Formosa Neijia

I saw this this morning:

China warned the United States on Thursday against “groundless smear attacks” against Chinese products and said it was working responsibly to address concerns over a spate of recent food safety scares.

“The Chinese Government has not turned a blind eye or tried to cover up. We have taken this matter very seriously, acted responsibly and immediately adopted forceful measures,” said a statement by China’s embassy in Washington.

“Blowing up, complicating or politicizing a problem are irresponsible actions and do not help in its solution,” the Chinese mission said in a rare policy pronouncement.

“It is even more unacceptable for some to launch groundless smear attacks on China at the excuse of food and drug safety problems,” it said.

Echoing the Beijing government’s complaints about U.S. media reports, the embassy said food safety concerns were not unique to China, 99.2 percent of whose food exports to the United States in 2006 met quality standards.

Problematic U.S. imports from China — including toxic ingredients mixed into pet food and recalls of toy trains and toothpaste — were isolated cases and “hardly avoidable” amid huge and rapidly growing bilateral trade, the statement said.

“It is unfair and irresponsible for the U.S. media to single China out, play up China’s food safety problems and mislead the U.S. consumer,” it added.

This statement comes on the heels of another story about cardboard being used to make steamed buns. I noticed that a certain thin-skinned bagua and xingyi teacher from south-west Canada was really ticked off by us foreigners discussing this on the Cheng Shi Bagua Yahoo list. He claimed that people are just “China bashing.”

And that’s where we are with this stuff: if you see that China obviously has a big problem with this stuff, then you’re racist and China-bashing. Reporting it is a “smear campaign.”

So, naturally, the reporter that broke this story is in hot water and has likely been forced to recant:

“Zi had provided all the cardboard and asked the vendor to soak it. It’s all cheating,” the paper quoted a government notice as saying.

Beijing TV had apologized for failing to check the report’s authenticity and said it would make efforts to improve staff ethics, the paper added.

China is reeling from a series of tainted food and drug scandals that have sparked criticism at home and abroad.

The deaths of patients in Panama from mislabeled drug ingredients from China, deadly toxins in pet food exported to the United States and food laced with hazardous antibiotics and chemicals have raised fears about the safety of China’s surging exports.

… and lead in the paint of Thomas the Train toys, rat poison in the breakfast ingredients of a local stand that killed 120 people, etc., etc., etc. But hey, no problem here. Just a bunch of “isolated incidents.”

Anyone that reports this stuff will get canned, just like this reporter in the story above. Is the story fake as the government so naturally claims (can’t let those exports get hurt) or is the reporter trying to make a name for himself at others expense? Who can tell when the government controls the “truth”?

We’ve had problems like this in Taiwan, so I know that China is much, much worse. A few years back, some dirtbags tried to pass off used industrial machine oil as cooking oil and killed a few people before they got caught. But the frequency with which this stuff happens in China is just unreal. We get reports constantly about goods from China being poisonous or just unhealthy.

We once bought a set of toy trucks for my boy from China, and when we opened the package, we saw that they were dirty and damaged. My wife soaked them in detergent before she gave them to our son. No more stuff from China for him.

So don’t buy into this BS about China bashing and being racist. Watch what you buy from China.