A bombshell exposé from state-media outlet Beijing News about the use of fuel tanker-trucks to transport cooking oil and other edible products—without the tankers being washed or disinfected between transports—has snowballed into the largest food safety controversy in China since the 2008 melamine-tainted milk and baby formula scandal. Multiple investigations are now underway, including one by the State Council, and a number of others by local supervisory bodies and companies implicated in the scandal, such as SinoGrain and Hopefull Grain and Oil Group. The cooking oil transport scandal erupted a mere week before China’s long-awaited Third Plenum, a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee at which major policy initiatives are often unveiled. Given China’s repeated food safety scandals and their potential to further undermine Party credibility, the latest scandal is highly politically sensitive. A quote from Xi Jinping, made at the Central Rural Work Conference in Beijing in 2013 and now being widely shared on the Chinese internet, notes: “If the Party is unable to ensure food safety, and if this persists, people will begin to question whether we are qualified to govern China.”
Online censorship of the tanker truck story has already emerged, with some related phrases unsearchable on Weibo. On July 11, Weibo users noted the suspiciously convenient timing of the hashtag #Carcinogens Detected in Japanese Cooking Oil Imported into Taiwan# shooting up to third place on Weibo’s list of trending topics. One Weibo user commented, “What a clever maneuver! It’s the same formula every time—pile on Japan to save China from embarrassment.”
CDT editors have been tracking online censorship of the tanker scandal, and have archived numerous essays and articles (many now censored or deleted) on related topics. Some of this archived content discusses the lack of regulatory oversight that allowed for dual-use tankers to transport food products as well as fuel (long an “open secret” in the industry); delves into China’s existing food safety rules and regulations; and analyzes the repeated occurrences of food safety scandals. Other content offers praise for Beijing Daily reporter Han Futao’s bold reporting, notes that such exposés used to be much more common, and explores the reasons for the decline of investigative reporting in China.
Among the most recent deleted content is a video from an amateur online sleuth on content-sharing site Bilibili, and an article from the 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese-language financial daily. The creator of the Bilibili video, Gao Jianli, managed to track down the license plate number of the tanker truck mentioned in the Beijing News exposé, and used a publicly available logistics app to track the tanker’s movements over the past six months to determine where the adulterated cooking oil had been delivered to. Gao also determined that the tanker had transported a number of different products, including kerosene, cooking oil, and animal feed. His now-deleted video, which has been archived by CDT, garnered one million views within 12 hours of being posted, and drew high praise from viewers impressed with Gao’s resourceful detective work. Below are some of the comments from Bilibili and Weibo users:
锅蒸之鱼: If you find one cockroach in your room, you can be damn sure it’s not the only one living there.
北方巨胖妖狼落枫: This is exactly the investigation we need. Right now, it’s the food transportation industry that urgently needs to be rectified, not the production or processing end.
tianxia76: You’ve dug a bit deeper than other media outlets. Even without conducting any interviews, you’ve already surpassed most other media coverage.
大连联通: Gao is so professional! This is true journalism. [Chinese]
On the heels of Gao’s investigation, the 21st Century Business Herald published a follow-up piece on the app he used to track the tanker, and found that after experiencing a surge of users on July 9, the app had disabled public access to the delivery truck tracking function by the following day. The Herald’s article, which includes interviews with personnel in the tanker truck and logistics industry, as well as the company that created the app, has since been censored. The Guardian’s Amy Hawkins reported on some of the online reactions to the app’s abrupt “upgrade” that made it impossible for members of the public to track fuel tankers that might be transporting tainted food products:
Some people speculated that the removal of Shipping Help’s tracking function was motivated by a desire to limit the size of the scandal.
“In the information age, data is power,” one Weibo user wrote. “However, this power sometimes makes people feel helpless. I hope that every ‘system upgrade’ is to better serve users, not to cover up the problem.” [Source]
Many articles about the tanker truck scandal have praised reporter Han Futao, who led the Beijing News investigative team, for his professionalism, courage, and dogged commitment to public-interest journalism. He has also been the target of online critics who question his motives and impugn his integrity. Ultranationalist commentator Sima Nan recently called for an investigation into Han Futao and his employer, the Beijing News, for their reporting about the scandal, and suggested—without a shred of evidence—that they might have the backing of “hostile foreign forces.” It would not be the first time that a Chinese investigative journalist has been targeted for exposing a scandal that embarrassed the government or threatened powerful vested interests. Jian Guangzhou, the seasoned reporter who exposed the melamine scandal back in 2008, was subject to much online abuse, and eventually quit his job and left journalism in 2012.
