Thursday, May 31, 2007 1:30 AM
by
will
Q: What do nuclear power and packaged Chinese food have in common?
No, they're not both radioactive, but good guess.
A: Both are featured in articles that invoke the recent Chinese food quality scandals. Both stories were printed in this morning's Wall Street Journal Asia, although one was a syndicated Washington Post story.
From the Washington Post, commenting on anxieties about China's ability to effectively regulate nuclear power:
Yet environmental advocacy groups and outside safety experts are less
than sanguine about the idea of hundreds of new nuclear plants being
constructed by a secretive Communist government. The Chinese government
has a poor public-safety record on issues far simpler than nuclear
power, such as food and drug purity.
From the Journal, writing about General Mill's line of E-Z to prepare packaged Chinese meals:
China has recently faced mounting criticism from
Western consumer advocates over tainted food and drug exports. General
Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe says that while General Mills buys its
water chestnuts and bamboo shoots from China, they are shipped to the
U.S. where they are processed and canned by a leading supplier of
canned vegetables with whom General Mills has had a long-term
relationship.
Officials from General Mills visited the supplier of
those ingredients many times and conducted assessments of the
supplier's management and food-safety programs, according to Mr.
Forsythe. The company continues to use a third-party auditor to conduct
regular safety checks.
I think it's interesting how spanning an image problem this food
quality issue has become for China. If food quality is being invoked in
stories about nuclear power, China needs to get cracking on some PR.
It's become --and I kind of hate to use the word-- a meme. It's now
firmly entrenching itself in the popular consciousness, and being
invoked as a symbol of various systemic problems that China perceived
to have (and, in many cases, actually has).
In the grand scheme of things, this is just a couple of mentions in the wake of a big story. But it must be getting tiresome for the powers-that-be. The questions is, besides executing Zheng Xiaoyu, what are they going to do about it?
See also:
Danwei: Strong opinions -- Can the U.S. guarantee food safety in China? (from which the Zhen Xiaoyu FT link above is drawn)
Spot-on: Anatomy of a quiet scandal.