CHINESE SAFETY SCANDALS EVOKE OLD CHICAGO Geoff Dyer
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
When an American friend sent me an e-mail last week about the latest food scare in China – something about bottled water full of the wrong type of minerals – he titled it The Jungle, after Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel exposing the grim realities of the Chicago meatpacking industry.
I added it to a list of messages that have made the same observation. For many Americans watching the safety scandals that have engulfed Chinese exports to the US in recent months, Sinclair's book is something of a road map for contemporary China.
In their own way, the tales about “filthy” catfish and poisonous toothpaste fit neatly into one of the grand narratives of our time, that China's booming economy is following a path similar to the US just over a century ago. Here is a continent-sized nation with new cities bursting with entrepreneurial energy and roads and railroads opening up once-isolated regions.
Such rapid expansion has left the institutions of government scrabbling to keep up, opening space for unscrupulous businessmen to cut every imaginable corner. Copies of The Jungle are being dusted off because as well as illuminating the dark side of hasty industrialisation, it also provoked outrage that helped pave the way for the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.
The uproar over Chinese products in the US is also an eye-opener about just how far globalisation has reached. No matter how much is written about the Chinese economy, it still has the capacity to surprise. It probably came as no shock for Americans to discover that their toys are made in China these days (with the possible exception of Lego), but I bet most did not know a few months ago that a quarter of imported seafood also came from the same country. How many chefs were aware that half the garlic consumed in the US is grown on Chinese farms?
Behind the indignation in the US about dodgy Chinese products, there has sometimes been another sentiment – a desire to turn back the clock to the time when China was only too happy to lock itself in a box and turn its back on the rest of the world. But that China no longer exists. Such is the scale of China's economy and so broad is its reach, there is no choice but to engage. Whether we like it or not, China's problems are now everyone's problems.
If food regulators in China cannot impose standards on the fish farms and vegetable producers they patrol, it is no longer just Chinese consumers at risk. The challenge facing regulators in Beijing is daunting, with hundreds of thousands of small companies operating in the industry, many with powerful connections to the local officials who should be keeping an eye on them.
The same goes for the foul air in Chinese cities. The other day, the Associated Press ran a story from the summit of Mount Bachelor in Oregon, 9,000ft above sea level, where a group of scientists has set up instruments to measure the increasing flow of soot particles that cross the Pacific from China. “This is, in effect, a fingerprint . . . the pollutants fingerprint,” one of the scientists said.
Angry American consumers can take heart that in today's globalised world, outrage also crosses borders. The US reports may have left some Chinese people feeling their companies are being victimised, but many more are concerned about the risks they themselves face and want more information.
As if on cue, another e-mail I got last week had the more intriguing title of “China's Upton Sinclair”. It included extracts from a book written in 2004 by a writer called Zhou Qing that describes in excruciating detail all the things residents of China have heard about the food supply but did not want to think about.
At a factory making pickled vegetables, he watched workers pour in insecticides to get rid of bugs. Or there is the Shanghai shop that fumigated cakes with sulphur powder and added industrial bleach to make them look whiter. Or the Nanchang drinks company that scraped off the sell-by date that had expired and added a new one to the bottles. Corruption and powerful local vested interests are always in the background of his tales – all written in the very best muck-raking tradition.
The big question is how quickly in China's one-party state, with its internet firewalls and media restrictions, such stories will translate into sustained pressure on the authorities. The other day I had a browse in some Shanghai bookshops and did manage to find The Jungle. But there were no copies of Zhou Qing's books.
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The writer is the FT's Shanghai correspondent
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