For weeks, as questions have multiplied over the safety of China's exports of food and other consumer goods, the Chinese media have had a consistent refrain.
US complaints about China's products are part of a mounting trade war. They are the expression of efforts by Westerners to keep China down, to invent what the Chinese media have called a "China threat" to manipulate public opinion.
Exceptions can be found to this line, particularly regarding safety issues involving Chinese-made toothpastes, which importers around the world recently discovered often contain diethylene glycol -- a poisonous chemical that tastes sweet, like its more expensive cousin, glycerin. Panama last year inadvertently mixed the chemical, imported through middlemen from China and mislabeled as glycerin, into cold medicine, killing at least 100 people.
After an initial spate of attacks on the foreign coverage, many Chinese media outlets have belatedly come to accept that the nation's standards for toothpastes -- which hold that using the chemical in small amounts is not harmful -- need to be refined.
In a commentary last week, one newspaper, the Xiaoxiang Morning Post, went further, rejecting the foreign conspiracy theories outright.
"In the end, it is not trade barriers, or stirring people up, which I deeply believed at the outset," Liu Hongbo (
Such commentary, however, has been rare. And that is remarkable, given that for years, Chinese consumers have been bombarded with reports about problems with domestic food safety and fraud: animals injected with illegal hormones to speed growth; eggs treated with poisonous dies; turbot, a popular fish, contaminated with unsafe antibiotics.
"I have no idea what we can and cannot eat nowadays," said Feng Jiangping, 40, as she shopped in a Shanghai street market. "I have stopped eating many things based on media reports. Recently, I have stopped eating turbot, river eel, eggs from free-range chickens."
"I don't know how the government manages food-safety things," she said. "I only know there is less and less safe food for us to eat."
More than anything, the food-safety crisis has revealed major weaknesses in China's emerging civil society, which for all its booming, frontier capitalist ethos has never developed anything like a consumer movement or citizen advocacy groups.
This leaves Chinese consumers at the mercy of what the government decides to make of any situation. Since earlier this year, when Chinese exports of tainted pet food ingredients touched off one of the biggest pet food recalls in US history, Beijing has announced that it would rewrite food safety regulations, introduce a national recall system, and overhaul the nation's top drug watchdog. On Tuesday, it executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog Zheng Xiaoyu (鄭筱萸).
But the government's sense of commitment seems variable.
"After all, these problematic products in the news are infinitesimally few," said foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang(
The next day, a government survey was released showing that nearly 20 percent of consumer goods on sale in China were substandard. The news drew scant commentary here.
"China's food and drug situation has worsened over the last 10 years," said Wang Hai (
Wang said these included the lack of accountability in the main watchdog agencies for food and drug quality.
"When you report a case to them, they don't have to accept it, they don't give you any word on how they are handling it and you never know whether or not they've done their jobs, because they don't provide any results," Wang said.
The food safety crisis also underscores persistent shortcomings in the Chinese news media, which, far from the state-controlled monolith many foreigners imagine, sometimes manage to be feisty and surprisingly investigative. The best example came recently, when a television reporter, Fu Zhenzhong (傅振中), uncovered longstanding practices akin to slave labor in the brick-making industry in Shanxi Province.
What China's emerging media outlets are less willing to do is directly criticize the government for failures in basic responsibilities, like ensuring the safety of food, medicine and other widely used products. As hard questions are being raised by outsiders, the Chinese news media have fallen back on the old formula of defensive nationalist posturing.
"There is unbalanced trade between the United States and China, and China indeed has the largest trade surplus with the US," intoned the Oriental Morning Post recently. "But there are many ways to keep trade balanced, and we wouldn't want to see the American media realize this goal by discrediting China's food safety."
Another newspaper, the International Herald Leader, which is published by the Xinhua news agency, denounced what it called "a new round of Chinese food panic that originates in America and has been stirred up by Western media."
This common story line of a US-driven plot to discredit China and Chinese products has run into difficulty, however, as Japan, the EU, certain Southeast Asian countries and even Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory, have all announced tightened controls or stricter inspections of Chinese consumables.
In contrast to coverage of US bans on Chinese toothpaste, dog food ingredients and fish, reports about global concerns on food safety in China have been sparse.
Asked why, Gao Xianmin (
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past