The remarks come days before Chinese leader Xi Jinping is due to convene a high-level meeting of the Communist Party, where his “common prosperity” agenda will be the top priority and top officials are expected to outline a package of reforms to restore confidence in a sluggish economy.
Authorities have been scrambling to control the fallout from the revelations. The Chinese government this week ordered several departments to investigate, and local probes were launched in Hebei province and the city of Tianjin as similar reports continued to emerge across the country.
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The outrage began when the state-run Beijing News reported last week that the country’s largest state-owned grain company, Sinograin, was transporting cooking oil in trucks also used for coal-derived fuel without washing the vehicles between shipments.
The detailed investigation, based on weeks of tracking tanker trucks and interviews with drivers, found that mixed truck use was an “open secret” in the industry and a way for freight companies to cut costs.
Although third-party shipping providers are the main culprits, large cooking oil manufacturers tend to turn a blind eye, the article says, in part because there is no legally binding regulations prohibiting this practice.
Panic set in among shoppers looking to make sure the oil they used to sauté foods every day at home — most often soybean oil — has not been 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 rigorously test its quality, Zeng Qiuwen, director of the Guangzhou Food Industry Association, said in an interview.
Chinese consumers have no choice but to buy oil – unless they return 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 wild economic growth and business opportunities was often accompanied by budget cuts and a lack of regulatory oversight.
In 2008, a major infant formula manufacturer was accused of adding melamine, a chemical that causes kidney stones, to powdered milk. to artificially increase protein content. An investigation found that six children died and 300,000 fell ill after drinking contaminated infant formula.
Cooking oil has become a particular concern since the early 2010s, when dozens of restaurants and street vendors were discovered trying to save money by collecting leftover used oil from trash cans or gutters, treating it and then reusing it for cooking.
As China’s economy has faltered for the past decade, Xi has moved away from trying to encourage growth at all costs. He has said it is equally important to provide people with a sense of security, whether from external threats or internal malfeasance.
In an apparent effort to prevent the scandal from escalating, China’s cabinet, the State Council, launched an interdepartmental investigation into the transportation of edible oils on Tuesday, promising “severe punishment” for misconduct.
Official propaganda has said it is siding with the public, publishing harsh criticism of the alleged misconduct and urging companies to do better. If official investigations confirm the practice, state broadcaster CCTV said, it would “amount to poisoning.”
Official condemnations were not enough to quell the outcry. On the Internet, people wondered why there were no rules requiring industrial and consumer goods to be transported in separate containers. Some announced their intention to buy imported oil or to make their own.
A flood of reports came in from across the country as other media outlets and internet sleuths began investigating the tanker industry.
Using subscription-based freight tracking services, journalists followed trucks moving between industrial customers and cooking oil manufacturers, and 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, otherwise the practice “will resurface sooner or later,” said Zeng, director of the Guangzhou Food Industry Association.
Similar incidents of contaminated tankers have been reported in China before, notably in 2005, when journalists discovered evidence of molasses being carried in tanks used to transport diesel – the tanks had not been cleaned.
But “people don’t seem to learn lessons from these past incidents,” Zhu Yi, an academic at China Agricultural University, wrote on Phoenix Media, a Hong Kong-based website.
Testing alone won’t be enough, Zhu said. Detecting contamination is partly difficult because residual hydrocarbons in fuel are often too small to be detected in tests on cooking oil.
Beijing News found flaws in the entire bulk edible oil shipping process, a collective lack of awareness and lax oversight – meaning there were all sorts of contamination risks and the solution had to be “prevention, not detection,” Zhu wrote.
Another problem is that the highly competitive trucking industry is struggling to make money during a crisis. Cleaning tankers takes four to five hours and can cost up to $55, reports Caixin, a financial publication.
As anger grew this week over the revelations, censors stepped in to calm the debate by removing some articles on the subject and blocking related tags on social media. Online commentators defended the importance of public scrutiny and investigative journalism to expose health and safety failings ignored by authorities.
Although it is state-run, Beijing News is known for its in-depth reporting on social issues, and its journalists regularly push the boundaries of censorship to expose wrongdoing by state-owned enterprises and local governments.
Although the original article has remained online to this day, subsequent reports published by other media outlets have often disappeared shortly after publication.
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 hours later.
“It was the media that finally paid attention to the cooking oil tanker disaster,” wrote one user on Weibo, the social network. “In recent years, the media’s ability to exercise oversight has seriously weakened, and more and more horrible things have happened.”