They come just days before Chinese leader Xi Jinping convenes a top-level meeting of the Communist Party, where his “shared prosperity” agenda will be a top priority and top officials are expected to prepare a package of reforms to restore confidence in a sluggish economy. .
Authorities have tried to contain the fallout from the revelations, with China’s cabinet this week ordering multiple departments to investigate and local investigations launched in Hebei province and Tianjin city, as similar reports continued to emerge across the country.
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The furor began when the Beijing News last week reported that the country’s largest state-owned grain company, Sinograin, was transporting cooking oil in trucks also used for coal fuel without washing the vehicles between deliveries.
The detailed investigation, based on weeks of tracking tankers and interviewing drivers, found that the mixed use of trucks was an “open secret” in the industry and a way for cargo companies to cut costs.
Although third-party shipping providers were the main culprits, large cooking oil manufacturers tended to look the other way, the article said, in part because there is no legally binding regulations prohibiting the practice.
Panic ensued among shoppers looking for guarantees on the oil they were using to fry at home every day – most commonly soybean oil – it was not contaminated with carcinogens, heavy metals or other toxic substances.
The incident has left consumers helpless because it is difficult to avoid using the oil or forcefully test its quality, Zeng Qiuwen, head of the Guangzhou Food Industry Association, said in an interview.
Chinese consumers have no choice but to buy oil — unless they go back to the old ways of making it themselves from fatty meat, he said.
Food safety and counterfeit drug scandals have plagued China since the early 2000s, when the pursuit of rampant economic growth and business opportunities often came with cutbacks and lax regulatory oversight.
In 2008, a major manufacturer of infant formula was exposed for adding melamine, a chemical that causes kidney stones, to milk powder. to artificially increase the protein content. An investigation found that six children died and 300,000 became ill from drinking the tainted formula.
Cooking oil has been a particular concern since the early 2010s, when dozens of restaurants and street vendors were found to be trying to save money by taking leftover used oil from garbage or gutters, processing it and then cooking with it. again with him.
As China’s economy has weakened over the past decade, Xi has shifted from promoting growth at all costs. Equally important, he said, is to provide people with a sense of security, whether from foreign threats or internal abuses.
In an apparent effort to prevent the scandal from spreading, China’s cabinet, the State Council, on Tuesday launched an interagency investigation into the transportation of edible oils, promising “severe punishment” for wrongdoing.
Official propaganda spoke out to be on the side of the public, publishing scathing criticism of alleged wrongdoing and urging companies to do better. If confirmed by official investigations, state broadcaster CCTV said, the practice would be “tantamount to poisoning”.
Official punishment failed to curb the protests. Online, people asked why there were no rules requiring industrial goods and consumer goods to be transported in separate containers. Some announced plans to buy imported oil or to produce their own oil from scratch.
A flood of reports came in from around the country as other media outlets and the internet began investigating the tanker industry.
Using cargo tracking subscription services, journalists tracked trucks moving between industrial customers and cooking oil producers, and they reported suspicious patterns to local authorities.
The State Council’s investigation will be thorough, but the high level of pressure on the industry must become commonplace or else the practice “will reappear sooner or later,” said Zeng, head of the Guangzhou Food Industry Association.
Similar incidents of contaminated tankers have been reported in China before, including in 2005 when reporters found evidence of molasses being transported in tanks used to transport oil – the tanks had not been cleaned.
But “people don’t seem to learn the lessons of these past incidents,” Zhu Yi, an academic at China Agricultural University, wrote in Phoenix Media, a Hong Kong-based website.
Testing alone won’t work, Zhu said. Part of the difficulty in detecting contamination is that residual hydrocarbons from fuel are often in very small amounts to show up in edible oil tests.
The Beijing News had found loopholes throughout the bulk edible oil transport process, a collective lack of awareness and lax oversight – meaning there were all sorts of pollution risks and the solution had to be “prevention rather than detection ,” Zhu wrote.
A separate problem is that the competitive trucking industry is struggling to make money in a downturn. Cleaning the tank takes four to five hours and can cost up to $55, Caixin, a financial publication, reported.
As outrage grew this week following the revelations, censors stepped in to suppress discussion by deleting several articles on the topic and blocking associated hashtags on social media. Online commentators defended the importance of public oversight and investigative journalism in exposing health and safety failures overlooked by officials.
Despite being state-run, Beijing News is known for in-depth reporting on social issues, and its reporters regularly push the boundaries of censorship to expose wrongdoing between state-owned enterprises and local government.
While the original article has so far remained online, follow-up reports from other media often disappeared quickly after being published.
A tracking service used by journalists to monitor trucks was taken offline on Wednesday, Yicai, a financial news outlet, reported. The article was taken offline a few hours later.
“It was the media that finally paid attention to the debacle of tankers carrying cooking oil,” wrote one user on Weibo, the social media platform. “In recent years, as the media’s ability to monitor has seriously declined, more and more terrible things have happened.”