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.

  • ammonium@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      apart from solar and batteries, they also seem to be doing quite well on wind and train infrastructure

      • Dempf@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        Absolutely. As far as solar goes, one statistic I like to point out is that China added more solar panels last year than the U.S. has in its entire history.

    • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.