Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.

The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.

It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.

  • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    4 months ago

    It’s not feeling based, China is truly going through a devastating collapse that can’t reversed. Take their demographics as an example. Here are some interesting pieces of information about China’s demographics:

    • There’s a gender imbalance of 110 males per 100 females, which is the highest in the world. That means there’s over 30 million males that don’t have a female counterpart.
    • The population is expected to shrink down to 587 million by 2100 according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
    • The country is going to have more retirees than workers at some point in the 2030s
    • The fertility rate is less than 1.2, which is either the second or third lowest fertility rate of any non city state country in the world (sources differ slightly)
    • The country’s fertility rate is one of the fastest shrinking in the world (regularly ranks among the 5 worst)
    • China’s has one of the fastest aging populations in the world
    • China is expected to have worse demographics than the US by 2035 in all metrics despite the US being a developed country and China is not
    • China’s median age already surpasses that of the US
    • Officially, the country has been shrinking since 2022
    • According to Yi Fuxian, a demographer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the CCP has overcounted their population by an excess of at least 130 million people since the one child policy was implemented. This means that China’s demographic problems are worse than we thought and that China’s population probably peaked 10-15 years ago
    • China is not a destination for immigration by any stretch, China currently has around 1.5 million immigrants and about half of those are from Macau, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.

    How does a country recover from this? This is beyond devastating. In fact, it’s terminal. No amount of authoritarianism or nationalism or desperate wars or anything can save the country from what it’s going through. It’s too late to damage control and there’s really nothing to turn things around. The system is going to collapse, and we’re going to see China’s power and influence disappear from the world stage in the upcoming decades. China in it’s current form under the CCP is going away. Pay attention and take notes because we’re witnessing the greatest collapse in human history.

    • Match!!@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      China could actually do something really cool and intentionally pull in refugees using the ghost cities strategy in combination with BRI. Everyone would like that.

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 months ago

        While that would be cool, there literally aren’t refugees in the world to fix China’s demographics. They should still do it anyway, having those ghost cities be populated by people who need a new home sure beats leaving them empty.

    • rekorse@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      Not being able to take care of your old when they can’t work anymore does not equal the greatest collapse in human history. I guess we will see though.