A Chinese dissident uncovers disturbing information about products sold in his country. Why has his book had so little impact?
By Jonathan Ansfield
Newsweek
July 8, 2007 - Knee-deep into his exposé of China's food industry, author Zhou Qing relates a disturbing anecdote about a pig-feed additive called clenbuterol. The chemical is poisonous to humans, causing dizziness, fatigue, nausea and heart palpitations. But breeders like the substance — known locally as lean meat essence — because it makes pork redder and meatier. Zhou hears from a food safety official about a provincial political leader told by a farmer that his pigs still get the banned chemical because it makes their meat a hot-seller in urban areas. “Don't you know that it harms people?” asks the official. "'Yes,” replies the farmer. “But city people have free medical care, so it's no problem.”
Tainted Chinese food and drugs have become an issue of concern globally after a spate of illnesses and accidents. Pet foods that include melamine-spiked wheat gluten are now being blamed for the deaths of an unknown number of American pets. Cough syrup laced with mislabeled diethylene glycol has claimed the lives of at least 50 Panamians. Many countries have blacklisted Chinese toothpastes containing the same ingredient. In recent years, Zhou notes, Russians popping Chinese pork out of the oven have discovered drops of mercury on the pan. Countries from Asia to Europe to North America have found traces of arsenic, illegal antibiotics and other potentially carcinogenic chemicals in Chinese seafood exports, leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to suspend the sale of five farm-raised varieties just last week.
The products sold inside China are even more dangerous. An eight-year-old ban on clenbuterol did not stop the poisoning of more than 300 people who ate contaminated pork in Shanghai last year. Zhou’s book, “What Kind of God”, reels off many other disconcerting examples. He writes of farmed fish and seafood farm-fattened on birth control pills, which experts say have decimated the sperm counts of Chinese men. There are kids’ snacks that are laced with hormones, leading 7-year-old girls to grow breasts and 6-year-old boys to grow beards. Then there are the cheap brands of soy sauce flavored with fermented—and arsenic and lead-contaminated—hair swept directly off barber shop floors.
In one notorious case in 2001, officials in the southeastern port of Zhoushan blamed toxic frozen shrimp exports sent to Europe on peasant women who use antiseptics to wash cuts on their hands. In fact, Zhou says, seafood raisers regularly dump bottles full of potentially cancer-causing chemicals like malachite green into their tanks to prevent fungal infections. Zhou's book shows a picture of a scribbled page from a shrimp farmer's accounts. "Malachite green, 15 bottles," it reads. Five years on, he writes, this culture of deceit lingers even as the stakes get bigger. As Zhou's updated manuscript went to press in late 2006, fish pickled with antibiotics and illegal chemicals were traced from abroad back to fish markets up and down the eastern seaboard—a major blow to an industry now worth an estimated $35 billion a year...
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"Russians popping Chinese pork out of the oven have discovered drops of mercury on the pan"??
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