Ways That Are Dark

Summing up recent events in China, 24/7 Wall St. figures that  Problems In China May Be Worse Than They Appear. Author Douglas A. McIntyre recounts the major revelations that have come to light in recent months. Collectively they paint a dark picture of the current situation in China. The troubling events consist of:

1. The Shanghai Composite is down over 15% in the last five weeks.
2. Nearly one-fifth of the sold-in-China products that were studied failed to meet the country’s quality standards.
3. The US has uncovered tainted pet food, toothpaste, and sea food from China.
4. 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year, mainly from air pollution in large cities.

The author sums all this up as:

Taken separately, the issues with product quality, falling stock markets, and acute health problems may not represent substantial cracks in the country’s economic future. But, taken as a whole, they may well spell the onset of a troubled period.

The original post appears at 24/7 Wall St.

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.

For weeks, regulators have been insisting that food in China is safe. In a recent nationwide crackdown, government inspectors closed 180 food plants and uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations. It turns out that many small food makers have been using industrial chemicals, dyes and other illegal ingredients in making a wide range of food products. Enforcement officials turned up illegal food-making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants, amounting to rampant fraud in the Chinese food industry.

“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department, told state-run news media.

More on this story in The International Herald Tribune article Chinese regulators find rampant abuses in food industry.

Debate over China’s poor food safety record is heating up with the FDA effectively blocking the import of five types of farmed fish. It has been reported by The New York Times that:

Chinese goods make up about 22 percent of United States seafood imports. But they accounted for about 63 percent of the shipments that were refused by the F.D.A. last year for having animal drug residues.

China has vowed food safety changes, but has not yet specified what those changes may be. Online discussion seems to suggest a food safety agreement with China is not only desirable, but an urgent necessity. Check out the hundreds of responses on The Times Reader’s Comments on this issue.