"Every day I ask myself, what is safe to eat? The pork is laced with
clenbuterol; the beef and lamb contain other toxic additives; and we
don't dare drink the milk."
For most Chinese, living in a healthy manner is not just common sense
but a form of piety. If you fall sick, it is widely assumed it's
because you didn't really take care of yourself.
But as the lament
above -- posted on micro-blogging site Sina Weibo under the pseudonym
'White clouds, Calm wind' -- suggests, this ancient precept did not
anticipate the advent of melamine, cadmium, pesticides, lead, mercury,
sulphur dioxide, micro-particles and dozens of other potentially harmful
chemicals that have worked their way into China's food chain, water
supply and atmosphere.
Nearly three decades of double-digit
industrial development greased by corruption and barely constrained by
regulatory oversight has produced, as a by-product, unprecedented levels
of pollution and an epidemic of toxic foodstuffs -- from baby formula
to the grain alcohol favoured at wedding banquets, made and marketed by
ruthless entrepreneurs.
Many of the thousands of small-scale
public protests across China each year are driven by the visible impact
of environmental pollution on people's daily lives, say watchdog groups
within and outside the country.
Until recently, such outbursts
never garnered attention beyond the immediate zone of impact. But the
Internet, and especially homegrown micro-blogging sites with some 600
million accounts, means the state can no longer keep such incidents from
becoming household knowledge across China.
Dozens of food and
beverage scandals resulting in hundreds of deaths have made Chinese
consumers wary, apprehensive and finally angry.
From 2007 until
2011, the use of clenbuterol, for example, flourished in factory pig
farms across the country. A dangerous anabolic steroid, the chemical is
also abused by athletes to build muscle mass. In animal husbandry, it
increases the ratio of more expensive lean meat compared to fat.
Nitrogen-based
melamine, a compound found in industrial plastics, was widely used in
baby formula up until 2008, when the worst food scandal to hit China in
years erupted into international news. Six infants died that year from
poisoning, and an estimated 300,000 are still suffering health problems,
especially kidney dysfunction. Despite the arrest of 21 people -- two
of whom were executed -- a similar case emerged two years later in 2010.
White
Clouds, Calm Wind's litany of alimentary anxiety also includes a fear
of "talc in our tofu (bean curd)," a staple source of protein consumed
throughout China.
"And we can't eat fried food either, because who
can guarantee that it wasn't cooked in recycled oil taken from the
streets?" At the end of last year, more than four dozen people were
arrested in one province alone for reselling so-called "gutter oil"
scooped up from the drains of restaurants.
"As for flour, it's so unnaturally white that it's frightening," says the blogger.
Tainted
food may be the least of China's health hazards -- it is still easier
for the government to crack down on unscrupulous merchants than to
purify China's water and air. Just this year, there have been two major
chemical discharges in life-giving rivers that have sent people
scurrying to the supermarket.
In January, multiple factories
upstream along a 300-kilometre stretch of the Longjiang from the city of
Liujiang were found to be dumping huge amounts of the deadly carcinogen
cadmium. Some four million people were affected.
Weeks later, an
acid spilled in the Yangtze at Zhejiang, one of the country's wealthiest
provinces, provoked a short-lived panic when residents in Zhenjiang
city smelled the results in their tap water.
But many consumers
will have wondered if the water that disappeared from market shelves is
necessarily safer. Only last year, Beijing authorities halted the sale
of 31 brands of bottled water that failed safety tests. Many harboured
colonies of bacteria that was hundreds -- and in one case 9,000 -- times
above threshold standards.
The same goes for ostensibly certified
"organic" foods, a sector that has nearly quadrupled in size in as many
years as middle-class consumers look for guarantees that what they are
eating is free of unsafe levels of pesticides.
Only China's top
leaders, provisioned from special farms, can be sure they are eating
safely, according to Gao Zhiyong, who worked for a state-run food
company and then wrote a book about it.
China's Environmental
Protection Ministry said in November that fully a tenth of China's
farmland contains dangerous levels of heavy metals due to contaminated
water and waste.
"The folks at the State Administration for Radio,
Film and Television (which oversees censorship) should be responsible
for food safety and those at the State Food and Drug Administration in
charge of reviewing movies," quipped another Weibo blogger under the
handle 'Refugee'. "That way, Chinese people could eat safe food and see
uncut movies."
Last August, thousands of residents in Dalian, an
industrial city in China's northeast, took to the streets to protest
against the presence and alleged leaks from a factory producing
paraxylene, a carcinogen used to make polyester films and fabric.
Even
Apple has come under fire. The Institute of Public and Environmental
Affairs, a Chinese research group, charged recently that some of the
high-tech giant's suppliers in China were spewing toxic substances into
the water and the air, endangering their workers and neighborhoods.
About
the same time, violent protests erupted in the eastern city of Haining,
where residents, including the mayor, blamed a rash of leukemia cases
on discharges from a nearby solar panel factory, forcing authorities to
temporarily shut it down.
Reports of abnormally high rates of
cancer near industrial installations have become so common that a new
term has entered the vocabulary: "Ai Zheng Cun", or "cancer villages."
With unintended irony, the Environment Office in the province of
Shandong recently anointed one such locale, Tushan, as a "commune of
longevity" despite a rash of cancer that some experts suspect is related
to a high concentration of chemical factories, including one that
produces the insecticide Profenofos.
The Chinese government has
been reluctant to release complete nationwide figures on cancer rates,
and even the ones they do may have underestimated the problem,
environmentalists say. Rural inhabitants -- heavily exposed to
insecticides and herbicides used in agriculture -- are often reluctant
to seek hospital care for fear of burdening their families with
out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Arguably, the most widespread and
health-wrecking form of pollution in China today is neither in the soil
nor the water, but in the air. Partly in response to a rising tide of
public anger over pollution, the government recently set new air-quality
standards, including for the first time particulates of less than 2.5
micrometers in diameter.
In so doing, however, it was forced to
acknowledge that the new benchmark immediately puts two-thirds of
China's big cities in the red zone. And while in keeping with the World
Health Organization's guidelines for lowering pollution levels in
developing countries, the new standards are still more than three times
higher than the body's recommended threshold.
China's increasingly
toxic environment combined with the viral-like spread of news across
the country's micro-blogging sites has proven highly combustible. As
once-isolated victims realize that the hyper-local threats to their
health are in fact duplicated across the country, they have become more
emboldened in their criticisms, and more insistent that action be taken.
"We
have been living this for decades," wrote one Weibo blogger under the
handle of 'Hebo HB'. "We only wish the government would not cheat us."
"Sometimes, I suspect that what we are breathing isn't air, but politics," said another user.
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