Wang Yong likes his beer, but he also likes to know what he's drinking.
So when he found strange black things floating a bottle of Guangming beer, made by Australian brewing giant Foster's, he wanted to return the two cases he had bought and get his money back.
But Foster's said they would only replace the defective bottle of beer with a new one, and would not return his money for the rest.
Not one to take defeat lying down, the irate Wang took an increasingly popular route for disgruntled consumers in eastern China -- he enlisted the help of the Shanghai Wave Complaints Hotline radio show.
The live program, which runs for an hour every weekday morning on China Eastern Radio, is one of the city's most popular radio shows, dishing out a tasty mix of angry customers, fraudulent shop owners and happy endings.
Complaints Hotline host Qu Cheng, a law graduate, said the media played a large role in helping Chinese customers become aware of their rights as well as mediating in disputes between disgruntled consumers and those peddling faulty goods and shoddy services.
China's economy has been picking up steam in the last 12 months and the country's consumers, who are driving the engines of domestic growth, are increasingly unwilling to settle for second best.
Many are taking to the law to wrest the best service possible from vendors across the country, and working with the media and the Chinese Consumers' Association to back them up.
So, live on air last week, Qu rang the Foster's sales office to take up Wang's complaint before an audience of around 15 million listeners. Qu told a Foster's sales assistant, who identified herself as Miss Liu, that under China's consumer law customers were entitled to a full refund if they believed goods were defective and they could prove why they had lost confidence in a product.
Thus the brewing firm should give Wang Yong a full refund as well as some free beer as a goodwill gesture, Qu advised on air.
The sales assistant, placed on the spot, promised she would come up with a solution to satisfy the disgruntled Wang, and the story ended happily.
"We give lots of judgments, which are not legally binding, but most people are happy to accept them," Qu said.
His show, which reaches listeners in Shanghai and the neighboring provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, has been on air for nine years, and in that period people have become more aware of their rights and more willing to fight for them, the host said.
In fact, the country famed for shoddy toys, shoes and knick-knacks made for export has some of the most "revolutionary and remarkable" consumer legislation in the world, said Professor Ling Bing of City University in Hong Kong.
The Consumer Protection Law of 1994 decrees that firms which knowingly sell faulty goods must compensate the consumer twice the value of the original product.
"If the shop sells shoddy products ... It's up to the shop to show they are not fraudulent," Ling said.
There are more than 90,000 consumer associations throughout China with around 10,000 full-time staff working to protect individual customer rights.
Wang Qianhu, director of the Appeals Department at the Association's Beijing headquarters, said consumer protection had gained ground rapidly in the seven years since the protection law was passed.
Even in rural areas, where lack of money, poor education, transport difficulties or a weak grasp of legal rights made it hard to protect customers, matters were improving.
"In rural areas we have tried to get help from local governments and village associations to disseminate the idea of people's rights and ability to protect themselves in recent years," Wang said.
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