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.

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    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

    • somethingsnappy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        4 months ago

        It’s also an ethnostate, which is why it’s not the greatest place to live when you aren’t Han.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          It’s also an ethnostate

          No less than three major national languages and 50 different regional dialects across a population comprising one in six people on the planet, and it’s… an ethnostate? Are we really suggesting that the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Manchus, and the Zhuang don’t exist? Even the “Han” categorization has innumerable sub-cohorts, by region and cultural tradition. These would constitute entire countries elsewhere in the world.

          But hey…

          Maybe this looks like an ethnostate to you.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      4 months ago

      Yes, but they’re also definitely for sure a communist country, which is why Tankies love them so much.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          4 months ago

          That was before most people here were born.

          It’s a capitalist oligarchy now. Sorry to ruin Mao’s legacy for you, we all know what a great guy he was.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  4 months ago

                  China has been a so-called communist country for over half a century and the number of private billionaires has grown, so this whole “billionaires happen during the gradual transition to communism” argument doesn’t really work when you start with zero billionaires with Mao and now have 814 billionaires.

                  Or am I to believe the number of billionaires keeps going up and up and then -bam- elimination of market economies?

                  But I’m sure Roderic Day, who appears to have no academic credentials, can find all kinds of explanations.

                  And in 20 years when there are over 1600 billionaires in China? Communism is just around the corner, baby!

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                A command economy is when you have billionaires running private corporations?

                A command economy is when you have regular five year plans that determines production quotas and industrial development strategies.

                Clearly, they have eliminated capitalist hierarchies

                Have you confused Communism with Anarchism?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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?

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      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.

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Posted it myself, just now, just for you.

          To be clear, what you’re suggesting is that stories that the Chinese government is actively talking about would be censored on lemmy.ml. Let’s see if that’s true! Can’t wait to find out!

          • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            Nice. I am not really suggesting that they are being actively silenced, since I do see them there from time to time. What I do notice is that stories that are critical of China always get zero or barely any engagement.

            Not really a good indicator of lemmy.ml’s willingness to discuss China’s flaws. This is in comparison to the wall of text that love to comment whenever it comes to defending China or blaming the western countries.

            We’ll see how many lemmy.ml users comment on your post this time.

            • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              The claim I’m disputing is that people would deny that this is happening, not that they’re insufficiently critical according to your standards. I’m not interested in evaluating that purely subjective claim (a discussion in which the goalposts could easily be shifted all over the place), what I’m interested in is disproving the objectively false claim that lemmy tankies deny this specific story happening.

              The fact of the matter is that the person I responded to lied. That’s all I’m saying. And for pointing out that objectively true fact, rather than anyone who disagreed supplying evidence, they just downvoted me, because apparently they think popularity is a substitute for truth.

      • Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Well, since we have a disagreement about what’s true, then there’s one surefire way to settle it, right? Evidence. If you’re saying that I’m lying and rejecting reality, surely you can point me to evidence that I’m wrong, right? So link me to the comments you saw of people denying this story.

          Oh wait, you can’t, because it didn’t happen. Because y’all make shit up about us all the time and never have the receipts, because fundamentally, we believe in basing our beliefs on evidence and you do not.

  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • geekwithsoul@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      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.