China: Execution of food quality official - full text
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His execution was intended to show how concerned the Chinese authorities were about food and product safety standards after a spate of problems in food products exported from China to countries in North America, the EU, and elsewhere.
Immediate Context
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 1 warned US consumers to dispose of Chinese-made toothpaste after US officials had found samples--for sale in three US cities--containing diethylene glycol, a toxic industrial solvent used to replace the harmless but more expensive ingredient glycerin, the New York Times reported on June 2. Similarly contaminated toothpaste had also been discovered in El Salvador and Spain. Use of the chemical by Chinese manufacturers had been found in cough syrup that reportedly killed at least 94 people in Panama in 2006.
In March 2007, it came to light that Chinese manufacturers had added the industrial polymer melamine to rice and wheat flour that was used in pet food sold in the USA and Canada. The contamination led to the death of an unknown number of animals, and led to one of the biggest pet food recalls in US history. It was widely alleged that the manufacturers had for years been using melamine as a cheap means of increasing protein readings in their products.
These revelations were compounded by the admission that several Chinese companies had exported seafood containing banned antibiotics to the USA.
Toys imported in to the USA from China were also found to have safety problems. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall of several children's items, including on June 18 the recall of 1.5 million popular toy trains that were decorated with paints containing lead, in violation of long-standing US environmental laws.
The incidents prompted the impounding of an unprecedented number of shipments of Chinese imports by the US customs authorities.
Reaction and Outlook
In the wake of Zheng’s execution, the Chinese government struck a conciliatory tone, admitting that food and drug oversight had been insufficient. “Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation…What we will have to learn from the experience is to improve our work and emphasise public safety,” Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of the State Food and Drug Administration, told the New York Times on July 10.
On July 20, the Chinese government cancelled the licences of two companies whose products were implicated in the pet-food deaths, according to the Associated Press news agency. The third company closed was the Taixing Glycerin Factory, which was implicated in the Panamanian cough syrup and toothpaste tragedies.
The Chinese government reported that was launching a new food safety system to improve the food supply in time for the 2008 Olympic Games, according to minister for quality, supervision and inspection Li Yuanping, who issued a statement on July 13. Li maintained, however, that small uninspected factories and “illegal exports” were responsible for the recent Chinese “food scare incidents”.
Li later said the Chinese and US governments intended to sign a memorandum of understanding to resolve food safety issues by the end of 2007, the China Daily reported on July 19. The two countries also said they would launch mid-level talks on food safety on July 31, according to China’s official news agency, Xinhua. The EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, while in Beijing, announced that she had received reassurances that China would give the EU more details on how it handled EU complaints about unsafe products, the US State Department-sponsored Voice of America reported on July 24.
Many reports in the Western press said that Zheng was being made a scapegoat and that little had been done to reform a largely unbridled system. “Mr. Zheng’s case appears to have served a political purpose, allowing senior leaders to show that they have begun confronting the country’s poor product-safety record,” the New York Times reported on July 11. Analysts quoted in a July 11 article by Agence France-Presse claimed that in Zheng's case politics had trumped law.
At hearings held by the US House of Representatives (the lower house of Congress, the US bicameral federal legislature) on July 18, the chairman of the US Product Safety Commission asserted that more than half of product recalls in the US were of Chinese imports.
Historical Context
Chinese merchants had been trading with the West for centuries, with relations becoming increasingly politicised, leading to the Opium Wars with the UK during the 19th century, the US Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) banning Chinese immigration to the USA, and the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion in China (1899-1901) against Western influence. The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 in the face of both Western pressure and internal demands for modernisation marked the end of the Chinese imperial era and led to a period of instability. The Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Party of China (CPC) built up rival power bases and fought bitterly for control of the country, but both resisted the invading Japanese (1931-45) until the end of World War II. The CPC, under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, finally defeated the Kuomintang, who retreated to Taiwan, in 1949. Chairman Mao declared the formation of the communist People's Republic of China (PRC) on Oct. 1, 1949 and the US government broke off diplomatic relations. Under Mao, the Great Leap Forward in 1958, a mass re-organisation and collectivisation of agriculture and industry, led to near total economic collapse, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, caused mass social upheaval. Mao's “revolutions” had a profound impact on the functioning and structure of the Chinese economy that has persisted to the present day.
The PRC attempted to re-open relations with the USA (and soon thereafter other western countries and Japan) in 1972, which at the time was primarily a geopolitical move designed to align the West with China and against the Soviet Union.
In 1978, the Chinese government began to reform its economy from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy while remaining under political control of the CPC.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, China and the USA became major trade partners, and China’s ability to export cheap products led to a major trade imbalance in China’s favour. Chinese trade exceeded US$1,758 billion at the end of 2006, according to a Jan. 2 report by Xinhua, representing a three-fold increase from 2001. Chinese exports rose on average 5.7 per cent in the 1980s, 12.4 per cent in the 1990s, and 20.3 per cent between 2000 and 2003, according to the World Bank.
According to US statistics, China had a trade surplus with the USA of US$170 billion in 2004, more than double that in 1999. China’s main exports included machinery, clothing, grain, steel, and textiles.
The US Trade Representative in 2005 put China on its “priority watch list” for counterfeit goods and intellectual property violations, and both the USA and EU repeatedly demanded tougher Chinese action on counterfeiting, technology transfers, and payment of royalties. The US government frequently lodged complaints alleging Chinese dumping of various products, and alleged that China maintained an artificially low currency exchange rate that boosted Chinese exports to the USA while harming US exports to China.
To assuage relations with its trading partners, China has launched corruption proceedings against trade and industry officials, including the mass corruption trials of September 2000, which took place against a background of trade negotiations with the USA.
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