On May 6, the New York Times published an article entitled "From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine," which reports that toxic syrup from China is responsible for causing over 300 deaths.
Following the release of this article, discussions and reports of poisoned food from China and unsafe products made in China have continued to climb.
In the month of April, a succession of news from Europe, North America and Asia reported that food, pet food and various other products imported from China did not comply with safety regulations and might pose serious health risks.
The following are examples of said health risks. On the 2007 Annual European Food Safety Authority Report released by the European Commission on April 19, 924 items in the EU market are listed as dangerous products, 440 of which are from China. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that melamine has been found in rice protein concentrate from China. This sort of rice protein concentrate was used by companies in the U.S. to produce pet food; it was later discovered that this particular rice protein causes kidney failure in cats and dogs.
On April 19, New Straits Times Press in Malaysia also published an article, "Alarm Bells about Food Imported from China," stressing that food imported from China poses a safety hazard not only for pet food but also food consumed by humans.
The article cited some cases familiar to most Chinese people. For instance, some farmers in China injected an industrial dye, suspected of causing cancer, into eggs to make the yolks look fresher. Farmers also injected chemicals into mangos to have them ripen sooner or into strawberries and apples to make them more reddish; fishermen used malachite green, a suspected carcinogen, to treat freshwater fish to make them appear fresher.
These techniques are not the inventions of farmers, but are instead known as "technical guidance" offered by "biochemical" experts who have been paid large sums of money. The above-mentioned news isn't news to the Chinese people. Similar reports have frequently appeared in Chinese media since the mid-1990s. Many Chinese people know that farmers involved in agriculture and aquaculture have products that they raise exclusively for their own consumption; they will never eat those intended for sale in the market. But nowadays this sort of behavior is not one practiced behind closed doors, which poisons their fellow countrymen; it has now reached the global scale.
Products from a country carry not only that country's standard production process but also many other social and cultural factors. For example, the prices of various commodities serve as a means to measure a country's labor force, wages, and welfare system. Product quality reflects the country's commercial credit and the moral order, as well as the country's infrastructure.
For instance, when the farmers separate their own food items from items sold to others, they have given up their professional ethics, and any moral credit that goes along with being producers of consumables. In addition, they do not have to bear the consequences for the sale of harmful food items to society.
The society in China lacks any regular means to investigate or punish those who commit unscrupulous acts. There is not even any basic means to reinforce legal ethics. As a result, the social order has collapsed and morality is also in sharp decline.
The country's basic order of operations needs to be established on two levels: First, the basic system, which includes the political and legal systems; second, the moral or honor system, including the ethics of the government officials and various occupational groups. The former is one of mandatory supervision, a system of credit, and the latter forms a self-regulating mechanism, that is, morality kept in check within each individual by each individual. If the system is not working, then it can be said that the social order is disintegrated. When large quantities of poisonous food and drugs were sold to other countries, it indicated that the chain of command and overall morality of the people within this chain has major gaps on several key points.
First is examination of the nation's loss of credibility. China, who has been a member of WTO for only a few years, has been severely criticized for multiple violations of the intellectual property law. This time, the outbreak of poisonous food and drug problems has severely damaged China's national reputation.
Second, the national credit constraint between the government and its citizens has been broken. Manufacturers have taken neither the overall national interest nor their own long-term interest into consideration. Despite this, the government has no effective measures with which to deal with them. Third, it indicates that members of society have a complete lack of ethics when it can be shown that producers consider only their own short-term profits and ignore the lives and safety of others.
The degeneration of morality has led to a complete collapse in the social order built upon system credit and ethical credit. A wrong doer is no longer held accountable for his wrong doings. As a result, the high society consists of the elite (turned) rogues (some people use terms like corrupted officials, profiteers, and intellectual rogues to summarize China's three elite groups, the political, economical, and intellectual group); the low society consists of the civilian (turned) rogues.
If this trend continues, the Chinese people will suffer unavoidable damage from further deterioration of the ecological environment. Consequently, the contaminated food is not limited to 10 percent of the heavily polluted farmland, but also there are potential hazards for the food supply chain that is based on ecological safety.
Reprinted from issue 191 of Huaxia Dianzi Bao, May 10, 2007
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