An ugly side of Chinese capitalism is the proliferation of fake goods. In today's Sunday Times, there was an article on fake eggs being manufactured for sale in Guangzhou.
That's right - fake eggs. The cost of a fake egg is 0.15 yuan (S$0.03) - half the price of a real egg. So gross profit per egg is 0.15 yuan.
How many eggs must a tofu-brained merchant make and sell to turn a decent profit ? Stoopid. Sure, one can argue that the merchants can make it up on volume. But the production process looks so tedious. And the fake eggs are harmful to people. I don't care how poor China still is - you don't poison people with fake food.
The HK media regular reports stories of fake foods production or unhygienic production facilities on the mainland. The horror stories simply boggle the mind :
- a soy sauce factory that extracts amino acids, a key ingredient, from human hair discarded by hair salons ;
- workers spraying insecticide on slabs of ham to drive away flies ;
- fake baby formula that has caused the deaths of infants from malnutrition in poorer provinces like Anhui. Besides cosmetics, jewelry and apparel, mainland tourists were buying tins of baby formula in HK, knowing that they were getting the real stuff ;
- unsold tins of mooncakes kept for sale in the following year ;
- industrial hydrogen peroxide used to bleach dried shark's fins to achieve the desire white colour.
I've been boycotting tinned or prepackaged foods from China for some time. Once, I bought two cups of herbal turtle jelly (gui1 ling2 gao1 - good for complexion mah) from a Japanese supermarket near my home, then realised that they were made in China. Into the bin they went.
In cases of fake food, I advocate the application of the Taliban penal code (you steal something, they cut off your hand). If you make fake foods, you don't have to go to jail - just eat everything that you produce.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
Gross! Yup, I've heard of those fake eggs and the fake milk powder before. The manufacturers deserves a good place in hell!
Wah. I always eat spam from China. Must stop.
I saw the fake eggs article in ST. And I was thinking that it is A LOT of trouble for a little profit.
now you're making me wonder what the heck did I eat in hK.
www.livejournal.com/~ngader
you're scaring me.. i'll remember no eggs for me when i go china to work...!
I forgot to mention a HK magazine article that I read recently. The title was "A Hongkonger that dares to eat hairy crabs from the mainland, is a brave Hongkonger". Apparently, farmers are using steroids and, get this - female contraceptive pills - to make their hairy crabs grow bigger and faster.
There are even imitation hairy crabs ! The most famous crabs are from a lake called Yang2 Cheng2 Hu2. The genuine producers were going to the extent of using laser engraving on the crab shells to prove that their crabs are truly from Yang Cheng Hu. Even so, the counterfeiters managed to replicate the laser engraving on their not-so-pedigreed crustaceans.
That's Chinese ingenuity for you.
yeah now i dare not eat anything from China..
There's also fake seaweed too! and fake soya sauce. The chinese actually used HAIR to make soya sauce! I saw it on tv! yucks!
Manz, I will love to boycott China Made stuff seriously, but all my clothes are made from CHINA!! Now I know why sometimes my back gets itchy when I put on my clothes!! Fake Cotton!!! In Australia, they showed a documentary film about China too .. making fake branded goods.. The ang moh said the chinese people always like to appear rich even if they are not, so they decide to get fake branded stuff instead ... so embarassing!
A China colleague once walked into a shop to buy mooncakes. He saw that there were two different kinds of tins, and asked the owner what the difference was.
"Oh, those over there, you can give them away as gifts. These over here, you can buy them for yourself."
After some probing by my colleague, the owner confessed that the "gift" tins were leftovers from the year before.
aiyoh they so unethical..
some are quite rich.. i saw them at the store buying real omegas/tag hueurs/tissot watches with CASH.
Post a Comment