Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.

The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.

It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.

  • Dempf@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.