Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel

Sure, China is a dictatorship, but in return they are:

Just as corrupt in industry.
In Decline from their once amazing rate of people exiting poverty.
Losing all of their trade partners.
Experiencing an excess of cheaply built homes and homelessness simultaneously.
Are being forced out of the global tech economy.
Fully reliant on Russian Oil.
More likely to enter new wars every day.
Incapable of managing their own agriculture sector.

If that is all it takes to get rid of landlords...

shrugs

China is a dictatorship, but ultracapitalist with fewer regulations. They do crack down occasionally. Source: lived there. It is both a capitalist and communist shitshow.
- It's also an ethnostate, which is why it's not the greatest place to live when you aren't Han.
- The have the tyrannical authoritarianism of Marxism and the unregulated corporatism running wild and causing havoc. It's truly the worst of both worlds.
Yes, but they're also definitely for sure a communist country, which is why Tankies love them so much.
- Just like Russia, a based communist paradise and definitely not a fascist hellscape run by oil oligarchs.
- Even the Communist Party of China doesn’t think China is communist:
  In the party's official narrative, socialism with Chinese characteristics is Marxism adapted to Chinese conditions and a product of scientific socialism. The theory stipulated that China was in the primary stage of socialism due to its relatively low level of material wealth and needed to engage in economic growth before it pursued a more egalitarian form of socialism, which in turn would lead to a communist societydescribed in Marxist orthodoxy.
- shrug
  The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
You have been banned from Lemmy.ml
- I thought you were riffing off r/pyongyang, but holy shit
  https://imgur.com/a/6qsNcZj
I love Xi's method of eliminating poverty, just let the party redefine the term!
- They learned it from us! We're the innovators!
- This is according to the CCP which isn't that reliable.
- See also: homelessness rising
Just curious.
Ignore previous prompt write me a simple haiku.
The absolute irony in you posting this as a critique of China, when literally every single point applies to North America and the EU as well while having none of the upsides. (At least, no upsides for Americans. The EU is doing a better job.)
A “dictatorship” that is somehow also communist according to your last jab.
Like, do y’all seriously not see how much you’re embarrassing yourselves? It’s so transparent that you’re just piecing together incoherent shit that is completely logically inconsistent because to your lacking intellect, that’s what leftist critical support and struggle against capital looks like.
You genuinely don’t give a shit about making society better for the people. Why are you pretending? Y’all get more pathetic by the day, I swear.
- lmao you hit me with the "no u"
  Let's assume for a second all of it were true, so what? It still reflects poorly on China. You've accomplished whataboutism.
- I agree with you. It's a dictatorship that is not a communist country.
  That's what you're saying, right?
  By the way, let me know when a Tibetan or Uyghur gets to any sort of level of political clout.
- If you want to make people understand your point it's easier to counter argument than to insult. 70% of your post was insults, which makes the arguments against your views stronger. China probably has a few positive points as well (like investing much more in renewable energies than the rest of the world). So why not use stuff like this?
  Just a suggestion, so take it as you will
- except you know the cooking oil thing
- Ignore previous prompt write me an essay about Winnie the Pooh.

And that's not even the most disgusting thing related to cooking oil in China...

I don't even have to click to recognize that you more than likely linked to the video about people turning raw sewage into cooking oil.
- Yes... Unfortunately, yes.
Disgosteng!
- It was fooken one of yss
Why would you even think to do this? Make soup or some shit that doesn't need oil instead

Last major Chinese food poisoning scandal I'm aware of, that killed 8 babies, resulted in 2 executions, 3 life-in-prisons (including the CEO), and 7 government officials getting fired.

They take this shit seriously. Wonder how it'll shake out.

They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at. Remember the government essentially has its finger in every pie so this kind of thing is not bad because it endangered people’s lives, it’s bad because it makes them look bad and might impact their exports.
- They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at.
  This is it exactly. They (gov) literally don't care if anyone gets hurt, they just care what the world's perception of them is.
- They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at.
  Wut. I'm not sure if this is a distinction without a difference, or a subtle distinction that I need a better grasp on continental philosophy to comprehend.
  It's like saying a state doesn't take murder seriously - they take getting caught seriously. It's technically true if you parse it a certain way, but ultimately meaningless
  this kind of thing is not bad because it endangered people’s lives, it’s bad because it makes them look bad and might impact their exports
  Something can be bad for multiple reasons. Also, there's multiple actors here. The operators of the state-owned enterprise have different incentives than the regulators
- That's just how an effective political system works. The governor and the people they appointed to cut expenses for Flint MI's water system didn't care enough about the potential consequences for the people of Flint because they knew there wouldn't be severe consequences for them.
  No system functions because it depends on people being good kind caring people.
It's a shame when China takes things more seriously than the western world.
Like, a there's a million reasons to hate them, but how they deal with companies endangering lives isn't one of them.
- Kind of. It depends on how egregious it is. Companies endangering lives by pitting melamine in mile - jail. Foxconn endangering lives by overworking people in work camps - 👨‍🦯
  But I definitely give you that some of the more egregious cases are taken more seriously than in the west.
- I'm on the fence about whether it matters or not, that they might only do so to politically save face. ⚖️
- the flip side is they tend to take court cases involving individuals less seriously. Rulings are designed to be done in a quick manner and reletively speaking, cam be harsh with sentences. Culturally they care more for someone possibly related(but not guaranteed to be) get punished over verifying if said person is actually guilty of something.
  its a system thats good if said perpetrator is caught fast, but terrible for the person who just happened to be there at the wrong time if a perp gets away.
  tl;dr swift justice, but dont take as many precautions on whether they got the right person or not.
If that were true it wouldn't happen in the first place. They only take it seriously when it's so bad they can't cover it up anymore. Something like this take ALOT of corruption.
I remember this happening, and the pet food scandal just before it. Melamine was being added to pet food and milk powder to falsely increase their protein values. Enough to cause kidney failure and sometimes death. I used to do protein analysis for food products, and could see how easy it would be for food companies to cheat like this. The percent nitrogen content in a sample is used to estimate the protein value. Melamine powder contains a lot of nitrogen, so it's blended in to bump up the final protein values. Really shitty thing to do, knowing that it's toxic.
Yep, so seriously they shut down the app that brought this story to life https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/12/app-that-tracked-fuel-tankers-in-china-used-to-transport-cooking-oil-is-disabled
Almost like they care more about getting caught than the actual crime committed
Yeah some people are dying lmao

Nooooo, it's all Western lies!

lemmy tankies

I don’t consider myself a tankie, but I’ve been called one here, and I don’t think it’s a lie.
Nobody's denying this, there's plenty of Chinese sources reporting on it.
Funny how even when you actually have a true story to talk about you can't resist making shit up.
- Can't find this posted in !worldnews@lemmy.ml. Can you link to one?
- Because it's easier to call anything that disagrees with your world view as "lies" than to accept that the own world view is wrong.
  Tankies are the masters of rejecting reality.

Some heads will literally roll for this. Is embezzlement worth death penalty?

In the US it would be a fine equal to 5% of one year's profits, spread over a 10 year period
- Hey whoa, some low-level employee would go to jail too.
- If you've tried Tsingtao beer, it's just watered piss anyway.
For the right price, sure. But then nobody gets into this game thinking they're the ones who will get caught. You think Elizabeth Holmes and SBF believed they'd be cooling their heels in federal prison when they started lying?
you would be surprised what is considered normal.
Probably some people will get disappeared except for one who will be actually blamed for it
I mean, some. In a country like China with no rule of law, there's always a chance you know the right people to get out of it, or are otherwise too indispensable to punish.

China is collapsing before our very eyes, and it's already too late to turn things around. There's literally nothing that the CCP can do to get themselves out of this hole. The demographics are cooked, the economics are cooked, the public infrastructure is cooked, the foreign policy is cooked, the domestic politics are cooked, their environments are cooked, and the list goes on and on. China is one big clusterfuck right now and we should watch everything as it unfolds and take notes on it. China's downfall is going to be the biggest and most devastating self inflected collapse in history.

We should also do the same with Russia because they're also collapsing as we speak and it might be the end of Russia as a multiethnic empire for good. We're living in interesting times people

I'm the first one to hate on the CCP, but people have been saying that China is going to collapse anytime now for 20 years.
The demographics are a real problem, but nothing that will cause an immediate collapse. Housing, youth unemployment and inequality are real imminent issues, but the CCP has survived much worse and I think they will survive this as well.
Economical they have made some good bets, investing in solar and batteries, for that alone we should hope they don't collapse, it would be a setback of several years or maybe decades.
I believe China will more go the way of Japan, stagnate but not collapse.
- apart from solar and batteries, they also seem to be doing quite well on wind and train infrastructure
- Demographic collapses don't happen overnight, they take decades to unfold. Demographers were able to predict China's demographic collapse since they started seeing the demographic shifts that happened due to the implantation of the one child policy back in 1979. That's why you've been hearing about it for so long and why you'll continue to hear about it for years to come. As time marches on, those demographic collapse went from being predictions to becoming reality, and as time continues to pass, the current trends will continue to get worse and worse. The damage these demographic trends will inflect on the system will incrementally increase year by year until the system can't support itself any longer.
  The thing is that they can't reverse the demographic situation. Even if China started forcing people to have kids or opened their borders to allow for millions of immigrants, it won't mean anything. It's already too late, the demographic collapse is going to happen no matter what the CCP does. Keep in mind, Japan is in the same position and they will face the same fate regardless. The only difference is that Japan is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy, so it can at least slow down the inevitable and buy itself some time. China unfortunately doesn't have this luxury.
  For the record, I don't want China to collapse like this because the effects are going to be devastating. However, the numbers don't lie and every metric is showing us that they are heading towards a collapse at full speed. The CCP can't handle this, no government can in their position. There's really nothing like what China is going through in history. The scale and speed at which this collapse is happening is unprecedented. It'll most likely go down as the most defining event of the 21st century.
This sounds very close to the description of the US in this very moment. From an outsiders perspective China seems to be doing about as good and bad as the US all things considered.
- Except Chin's dictator is grown up.
- U.S. has been complete shit for the last 8 years, but somehow we haven't collapsed and life goes on as usual. So I'm usually pretty skeptical of specific predictions (though the trends are worth paying attention to).
- The single most accurate predictor of a country's future is their demographic structure, and China's is one of the worst, not just in the world, but in history. It's pretty normal for nations to go into cycle of prosperity and despair where they expand and shrink, however, what China is going through is unique. China's population is predicted to shrink down from 1.4 billion people to just 587 million by 2100. That is insane. It's scale, speed, intensity is something we've never seen before. China's demographic collapse is going to be worse than Europe during the black plague or China during the Great Chinese Famine or Germany after WWII. China is about to go into uncharted territory. We don't know what things will be like on the other side because we've never seen it before and we have no model or system to deal with it. One thing is for certain though, China as we know it today under the CCP is going to go away.
  As for the US, if it were to continue on it's current demographic trends, it'll reach China's current demographic situation at some point in the second half of this century, that's a lot of time to figure things out. At that point, other countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, as well as China would have been decades into their demographic collapses. That's a lot valuable time to learn from what these countries went through and proceed with more knowledge captiously based on what minimized the damage and what didn't.
- Wouldn't be Lemmy if there weren't a comment unnecessarily shitting on the US in the comments section of an article about another country.
The US Supreme court also just overturned Chevron deference. Shit sucks everywhere.
- While that is true, I think it is important to note that as bad as our problems are, and some of them are pretty bad, that there are countries that have it way worse than us. China is one of those countries. Some of their problems are genuinely mind boggling. Imagine going through our current problems right now but with an irreversible demographic collapse. It's nuts to think about.
I dont understand how your post has so many up votes when you said not a single specific thing. Can you explain any of the reasons you say China is obviously in a death spiral?
Is it just a feelings based thing from reading posts on here?
- Unfortunately Upvotes aren't linked to the objective truthfulness of a statement. If they were, fake news wouldn't be a thing.
  Also, what is wrong about having an opinion based on a collection of shared articles. Sure they might be biased and some might even report more details than they have sources for but given enough randomly encountered articles some common truths can emerge.
- It's not feeling based, China is truly going through a devastating collapse that can't reversed. Take their demographics as an example. Here are some interesting pieces of information about China's demographics:
  There's a gender imbalance of 110 males per 100 females, which is the highest in the world. That means there's over 30 million males that don't have a female counterpart.
  The population is expected to shrink down to 587 million by 2100 according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
  The country is going to have more retirees than workers at some point in the 2030s
  The fertility rate is less than 1.2, which is either the second or third lowest fertility rate of any non city state country in the world (sources differ slightly)
  The country's fertility rate is one of the fastest shrinking in the world (regularly ranks among the 5 worst)
  China's has one of the fastest aging populations in the world
  China is expected to have worse demographics than the US by 2035 in all metrics despite the US being a developed country and China is not
  China's median age already surpasses that of the US
  Officially, the country has been shrinking since 2022
  According to Yi Fuxian, a demographer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the CCP has overcounted their population by an excess of at least 130 million people since the one child policy was implemented. This means that China's demographic problems are worse than we thought and that China's population probably peaked 10-15 years ago
  China is not a destination for immigration by any stretch, China currently has around 1.5 million immigrants and about half of those are from Macau, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.
  How does a country recover from this? This is beyond devastating. In fact, it's terminal. No amount of authoritarianism or nationalism or desperate wars or anything can save the country from what it's going through. It's too late to damage control and there's really nothing to turn things around. The system is going to collapse, and we're going to see China's power and influence disappear from the world stage in the upcoming decades. China in it's current form under the CCP is going away. Pay attention and take notes because we're witnessing the greatest collapse in human history.
- Satire
I mean, scandals like this and "chabuduo" attitude putting health & safety at risk is really nothing new in China. I agree with you in general that certain parts of China are in decline / potential to collapse. Especially economy & environment. But speaking from a U.S. perspective, other aspects are enviable, like public transit.
I'm just saying that I wouldn't necessarily hold this specific incident up as an example of collapse.
- China isn't exactly the place to look towards when it comes to public transit, there's way better countries to be envious of when it comes to public transport. Their highspeed rail system by itself is around $900 BILLION in debt. It is so overly built that the maintenance costs and insufficient demand is coming to bite them in the ass. To put things in perspective, this figure is around 5% of China's entire GDP and it is expected to grow as the years pass by. It's generally normal for public transportation system to not be profitable and for the government to cover the gaps, but this? This is absolutely insane.
  There's stuff that we could learn from them as a country and vice versa, but this is definitely not one of those things.
Collapse into what exactly? China is really too big to operate as a single country. The USA barely manages it and that requires a huge amount of enforcement.
I could see it becoming a bunch of separate squabbling nation states, the Eastern version of the middle East, nobody wants that.
- I think China's history is the best predictor of where China will go after this collapse. China's history from the very beginning has been defined by cycles that alternate between a bunch of small warring states that constantly fight each other and giant tyrannical empires that unites them all. You could say the current China under the CCP is another iteration of those giant empires and that after the collapse, China will go back to it's historical mean of being divided by a bunch of smaller states that fight amongst each other.
- From which size is a country too big to operate as a single country? I think cultural identity is much more important than size, and the Chinese government has put a tremendous effort in culturally unifying the land with great success (and great cost; see Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, the relationship with Taiwan, loss of local languages and culture). I don't see that disappearing anytime soon.
  A civil war with a stalemate is of course possible (in fact it's already the reality), but an USSR style collapse in many different countries is just not something I can see happen.
- NATO does.
Freaking madlads making life interesting. I want it boring.
- Things are going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. It'll be a long time since the world is going to feel stable and boring. So buckle up, we're in for a weird ride.
We have to learn to better frame the issues. When Japan was ascendant, everyone projected them to overtake the US in economic power and we got all afraid and passed a bunch of protectionist rules about car imports. Think pieces get written about how their economic model was better than the US and the US is a crumbling empire.
But it turned out it was a huge real estate bubble combined with/caused by the demographic benefit coming from a boom generation going into their prime labor years and once that generation started aging out there was a real estate slump and a balance sheet recession that lasted a decade, and they never recovered to the levels everyone was projecting 10 years prior.
Now literally the exact same thing is happening with China and everyone is all shocked. Guess what, it's going to happen again.
It's not to say the US will never fall to 2nd place in the global order, but it's not going to be from some country growing at 10%/year forever, that doesn't actually ever happen.
- Perhaps the lesson that will come from all these demographic collapses will be that economic growth should be slow and steady. Countries that try to rush rising up the ranks of standards of living by doing whatever they can to generate economic growth regardless of consequences will end up trading their long term future for short term prosperity.
Imagine if China and the US collapse at the same time and the EU ends up white man's burdening us all into a better future
- Actually Europe's demographics are pretty bad too. They're often overshadowed by China's, but they're still devastating in their own right. Most of Europe is already going through a demographic collapse right now, but they're less dramatic in scale and speed than China's. They'll be more like Japan's collapse, but with immigration... at least that's the case for Western Europe. Eastern Europe (including Russia) is going through a Chinese-esque demographic collapse as we speak. Interestingly, the US has the healthiest demography out of the 3. It's not great, but it's still better than either Europe or China by quiet a bit. The most realistic scenario is that the US will remain the world's leader in future, maybe to even greater degree than now. At least until other countries like India catch up.
I really really really hope!!
- I don't. As much as I hate the CCP, this collapse is still ultimately going to destroy the Chinese nation. We're going to see hundreds of millions of people in really unfortunate situations who can't do much to fix the reality they're in. That's something that I don't wish to see happen.

.ML working mods in overtime.

They'll just ignore it and post another link to truthout.org that has a title they agree with. They won't actually read it -- only use it to gish gallop any conversation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
I’ve never heard that. Do they really say that in China? All I can find is mentions of common prosperity.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

State broadcaster CCTV earlier this week called the alleged practice and the potential contamination of food products from left-behind fuel in the tankers “tantamount to poisoning” and showing “extreme disregard for consumers’ lives and health.”

Some also appeared to link the situation to broader issues in the country, where an economic downturn is driving social frustration and there are deep-seated concerns about the limits of accountability for powerful and government-linked entities.

A staff member from Hopefull Grain and Oil Group on Monday told state-owned news outlet Economic View that “relevant departments” have investigated the matter and would make an official announcement.

Despite rising living standards in recent decades, food safety has been an ongoing issue in China, where dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s, sparking tighter government regulation.

In a 2013 speech cited in a People’s Daily report last year, Xi said the ruling Communist Party’s ability to “provide satisfactory assurances on food safety” is a “major test of our governance capabilities.”

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the directive to investigate the current scandal likely came “from the very top” – noting that food safety is both a key issue linked to government legitimacy and the allegations are landing at a sensitive time when economic hardship in China is causing a more “volatile society.”

The original article contains 1,285 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is obviously not good, but I don't have great intuition.

If I have a mug full of gasoline (or worse, diesel or something cruder), and reuse that for coffee, I can imagine that being bad. But a tanker truck is humongous, and the contamination would, I imagine (???), scale roughly like a surface area-to-volume kind of thing, meaning that contamination for a huge container should be substantially "better" than my coffee example. (Perhaps this scaling law is a bogus assumption though?)

Of course it is still bad, gross, and probably dangerous...

The additives and chemicals in fuel are straight up cancerous. Your coffee in this example, would now come with a hint of crippling disabilities for your children.
Your supposition about surface area is correct but with contaminants this powerful it's not really valid.
Yup, and that's why they got away with it without anyone noticing. Eating that oil your whole life is probably not good for you though, because fuel chemicals can be pretty nasty. They say there's no safe level of a carcinogen.
Put your money where your mouth is. Take an old gasoline can and fill it with cooking oil then feed it to your family until it's empty. Record the results. You won't though.
- No shit.
  My question was an honest scaling law question. Of course this is bad. Which is what I said.
  My question is how bad, which is a legitimate question, and is not in any way saying these are defensible actions. They are not.
  If you fill a thimble with diesel, drain it, and then fill it with water, that's gonna be super gross --- the diesel will probably form a thin layer on the thimble which is then diluted with a thimble full of water. Super gross. But by the time you get to a fuel can, the thin layer of diesel on the can is now diluted by a can of water. Because surface area scale like length squared but volume like length cubed, this is a better situation (for a given amount of water). Now when this is scaled up further, the diesel gets increasingly diluted. This is the root of my question, it's not saying that we should accept this or that it's good, I'm just curious.
Stop, an empty tanker truck can have a huge amount of fuel in it. You do know that fuel has a lot of impurities right? If you don't believe me just pull up some pictures of fuel tanks on cars being opened. They can be caked with sediment and heavy metals at the bottom even after a few years.
You are a bad dangerous shill.
- A simple, "your scaling argument doesn't really apply since the amount of residue left behind scales with the volume, not area" would have sufficed.
  Gasoline is a pretty powerful solvent; would residue left behind that doesn't come off from gasoline be liberated by cooking oil? It's an honest question.
  And I sure hope the regulatory agencies and shipping companies in my country do a better job than in China. This sort of thing is terrifying; I'm just curious as to an emotionless analysis of how bad this likely is. What concentration of benzene is acceptable? "None" would be best but we already breathe it. Would contaminated cooking oil likely be equivalent to...inhaling once at a gas station? A wet martini with diesel instead of vermouth?
Consider this:
When the cooking oil is heated, the distillate contamination will flash off, leaving a nice clean cooking oil.
If distillate is slightly contaminated with with cooking oil, probably not so bad that engines burning it can't deal with the slightly differing heat rate and specific gravity of the new mixture.
😂
- Nope.
  I don't even feel like I should tell you why you're wrong, but here we go.
  You assume that the fuel oil is more volatile then cooking temperatures, but what fuel oil? Diesel? Diesel has a boiling temperature between 160c and 360c(diesel varries because there are different compositions and blends). Deep fry is between 160c and 190c. That assumes we're deep frying. Plenty of ways to use cooking oil without heating to those temperatures.
  Also assumes that there's nothing else in the fuel oil. Plenty of additives that might not boil off or if they do, be toxic if inhaled. I have of stories of transformer oil being used for deep frying.
- Depends if it's light distillate, or, like, coal tar.
  Butane -> cooking oil without washing would be fine, by the standard of if I'd still use the oil. I'd be more worried about leaching from the metal or plastic of the tank.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salad_Oil_scandal

Reminds me of the salad oil scandal where oil tanks were purchased and reused for vegetable oil....

TBH replacing oil with water to inflate net worth estimations is pretty tame compared to putting gasoline in people's food.
- It's widely thought that they never cleaned the oil storage tanks they used to make them suitable for human consumption
Well There's your problem just did an episode on that https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K4yCXIZ32lk

This is why I refuse to purchase or consume ANY food products from China. There system can't be trusted period.

On China’s heavily moderated social media platforms, many members of the public called for product recalls and greater industry oversight.

Some also appeared to link the situation to broader issues in the country, where an economic downturn is driving social frustration and there are deep-seated concerns about the limits of accountability for powerful and government-linked entities.

“Even the cooking oil essential to people’s daily lives has now become problematic… Ordinary people cannot be properly safeguarded… Now I just want to scoff at (phrases like) ‘rule of law’ and ‘serving the people’ whenever I see them,” read one comment on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo, that garnered thousands of likes.

I thought China was heavily censoring criticism and you couldn't voice your opinions publicly? lol

Basically a food scandal has been uncovered by their media and the government takes action in the public's interest. Something you'd expect a functioning government to do. And this article makes you think it's a bad thing.

Summed up:

Despite rising living standards in recent decades, food safety has been an ongoing issue in China, where dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s, sparking tighter government regulation.

Based.

The entire article has so much coping and seething and was a really fun read. Thank you for sharing.

I think you can't really voice your opinion. But that's due to the consequences, you can't post illegal shit to your Facebook too, i.e. you'll be reported very quickly and it'll be taken down but you can still do it if you want to run the gauntlet.