Food: It's Even Less Safe Inside China
A Chinese dissident uncovers disturbing information about products
sold in his country. Why has his book had so little impact?
By Jonathan Ansfield
Newsweek

July 8, 2007 - Knee-deep into his exposé of China's food industry,
author Zhou Qing relates a disturbing anecdote about a pig-feed
additive called clenbuterol. The chemical is poisonous to humans,
causing dizziness, fatigue, nausea and heart palpitations. But
breeders like the substance-known locally as lean meat essence-because
it makes pork redder and meatier. Zhou hears from a food safety
official about a provincial political leader told by a farmer that his
pigs still get the banned chemical because it makes their meat a hot-
seller in urban areas. "Don't you know that it harms people?" asks the
official. "'Yes," replies the farmer. "But city people have free
medical care, so it's no problem."

Tainted Chinese food and drugs have become an issue of concern
globally after a spate of illnesses and accidents. Pet foods that
include melamine-spiked wheat gluten are now being blamed for the
deaths of an unknown number of American pets. Cough syrup laced with
mislabeled diethylene glycol has claimed the lives of at least 50
Panamians. Many countries have blacklisted Chinese toothpastes
containing the same ingredient. In recent years, Zhou notes, Russians
popping Chinese pork out of the oven have discovered drops of mercury
on the pan. Countries from Asia to Europe to North America have found
traces of arsenic, illegal antibiotics and other potentially
carcinogenic chemicals in Chinese seafood exports, leading the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration to suspend the sale of five farm-raised
varieties just last week.

The products sold inside China are even more dangerous. An eight-year-
old ban on clenbuterol did not stop the poisoning of more than 300
people who ate contaminated pork in Shanghai last year. Zhou's book,
"What Kind of God", reels off many other disconcerting examples. He
writes of farmed fish and seafood farm-fattened on birth control
pills, which experts say have decimated the sperm counts of Chinese
men. There are kids' snacks that are laced with hormones, leading 7-
year-old girls to grow breasts and 6-year-old boys to grow beards.
Then there are the cheap brands of soy sauce flavored with fermented-
and arsenic and lead-contaminated-hair swept directly off barber shop
floors.

In one notorious case in 2001, officials in the southeastern port of
Zhoushan blamed toxic frozen shrimp exports sent to Europe on peasant
women who use antiseptics to wash cuts on their hands. In fact, Zhou
says, seafood raisers regularly dump bottles full of potentially
cancer-causing chemicals like malachite green into their tanks to
prevent fungal infections. Zhou's book shows a picture of a scribbled
page from a shrimp farmer's accounts. "Malachite green, 15 bottles,"
it reads. Five years on, he writes, this culture of deceit lingers
even as the stakes get bigger. As Zhou's updated manuscript went to
press in late 2006, fish pickled with antibiotics and illegal
chemicals were traced from abroad back to fish markets up and down the
eastern seaboard-a major blow to an industry now worth an estimated
$35 billion a year.

Zhou intended his study to be a wake-up call to the nation. Its title
is a subversive twist on an imperial Chinese proverb, "Food is the
people's heaven," which conveys the age-old ideal that a ruler's
mandate is only as good as his ability to feed his people. In recent
decades China's Communist Party mandarins have fed them pretty well.
But Zhou's title poses the taunting question: "What kind of food? " He
portrays a fast-growing country suffering from something of a food
safety coma, overindulged with good eats but under-protected from the
dangers. "Chinese people today are fed like pigs," Zhou tells
NEWSWEEK, "so that all they'll want to do is keep on eating."


Indeed, Zhou's timely book has had curiously little impact inside
China. Expanded from a report first published in a Beijing-based
journal in September 2004, it became a 2006 finalist for a prestigious
reporting award, the Lettre Ulysses. According to Zhou, Politburo
officials endorsed his initial study as an important account of
China's food safety problem. NEWSWEEK has reviewed copies of what
appeared to be official documentation confirming this. The acclaim,
however, seems to have had scant effect. When an updated version of
the book was released at the beginning of this year, its text was
heavily edited and the print run small and little publicized. Zhou,
42, says he's been told that state security authorities warned the
Beijing-based publishers against promoting the work.

Zhou believes his dissident status may have made the authorities
especially sensitive: as the publisher of an independent political
journal at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy
protests, he spent nearly three years in jail afterward. (When
NEWSWEEK contacted the office of the editor in charge of the book at
the China Workers Publishing House, a man answering the phone said the
circulation of the book was "not large". The man, who refused to give
his name, said editors had cut and modified the study on finding that
"some of the figures and contents were incorrect", but that the volume
had been distributed as planned.)

China's central government has begun to confront the problem. In May,
a court sentenced to death Zheng Xiaoyu, the first chief of China's
State Food and Drug Administration, for approving fake medicines and
pocketing bribes in exchange for waiving approval procedures. In June,
Beijing unveiled its first five-year plan for food safety, prescribing
new mechanisms to trace and recall food, respond rapidly to scares and
blacklist offending companies. But critics say that government's
latest spurt of action was prompted by embarrassment at having its
quality problems made public internationally rather than domestic
scandals and concerns about quality. "Zheng Xiaoyu was sentenced to
death because of America's dogs and Panama's cough syrup," says Zhou.

Zhou began investigating China's food supply after a dinner he shared
with a friend in Guangdong, the carnivorously uninhibited southern
province where it's said people will "eat anything with wings-except
an airplane". The local Cantonese swear by their belief in the
curative value of what they eat, right down to the individual body
part. This restaurant's specialty: placenta soup, believed to be a
boost for fertility, among other things. The placentas come from the
aborted fetuses of migrant women workers who are unmarried or out of
line with the government's One-Child Policy. During dinner, Zhou
peeked into the back-kitchen and saw the cooks scooping out fetuses.
He makes a karmic link between gastronomical excesses and the maladies
that have afflicted Guangdong, breeding ground of diseases from avian
flu to SARS: "Perhaps Heaven was exacting his revenge on all those
people who dared eat human dumplings."

"What Kind of God" is not exactly an epic on the order of "The
Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel of life in the rancid bowels of
Chicago's meatpacking district. That fictional account was enough to
provoke a flood of letters to Teddy Roosevelt's White House and help
pave the way to the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act. Zhou's work is
more a stitch-job of Chinese news bites, pop trivia, and Zhou's own
brushes with officials, experts and peasants. Until now, he confesses,
he'd never even heard of "The Jungle". Still, Zhou has no doubt about
where the brunt of the blame lies. "We must get to the crux of the
problem with the system," he writes. "While cracking down on the
immediate perpetrators of food safety incidents, it's even more
critical that we crack down on the officials who bear the
responsibility." With the world's attention now focused on the quality
of Chinese goods, his damning indictment may yet prove a first step
along that road.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19650917/site/newsweek/