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.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s also an ethnostate

    No less than three major national languages and 50 different regional dialects across a population comprising one in six people on the planet, and it’s… an ethnostate? Are we really suggesting that the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Manchus, and the Zhuang don’t exist? Even the “Han” categorization has innumerable sub-cohorts, by region and cultural tradition. These would constitute entire countries elsewhere in the world.

    But hey…

    Maybe this looks like an ethnostate to you.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          4 months ago

          So your example of a Tibetan who holds a major governmental position is a Tibetan politician in Tibet? Really?

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              4 months ago

              “It’s not an ethnostate because people only hold top governmental positions in regions where their ethnicities dominate” is not the argument you think it is.

                  • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    The “Han Chinese” ethnic category is actually a lot less secure in its definition than one would think. Not defending the Chinese government, far from it actually. The CCP has a vested interest in promoting a unitary ethnic identity in the idea of “Han Chinese”.

                    Despite that though, strong identities often tied to the various unique cultural differences and “dialects”(modern day linguists often consider alot of these “Han Chinese” dialects as really, distinct languages with unique and sometimes mutually unintelligible phonetic differences, with the caveat being somewhat similar grammar, tied together through a common logographic script and considered part of a broader family tree of sinitic languages), survive despite that.

                    It’s why overseas Chinese who sequester themselves in various Chinese communities, oftentimes identify as “Cantonese” or “Teochew” and other terms that, although tied to this greater “idea” of “Han Chinese”, they think to be distinct from one another.

                    Like they were their own ethnic groups.

                    “Han Chinese” is, at least I think, an idea closer to pan-ethnicity, than it is it’s own ethnicity.

                    When it comes to the Chinese language, the main “dialect” is mandarin, and the CCP has done a good job in slowly eradicating other “dialects”(languages). With one of their strategies being, well, classifying as many sinitic languages as possible as, “dialects”. The loss of these “dialects”, these languages, are tragic.

                    “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” - Max Weinreich

                    Edit Addendum: In any case this shit complex and nuanced and shit. I’ll post an interesting article here, because I think it applies. https://www.michigandaily.com/michigan-in-color/taishanese-family-and-other-fading-things/

                    In any case Fuck the CCP!

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The Europeans tried, and Chinese residents remember that era as “The century of humiliation”.

        I would have more money on the UK cracking up than China.