China is a developing country and our supervision of food and drugs started quite late and our foundation for this work is weak, so we are not optimistic about the current food and drug safety situation,” Yan said.

The complete story is available at The New York Times: China Executes Ex-Food Regulator.

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Corrupt official sentenced to death

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

A Chinese court sentenced a former official from the State Food and Drug Administration to death today. It’s the country’s second death sentence for a former drug regulator in the last three months. Cao Wenzhuang oversaw the pharmaceutical registration department, which gave him the power to approve the production of drugs. He was convicted of accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from two companies who were seeking approval for their drugs. Under Cao, the registration department at one point had a staff of 12 and approved 14,000 drugs in three months.

While the world has reeled at recent tainted food scandals, the more serious problem lies in China. The New York Times reports in its coverage of the latest high profile death sentence:

Chinese consumers are thought to be the primary victims of fake and substandard food and drugs, and the nation’s top regulators have been blamed for putting the public at risk by swapping cars, gifts and cash for granting licenses to drugs that in some cases have turned out to be deadly.

And while the recipient of the bribes is being dealt with harshly, what is the fate of the companies accused of bribing him?

Although some pharmaceutical companies involved in the scandal have been shut down and some executives have been jailed, the government has said little about prosecuting the companies and officials who paid the bribes.

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Latest problems may only be the tip of the iceberg

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Following up on the post Problems In China May Be Worse Than They Appear, fears continue to grow that recent discoveries of tainted goods only represent the tip of the iceberg. There is an excellent piece by Howard W. French in The International Herald Tribune entitled Scandals hint at reality behind China’s ‘miracle’ . The article takes recent events and places them within a broader picture. There may be some problems with Chinese exported goods, but the real problem lies with goods made for domestic consumption which don’t have to pass the same high standards.

In the broadest sense, what the deluge of scandals suggests is that reality is catching up with the old and familiar story line of the “Chinese miracle.” Indeed, this country has been deluding itself and much of the world with the notion that healthy and lasting prosperity can be built on a foundation of counterfeiting, of exploitation and of fraud.

As governing philosophies go, “Shhh, quiet, we’re busy making money,” is not a very inspiring one, and it leaves a country and its people without any moral or ethical compass, beyond crudities like “might makes right,” or “the ends justify the means,” or “I got here first.

There are serious costs resulting from this governing philosophy.

China’s environment is being ravaged at a pace that many experts both here and outside of the country say is unsustainable, even in the medium term. A change of course proves all but impossible, though, because it is argued that to protect the environment is to slow growth, and to do that is to endanger stability.

…a system that is so clearly based on influence peddling and on power networks, where accountability is elusive and where the individual stands little chance of legal redress, is a system that breeds instability and scandal and an erosion of trust.

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