How Safe Is China’s Food in Light of the Fuel-Tanker Cooking-Oil Scandal?

Some years ago I reported from Spain on a scandal involving adulterated cooking oil. It was a criminal enterprise in which officially denatured rapeseed oil, imported for industrial use, was re-sold to consumers as olive oil. Unfortunately, the aniline dye that had been added to render it unfit for human consumption created serious health problems. A survivors’ organization estimated that 5,000 people died.

Scandals like that remind us that unsafe food is not exclusive to China, and that the causes of hazardous food range from criminal activity to shoddy hygiene practice and poor regulation. Chinese consumers have suffered from all of the above, and, in most cases, state censorship and official complicity and cover-up made bad situations worse.

The most notorious case of adulteration for profit in China illustrates the problem: The addition of melamine to watered down milk did serious damage to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, the infants who consumed it in baby formula. Arguably, there is never a good time to poison babies, but the timing in this case was particularly unfortunate: China was hosting the Olympics in 2008, so despite the rising concerns of the doctors who were monitoring an alarming rise in cases of infant kidney damage, the product remained on the shelves and the scandal was suppressed until the close of the Paralympic Games.

People did eventually go to jail, as they may in the case of the fuel-tanker cooking-oil scandal, the most recent example of dangerously cutting corners for profit. But there is a category of persistent food risk in China that is harder to address and for which the responsibility is wider than individual criminal behavior.

In 2013, inspectors in Guangzhou reported that nearly half the rice tested for sale in the city contained unsafe levels of cadmium, a heavy metal that can have negative effects on the human body. The rice came from Hunan province, where, the following year, researchers discovered that 65 percent of the rice samples collected exceeded the national cadmium limit.

This was the result of soil contamination, an effect of poor regulation and rapid industrial development that had left China’s scarce farmland with a toxic legacy of industrial waste, through direct contamination or the use of contaminated irrigation water.

The problem so worried the authorities that when journalists first began to inquire into the extent and severity of soil pollution, they were advised that the information was a state secret. Soil pollution is both difficult and eye-wateringly expensive to remedy. Many of the polluters had closed or moved on, so the costs of the clean-up were left to the public authorities who were disinclined to pay, or, in some cases, to peasant families who were not able to.

All cases of unsafe food, including contamination derived from soil pollution, are a form of official failure: public administration is meant to regulate and control noxious discharge into water bodies, and to identify and punish both the deliberate adulteration of food and hazards derived from poor practice.

So what is going wrong? There are parallels with other environmental challenges in China: Twenty years ago, a combination of perverse incentives, official complicity, corruption, and indifference led to severe air and water pollution until mounting public protests finally forced the government to act. Laws and punishments existed, but laws were infrequently enforced and punishments too light to act as deterrents.

When the government finally strengthened its law against water pollution in 2017, it provided for steeply increased fines and escalating penalties for repeat offences, thus making it more expensive to pollute than to meet the operating costs of not polluting. But despite repeated scandals and some improvement in the inspection regime, the punishment for delivering unsafe food remains relatively low. China’s Food Hygiene law, for example, provides only for the confiscation of illegal gains and a fine of not more than five times such gains. If no gains are found, the maximum fine is 50,000 renminbi (U.S.$6,894). Until enforcement improves and punishments are severe enough to deter, Chinese consumers will continue to suffer from unsafe food.

I once worked at the innovation department of a mid-sized food corporation and found food scientists and everyone in the company most inspiring and trustworthy—my family still buys the company’s condiments to this day. When I come across news related to food, I think of them, the professionals who see food safety as the most important part of their work.

China’s breakdowns of food safety are not all alike. Some involve systemic issues, and some stem from intentional wrongdoing by individuals, as was the case in the latest episode involving cooking oil as well as previous recycled cooking oil as scandals.

The most recent episode entails a serious breach of the Chinese government’s social contract with its people, but it hasn’t and won’t cause large-scale outcry. Ultimately, when it comes to food safety, many Chinese people believe that they have the right to demand an answer—and unlike what happens when wrongdoing affects only marginalized communities, the state will give them one. That’s why the original article in Beijing News has not been taken down.

Ensuring food safety is not only a matter for food regulators. China currently has no mandatory national standards for the transportation of edible oil. One can argue this is about road transportation, and we should consider the economic insecurity of the truck drivers, who are mostly gig workers and who endure cheaper and cheaper rates due to the economic slowdown and because of the pressure on their industry from tech platforms. Every link matters, and it’s in these intersections that regulators find themselves conflicted.

Gauging the impact of this scandal in terms of public opinion is notoriously difficult thanks to an AI-enabled, real-time censorship machine, combined with the top-down propaganda system and the inner workings of political and business collusion.

Although food safety issues are covered by news media with less censorship than other critical issues, people habitually self-censor and beat around the bush when discussing them.

Rendering pork fat was traditionally a way for families to add oil to their diets before industrialization. It is now seen as a measure that guarantees food safety. In response to an online question about why the Chinese public doesn’t seem to care about the Olympics anymore, one Internet user commented, “I’m too busy rendering pork fat.” They are saying that food safety matters to them a lot more than so-called national glory.

To jokingly say someone seems confused, one says “have you had too much contaminated oil?” But you can replace “contaminated oil” with every antagonist of a food safety scandal.

After giggling, we come back to reality: Those with means can afford premium ingredients, do their research on social media, and buy the best on supermarket shelves, whereas the impoverished move on with their lives.

After a decade of virtual silence not just on food safety issues but on many stories of immediate public concern, the recent report in the Beijing News was like a soft but insistent reminder of how little things have changed behind the curtain of propaganda and perception engineering—what the Chinese Communist Party euphemistically calls “public opinion guidance.” With news reporting, and certainly investigative reporting, in full retreat in China for a decade, it’s impossible not to consider the role this has had in suppressing a whole range of public interest stories from the national right down to the local level.

Whatever we can say about the state of food safety, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that China’s information standards are among the poorest in the world when it comes to professional reporting and transparency. Since Xi Jinping came to power, consolidating the leadership’s hold on all aspects of society, he has seen to it that more professionally-minded media are brought to heel. He has emphasized the media’s duty to protect and serve the Party. But alongside this centralization of power, localities across China have been given greater discretion in how they do and don’t report on breaking stories. In many cases now, local county and city governments, or their police departments, are empowered to control the information release process, and are treated as “authoritative” news sources even when they have every incentive to keep information under wraps. It is not uncommon these days to read news reports from state outlets like Xinhua News Agency that are entirely reliant on local news releases—a perfect recipe for concealment.

This is not good news for informed governance, of food safety and much else. In March this year we saw in rather dramatic fashion how the news is being suppressed at the local level, as reporters from the powerful state-run China Media Group (which owns CCTV and is under direct control of the Party’s propaganda organs) were forced away from the scene of a gas explosion by police in Hebei province while they were attempting to report live. Ten years ago, we might have seen the Internet and social media step into the gap, and it was not at all uncommon for stories to break first online or through the social media platform Weibo. But even this is no longer assured, given more effective policing of platforms. One rather egregious case in point was a deadly fire last year at Beijing’s Changfeng Hospital in which 29 people were killed. In spite of the fact that the fire broke out at midday in a relatively populated area of the country’s capital, it was eight hours before an official news release was posted to social media by the Beijing Daily, the official organ of the city’s leadership. Even though there had been a burst of posts, including eyewitness videos, that afternoon, these were effectively suppressed by platforms and prevented from going viral. These eight hours of silence astonished even local journalists who are very much aware of how strong restrictions have been.

The Beijing News report of cooking oil shipment malpractice provides a glimpse behind the everything-is-fine veneer. It’s a reminder that however one assesses China’s performance, whether on economic governance, food safety, the struggle against poverty, you have to consider the crucial factor of information transparency. China is the land of bold projects and bold propositions. But the boldest project of all, the country’s largest infrastructure project hands down, is the control of information.

In the summer of 2023, a small discovery in a student’s cafeteria meal became a major issue across China. It involved the head of a rat or mouse found in the rice at a college canteen in the southern city of Nanchang. Although the discovery itself was disturbing, it was not the main point of discussion. When the student confronted the kitchen staff, they denied it was a rat, insisting it was actually a duck’s neck, a popular snack in many parts of China.

Everyone who saw the photos of the unpleasant food surprise agreed that the little head looked like a rat, had teeth like a rat, and had the snout of a rat, and thus probably was a rat. Nevertheless, the school canteen maintained that it was a duck’s head that had just ended up in the wrong dish. The local food supervision bureau even backed them, and students at the school were reminded not to discuss the matter on the Internet any further.

The incident, also known as the “‘is it a rat head or a duck neck’ incident” (鼠头or鸭脖事件, shutou or yabo shijian), kept snowballing online until everyone knew every detail of the story. Ultimately, the issue was no longer about whether the unidentified object in the canteen rice was a rodent or a duck, but about the school and the food supervision bureau treating the students and the public as fools.

A popular Chinese idiom circulated: zhi lu wei ma (指鹿为马) or “calling a deer a horse” in English. The phrase comes from a story about the corrupt eunuch and Qin dynasty minister Zhao Gao, who brought a deer to the second emperor, presenting it as a “horse.” Afraid to disagree with him, many people repeated this falsehood. During “rat-gate,” netizens changed the idiom to “calling a rat a duck” (zhi shu wei ya, 指鼠为鸭), capturing the essence of the story: Everyone knew it was a rat, but to avoid a food safety scandal and save the school’s reputation, it was decided that it simply could not be true.

The recent cooking oil scandal, involving transport trucks and cargo ships being used to carry both cooking oil and toxic chemicals without proper cleaning procedures, has raised public concern not just about unsafe food-handling practices, but also about the lack of transparent communication in the aftermath of such incidents.

When the Chinese logistics platform Fahuobang suddenly took its truck-tracking feature offline in July it spawned a viral hashtag on Weibo. “What are they afraid of?” a popular blogger wondered. Another viral post contained a photo of an oil truck on the road with an enormous cover over it. “When I was young, I thought ‘covering one’s ears to steal a bell’ [yan er dao ling, 掩耳盗铃, a proverb for burying one’s head in the sand] was a joke because nobody would be that stupid. It turns out I was naive.”

“Where did the edible oil from the kerosene tanker go?” wondered another popular hashtag. While investigations are reportedly ongoing, netizens are pressing for answers, and some topics are getting censored. “What has happened to this story?” they write. “What is the outcome?”

In the end, the main issue is not whether or not China has made great strides in food safety—most would agree that significant improvements have been made. Rather, food safety scandals like these highlight a myriad of other problems, including a lack of enforcement, bureaucratic inefficiency, power plays, and public deception, without really addressing the root of the problem.

What incites the most anger is that in this social media era, some companies, officials, and authorities will do anything to avoid facing public outrage, even when the facts are clear to everyone. They will go to great lengths to cover up the truth, even if it means absurdly turning a rat into a duck. This blatant disregard for transparency and accountability not only erodes public trust but also highlights deeper issues of corruption and inefficiency that plague the system.