The Chinese communist regime is facing a public outcry over the revelation that some big companies transport cooking oil in contaminated fuel tankers.
The discovery has stirred widespread outrage over inadequate food safety in China, where the regime’s top ranks are set to convene for a major policy meeting.
On July 2, China’s state media 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.
On China’s heavily censored internet, the report went viral on July 9, after the Chinese authorities broke a week-long silence on the matter. In an online statement, the State Council said it would “thoroughly investigate” the issue, saying that illegal enterprises and responsible persons will be “severely punished in accordance with the law and will not be tolerated.”
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.
The revelation rekindled food safety concerns among the Chinese.
One Weibo user stated: “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?”
‘No Food Safety’
Associate Professor Feng Chongyi from the University of Technology Sydney said that 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 that the issue is due to 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. However, the CCP is a highly hypocritical and extremely corrupt regime, so there is no food safety in such a system,” he said.
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 that there are two pathological issues in the political system under the CCP.
“The first issue is within the Party itself. 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,’” he said.
The second pathological issue is that most of the sizable enterprises in China often have government ties, he said, which makes it difficult to punish these companies from the perspective of the public’s or consumers’ interests.