Cooking Oil Scandal Sparks Outrage Over Food Safety in China

A man riding a bicycle with a barrel of cooking oil leaves a supermarket in Beijing on June 12, 2024. Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images

The Chinese communist regime is facing a public outcry over the revelation that some big companies transport cooking oil in contaminated fuel tankers.

On July 2, Chinese state media outlet Beijing News reported that to save costs, the multipurpose use of the same tankers for transporting cooking oil, fuel, and industrial chemicals has “become the norm.”

Its journalists found that many tanker trucks, which had just unloaded coal oil, were immediately used to carry edible soybean oil, without any cleaning process.

“It is an open secret in the tanker transportation industry” that edible liquids are transported in chemical liquids trucks without cleaning, an unnamed driver was quoted in the report as saying.

The companies named in the report are well-known state-owned enterprises, including Sinograin and Hopefull Grain and Oil Group.

The revelation of such an issue is rare in China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls how news is reported. From floods and the COVID-19 pandemic to economic woes and sporting events, information deemed harmful to the regime’s image often quickly disappears, especially ahead of major Party meetings.

However, the report was published less than two weeks before the Party’s Third Plenum, a major gathering of the regime’s top officials that is held every five years and started on July 15.

On China’s heavily censored internet, the report went viral on July 9, after Chinese authorities broke a week-long silence on the matter. In an online statement, the State Council stated that it would “thoroughly investigate” the issue, saying illegal enterprises and responsible parties will be “severely punished in accordance with the law.”

A hashtag asking where these contaminated edible oils were transported reached the No. 1 spot on the trending page of Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in China, attracting more than 156 million views on July 9 alone.

Sinograin announced on July 6 that it had terminated its partnership with the tanker operator involved and had initiated an internal investigation. Hopefull Grain and Oil Group had yet to release an official response at the time of writing but told state media outlet Xinhua earlier that its products “don’t have any quality issue.”

The revelation rekindled food safety concerns among the Chinese.

One Weibo user said: “It’s difficult to make money, find a job, and survive. There are almost no guarantees for anything. Now, is even having a quiet and safe meal a luxury? We can avoid unclean restaurants, but how do we escape when the poisoning comes to our own homes?”

Some compared this issue to the tinted baby formula scandal in 2008, which caused tens of thousands of children, mostly infants, to develop kidney stones and other illnesses after the industrial chemical melamine was found in the formula powders produced by Sanlu, a Chinese dairy giant.

“Every generation has its own Sanlu,” a Weibo user wrote.

‘No Food Safety’

Associate professor Feng Chongyi from the University of Technology Sydney said this scandal indicates a fundamental lack of respect for life in China.

“China is the country with the most rampant toxic food,” Mr. Feng told The Epoch Times.

He said the issue is caused by corruption within the CCP. While the regime outwardly promotes anti-corruption efforts, almost every industry, including the food industry, is rife with bribery, according to Mr. Feng.

“If public authority and government regulatory measures are in place, these issues can be quickly eliminated,” he said. “However, the CCP is a highly hypocritical and extremely corrupt regime, so there is no food safety in such a system.”

Wu Se-chih, a researcher at Taiwan Thinktank in Taipei, attributed the food safety issue to the lack of rule of law in communist China.

Mr. Wu said there are two pathological issues in the political system under the CCP.

“The first issue is within the Party itself,” he said. “The CCP’s governing tendency in such incidents is to prioritize the stability of the regime above the interests of the people. Therefore, their response is often ‘all bark and no bite.’”

The second pathological issue is that most of the sizable enterprises in China have government ties, he said, which makes it difficult to punish these companies from the perspective of the public’s or consumers’ interests.

Luo Ya contributed to this report.