E. coli conservatives (2): The China connection

Some of the latest headlines about the pet food scandal: "Nothing But Luck Kept Suspect Wheat Gluten Out Of Food Supply." [1]
"New Finds Expand the Threat Beyond Wheat Gluten."

Some recent developments: new brands [2] getting recalled all the time (it's up over 5,000 now); corporate flacks [3] spinning at fast enough velocity to escape earth orbit; Senate hearings [4] reminding us of that the central scandal of America's food-safety system under conservative government, that the FDA has now power to order recalls (something I'll be writing much more about in the future).

The part of the story I want to linger on for now, however, concerns our modern-day robber barons' good friends across the sea: the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese company apparently responsible for introducing poison into its wheat gluten, allegedly to increase the protein content so they could charge more, is called Xuzhou Anying. An enterprising American reporter in China asked the news director at Xuzhou's City Morning Post for his thoughts [5] about global attention now suddenly centered on his obscure city. But he hadn't heard of any story: "I didn't know this news about Xuzhou Anying. And even if we had heard about the news, we wouldn't be able to report on it because it's negative news."

The American reporter tracked down another wheat gluten manufacturer in a city 200 miles away; what precautions, it would be interesting to know, were other, similarly positioned companies taking to avoid the same mistakes? "We never heard the news of tainted pet food," the manager [5] responded.

Yes, that would be China, all right, from whence America imports more and more of its foodstuffs and everything else. "The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef's nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella," the Associated Press [6] reports. "Worried about losing access to foreign markets and stung by tainted food products scandals at home, China has in recent years tried to improve inspections, with limited success."

Asks our friend Dr. Phil: how's that working out for you?

If by "you" you mean, like, people in the United States who eat food, not so good. "Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected--yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption," another AP article [7] explains. More and more of the contents of that poisoned chalice come from China; since Ronald Reagan became president, Chinese agricultural exports have increased twenty-five-fold [6].

But if you are a transnational agribusiness concern, or one of the conservative ideologues who enable them--hell, it's working out great!

You see, whatever the Chinese Communist Party's commisars concerted, belated, PR-driven efforts to clean up dangerous factories, it's hard, if not impossible, to coordinate the kind of market incentives it would take to keep swindlers from acting like swindlers when your country is not free. When newspapers aren't allowed to report catastrophes, and whistle-blowers aren't allowed to talk to newspapers, corporations, American or Chinese, can do whatever they please to increase their bottom line at the expense of the public wellbeing, because they don't have to be afraid of getting caught.

And guess what? That's why E. coli conservatives love China. As one of them, Edward Gleaser of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, put it at the Wall Street Journal's Econoblog, China's "dictators are even better than democrats at restraining the growth-killing practices of expropriating private wealth." [8]

(Let me translate that from foreign language spoken by E. coli conservatives. Professor Glaeser means: How often do you hear of a highway patrolman giving himself a ticket for speeding? [9].)