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I mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise? There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is unprecedented. Their food supp

I mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise? There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is unprecedented. Their food supply is poisoned by factories that simply don't care about life and only care about money. There have been articles about how cooking oil is recycled from waste, and how fish are fed feces instead of food and packed in ice from polluted waters. Fake milk, fake baby formula, fake eggs for crying out loud. They add poisonous chemicals to pass tests, but those chemicals killed hundreds of pets in the US. And when the FBI went to investigate, the factory has already been burned to the ground to eliminate evidence. My friend worked at Uber and she said that the amount of fraud perpetrated within China was staggering, more than any other country on a per capita basis. There was an article on HN recently talking about how some Chinese products on Amazon have 40x the safe amount of lead and 30x the safe amount of cadmium in children's products. How does lead and cadmium get into a Spider-man pencil case for fuck's sake? It's so bad that even Chinese citizens simply don't trust the products made in China. When Chinese citizens go abroad they buy things like baby formula because they know they can't trust Chinese baby formula. It's sickening. I'm teaching my children to completely stay away from cheap Chinese products because we seriously have no way to know if it's safe, and our government has cut funding time and time again so it doesn't have enough resources to test the goods coming in. It's reprehensible.

internet_user 7y ago
And not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global-threat-of-radioactive-scrap-metal/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global... "India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there’s no evidence the situation has improved." It's not just reprehensible. It's down right psychopathic. Sick.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant. Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off: https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste-across-italy-1513190243 https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...
  - internet_user 7y ago
    Do you think it's an accident China does not screen their export goods for safety? Nobody thought about it somehow for decades? Organized crime runs all the way through the system in many places, not just China.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Does any country screen their exports for safety? Screening imports I've heard before, but never exports.
      - internet_user 7y ago
        How can a random truck stop in Kentucky detect that radiation, but apparently goods passed through Chinese ports (and in fact the supply chain) without setting off anything anywhere? Think about that for a minute.
        mschuster91 7y ago
        Because your random truckspot has way lower throughput than any major port. You absolutely can do a full freeze-and-search on a German Autobahn (and it regularly gets done to check for driving clock records, overloading and insecure fastening of load), but in a port? No way. Only thing that's remotely practical is to check 1 of N containers with a drug dog or an x-ray and that's it.
firethief 7y ago
America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.
- internet_user 7y ago
  and legal system too.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  For now at least.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  This is actually something Hank Paulson comments on in his book "Dealing with China": the Chinese have a huge government, but they actually have something like a half to a third as many government workers per capita. And their comms infrastructure, despite the Huewai bruhaha, is severely lacking in comparison, so those additional people don't stretch as far.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    What about their comms infrastructure is lacking? I got full high-speed cellular internet reception even in the deep countryside when I visited there last year.
    - killjoywashere 7y ago
      Don't recall, feel free to read the book.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them. It can't be believed until it's experienced.
  - 7y ago
latchkey 7y ago
Unsurprisingly given the proximity, Vietnam is just as bad in this respect. It is crazy, anything to make some money.
roywiggins 7y ago
There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing in the West's industrial past. Being a fast-growing economy and also keeping a strict eye on product purity, has it ever successfully been done before? Not to say that as an excuse, but it's not at all an uncommon pattern.
- nikkwong 7y ago
  I think it's pretty much what we'd expect when markets are allowed to operate unhinged; it doesn't necessarily speak to a point in time in an economy's development—it moreso speaks to the fact that less developed economies are less strictly regulated because they've yet to develop the case law and obituaries on which protective regulations are formed. With that in mind it's a bit hard to ignore the irony in the regulatory uncoupling that's happening in the US right now. We have learned from our own past and from the aforementioned stories that greed and self interest will always produce externalities that trump a society's well-being; it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good.
  - andrekandre 7y ago
    > it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good. while reading your post half way i was thinking to reply saying the exact same thing this gives me much pause, because it means that even if more and more these deregulation’s hurt society, they would get drowned out by the (increasingly sensational) daily news cycle
    - nikkwong 7y ago
      Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.
sundvor 7y ago
This is real. Try buying the good types of baby formula in Australian supermarkets or pharmacies; you quickly learn the need to have a buffer of several lest your baby goes hungry. Scalpers go in and get what they can, then sell to China for a massive profit. If they're hit by the "max one per customer" they'll come in again and again until they're kicked out of the store. I feel bad for parents in China who can't trust the products in their own stores.
- A2017U1 7y ago
  And yet Australian dairy farmers constantly complain about low prices and going bankrupt. This has been going on for years. The complaint doesn't add up. There's more than enough milk powder to go around, people are fighting over the premium ones.
  - pas 7y ago
    Baby-food powder is probably too small a market for milk producers to matter. (And usually the cost of the milk is not that big of a factor in the final consumer price.)
SubiculumCode 7y ago
I have no evidence of this, and I am not proposing it is true... more like a plot for a novel or something, but What if a nation that produces almost everything purposely contaminates their products with slow poisons and heavy metals so that the enemy consumer population slowly becomes stupid and ill, and unable to compete effectively on the international stage.
Gatsky 7y ago
I’ve read these articles as well. However, I don’t think one can infer generalisations about the culture of > 1 billion people by reading a few articles online. I also don’t think that a ‘culture of dishonesty’ is an actual thing, or at least an appropriate application of the word ‘culture’. More close to reality is that China has a system of incentives which, perverse or otherwise, make ‘dishonesty’ more likely. This operates in Western culture as well, for example the activities of investment banks in the subprime loan crisis. The distinction is important because it is difficult to change a culture but incentives can change overnight.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mrob 7y ago
>fake eggs I haven't seen any evidence that these were ever sold to the general public. It seems very unlikely to me, because eggs are cheap, and the alleged manufacturing process is labor intensive. If you're willing to take the risk making fakes there are many other more profitable options. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.cc/2007/05/hoax-chinese-counterfeit-eggs.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.c... https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/ https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/
chewz 7y ago
> It's reprehensible. You mean something like this - Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910

internet_user 7y ago

And not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global-threat-of-radioactive-scrap-metal/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global... "India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there’s no evidence the situation has improved." It's not just reprehensible. It's down right psychopathic. Sick.

roywiggins 7y ago
A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant. Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off: https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste-across-italy-1513190243 https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...
- internet_user 7y ago
  Do you think it's an accident China does not screen their export goods for safety? Nobody thought about it somehow for decades? Organized crime runs all the way through the system in many places, not just China.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Does any country screen their exports for safety? Screening imports I've heard before, but never exports.
    - internet_user 7y ago
      How can a random truck stop in Kentucky detect that radiation, but apparently goods passed through Chinese ports (and in fact the supply chain) without setting off anything anywhere? Think about that for a minute.
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        Because your random truckspot has way lower throughput than any major port. You absolutely can do a full freeze-and-search on a German Autobahn (and it regularly gets done to check for driving clock records, overloading and insecure fastening of load), but in a port? No way. Only thing that's remotely practical is to check 1 of N containers with a drug dog or an x-ray and that's it.

firethief 7y ago

America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.

internet_user 7y ago
and legal system too.
_bxg1 7y ago
For now at least.
killjoywashere 7y ago
This is actually something Hank Paulson comments on in his book "Dealing with China": the Chinese have a huge government, but they actually have something like a half to a third as many government workers per capita. And their comms infrastructure, despite the Huewai bruhaha, is severely lacking in comparison, so those additional people don't stretch as far.
- jbay808 7y ago
  What about their comms infrastructure is lacking? I got full high-speed cellular internet reception even in the deep countryside when I visited there last year.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Don't recall, feel free to read the book.
jlawson 7y ago
Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them. It can't be believed until it's experienced.
- 7y ago

latchkey 7y ago

Unsurprisingly given the proximity, Vietnam is just as bad in this respect. It is crazy, anything to make some money.

roywiggins 7y ago

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing in the West's industrial past. Being a fast-growing economy and also keeping a strict eye on product purity, has it ever successfully been done before? Not to say that as an excuse, but it's not at all an uncommon pattern.

nikkwong 7y ago
I think it's pretty much what we'd expect when markets are allowed to operate unhinged; it doesn't necessarily speak to a point in time in an economy's development—it moreso speaks to the fact that less developed economies are less strictly regulated because they've yet to develop the case law and obituaries on which protective regulations are formed. With that in mind it's a bit hard to ignore the irony in the regulatory uncoupling that's happening in the US right now. We have learned from our own past and from the aforementioned stories that greed and self interest will always produce externalities that trump a society's well-being; it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  > it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good. while reading your post half way i was thinking to reply saying the exact same thing this gives me much pause, because it means that even if more and more these deregulation’s hurt society, they would get drowned out by the (increasingly sensational) daily news cycle
  - nikkwong 7y ago
    Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.

sundvor 7y ago

This is real. Try buying the good types of baby formula in Australian supermarkets or pharmacies; you quickly learn the need to have a buffer of several lest your baby goes hungry. Scalpers go in and get what they can, then sell to China for a massive profit. If they're hit by the "max one per customer" they'll come in again and again until they're kicked out of the store. I feel bad for parents in China who can't trust the products in their own stores.

A2017U1 7y ago
And yet Australian dairy farmers constantly complain about low prices and going bankrupt. This has been going on for years. The complaint doesn't add up. There's more than enough milk powder to go around, people are fighting over the premium ones.
- pas 7y ago
  Baby-food powder is probably too small a market for milk producers to matter. (And usually the cost of the milk is not that big of a factor in the final consumer price.)

SubiculumCode 7y ago

I have no evidence of this, and I am not proposing it is true... more like a plot for a novel or something, but What if a nation that produces almost everything purposely contaminates their products with slow poisons and heavy metals so that the enemy consumer population slowly becomes stupid and ill, and unable to compete effectively on the international stage.

Gatsky 7y ago

I’ve read these articles as well. However, I don’t think one can infer generalisations about the culture of > 1 billion people by reading a few articles online. I also don’t think that a ‘culture of dishonesty’ is an actual thing, or at least an appropriate application of the word ‘culture’. More close to reality is that China has a system of incentives which, perverse or otherwise, make ‘dishonesty’ more likely. This operates in Western culture as well, for example the activities of investment banks in the subprime loan crisis. The distinction is important because it is difficult to change a culture but incentives can change overnight.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mrob 7y ago

>fake eggs I haven't seen any evidence that these were ever sold to the general public. It seems very unlikely to me, because eggs are cheap, and the alleged manufacturing process is labor intensive. If you're willing to take the risk making fakes there are many other more profitable options. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.cc/2007/05/hoax-chinese-counterfeit-eggs.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.c... https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/ https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/

chewz 7y ago

> It's reprehensible. You mean something like this - Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910