From poisons
to road accidents,
a lot of things in China can be deadly.
Hi. Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m your host, Chris Chappell.
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The world is full of delightful deadly dangers.
From natural disasters to disease,
from toxic waste to toxic food.
And China’s certainly got its fair share of things that could kill you...
eventually.
So today, I bring you five things to look out for in China
if you’re not yet ready to meet Marx.
Karl, not Groucho.
Number 5
Tainted food.
Now, I love Chinese food.
Whether it’s soup dumplings,
or red-cooked pork,
or hand-pulled noodles—
there’s no cuisine that tantalizes the taste buds like Chinese food.
But when you eat Chinese food in China these days,
well, you may be putting yourself at risk.
I don’t want to be alarmist here—
you’re probably not going to die,
but you might wish you were dead.
For example, if you’re visiting China,
you’ll definitely want to try the street food.
Just think of it like playing Russian roulette
with your digestive system.
Vendors may not washing things,
or maybe they let meat sit around in the open for hours.
Sometimes street food can be great.
Other times, let’s just say it can come back to bite you.
And consider that some of the delicious foods
that you may be eating might have been prepared
using recycled gutter oil.
“It’s all in a day’s work for this woman.
She opens up a manhole cover and scoops out
as much slop as she can.”
According that Radio Free Asia report,
business is so good,
in just a few short years of scooping out gutter gunk,
that woman made enough money to build a house.
“Her slop eventually ends up at a processing plant like this one,
where it’s combined with other animal fat refuse,
to create recycled cooking oil.
Workers put the oil in barrels for delivery
to restaurants and hotels.”
Now that video is from 2013.
So have things changed since then?
Well, since at least 2010,
Chinese authorities have repeatedly cracked down
on the use of gutter oil,
but there’s no sign that it’s gone.
Especially since authorities have to keep ramping up the crackdown.
Now you might think going to a Western restaurant
like KFC or McDonald’s would be safe—
since they have higher standards.
Well, not necessarily.
A video surfaced in Chinese media a few years back,
showing disgusting practices in a Shanghai food-processing factory
that supplies ingredients to a lot of international restaurant brands.
“It began with this grainy video shot by local TV,
showing workers allegedly processing expired meat.
Mixing raw and recycled meat,
and pulling raw meat directly off the floor with their bare hands.”
The plant supplied meat in several Chinese cities
to McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s.
Which I didn’t even know they had in China.
Food scandals in China are disturbingly common.
From ‘seriously mouldy’ meals on Chinese trains...
to kindergartens feeding kids ‘rotten, worm-infested food’...
restaurants and institutions may not be
a safe haven of food safety in the least.
A quality control and compliance service provider called Qima
found that almost half of Chinese food-processing plants
fail to meet internationally acceptable standards.
The company conducted several thousand inspections,
audits and tests on food-processing plants in China
and found abnormal levels of pesticides, antibiotics,
heavy metals, bacteria, or viruses
that could put consumers at risk.
The Qima’s vice president said,
“There are horror stories, obviously”...
after the company published a report that
48% of the thousands of food processing plants in China
did not meet the requirements set by Western
food trading companies and retailers.
Oh, and careful what you wash down your meals with, too, because...
Number 4
Toxic drinks.
The company that makes Jack Daniel’s, Brown-Forman,
estimates that around 30% of all alcohol in China is fake.
But perhaps more shocking is a recent report that
nearly 40% of Chinese people knowingly buy fake booze.
Fake booze means it’s not what the label says it is.
It could be anything from a cheaper brand
poured into a more expensive bottle,
to straight-up poisonous bootleg liquor
made in a bathtub.
And in some cases, fake booze can kill you.
Just like real booze—
except fake booze can also kill you
in ways you don’t expect.
That’s what the World Health Organization’s
representative in China says.
“Where counterfeit alcohol
is made from poor quality ingredients
or toxic industrial chemicals,
consuming it could lead to
serious acute illness or worse.”
The nasty chemicals he’s referring to
include antifreeze and methanol,
which can make you go blind.
And bottling conditions can be,
as one British newspaper reported,
“perilously unsanitary.”
Which is a nice way of saying that counterfeiters
were caught bottling the booze in toilets.
In a recent case 22 people were poisoned
after drinking fake whisky at a bar southern China.
It’s unclear how much they drank,
but according to local reports,
some experienced visual impairment,
dizziness and some even vomited.
Now while for some people that might sound like
just another Friday night,
it turns out the whiskey was poisonous,
and some of them ended up in intensive care unit
and nearly died.
Now you might think:
“Liquor then beer,
you’re in the clear.”
But even beer in China can make you sick.
In this video,
workers at an underground factory in Dongguan
are dunking used Budweiser cans into a tub of cheap beer
with their bare hands to fill them up.
Then the Budweiser-branded cans run along
a filthy conveyor belt where they get capped and presto,
ready to quench the thirst—
or claim the life—
of the unsuspecting night club goer.
Authorities estimated that the underground factory
churned out about 600,000 crates of fake Budweiser a month,
which were then distributed to bars and nightclubs.
Fake alcohol won’t always kill you,
but you’ll definitely have the worst hangover of your life.
For a quick recovery,
just remember,
drink plenty of water.
Just not the fake kind,
like from the illegal bottling plant near Shanghai,
where a man was busted filling empty jugs with dirty tap water
and passing them off as well-know brands like Nestle.
So...China is full of fake liquor and water.
I think I’ll just stick with milk.
Unless, of course, it’s...
Number 3
Tainted milk powder.
Back in 2008, 300,000 babies got sick
after drinking tainted milk powder
from the Chinese company Sanlu.
At least six of the babies died from kidney damage.
Eventually, two Sanlu executives also died.
From being executed.
The scandal was one of the worst consumer product scares
in modern Chinese history.
Partly because authorities tried—
and failed—
to cover it up.
Although they did successfully cover it up
until after the 2008 Beijing Olympics,
so they get at least a bronze medal for saving face.
Now Chinese authorities say they’re working to solve the problem.
But the consumer market doesn’t seem to think so.
That’s why the majority of Chinese parents
still prefer to buy their infant formula from foreign brands.
There’s even a black market of infant formula traffickers
who bring in powdered milk from abroad.
That’s like trusting your local drug dealer
more than a government-regulated company.
I mean, literally,
people are buying infant formula on the street.
Which is not smart, since big criminal syndicates
are also getting in on the racket.
In April 2016,
Shanghai authorities arrested nine people
for producing more than 17,000 tins
of fake milk powder with counterfeit labels—
so these products looked like those
from American infant formula brands.
Some Chinese parents are just crossing the border
into Hong Hong to buy legit milk powder,
but the Hong Kong government
has now set restrictions on that.
The demand for high quality milk formula in China right now
is so high, and the supply so limited,
that it’s become the most valued gift at baby showers.
I guess I should return
that plush Cthulhu I bought for my niece.
What’s that, Shelley?
Ok, fine, it was for me.
On to other things that can kill you...
Number 2
Traffic accidents
Driving around China can be a killer experience.
In 2016 in China there were over 300 thousand deaths
due to road incidents—
more than 800 people every single day.
When you compare that the US—
and adjust for the number of drivers in each country—
you’re 6 times more likely to die driving in China.
The best travel advice in China is to avoid the roads—
and take the train.
Well...not always.
And...
Number 1
Air Pollution
In China, the skies aren’t always blue.
Air pollution is not only costing the Chinese economy
around 38 billion dollars a year,
it’s killing 1 million people per year.
A new study from the Chinese University of Hong Kong
says an average of 1.1 million premature deaths each year
are caused by two types of air pollutants:
a fine particle called PM2.5 and smog-inducing ozone.
PM2.5 are microscopic airborne particles small enough
to lodge deep in the lungs and cause respiratory problems.
That’s the number 3 cause of death in China,
according to the WHO.
Other studies link ozone pollution to an increase
in the number of deaths from cardiovascular diseases,
which is the number one killer in China.
Beijing is one of China’s most-air polluted cities.
It’s not good for kids...
or the elderly.
Air pollution is even a reason
many Western business people
want to get out of China.
Or maybe it’s just the food.
Or the booze.
Or the car accidents.
So what do you think about the top 5
things in China that could kill you?
Leave your comments below.
And before we go,
it’s time for me to answer a question from a viewer
who supports China Uncensored
on the crowd-funding website Patreon.
Karan Joshi asks:
“Can the People's Republic of China
ever split up like the Soviet Union?”
Good question, Karan.
The difference is that in the Soviet Union’s case,
it wasn’t just one country.
It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
essentially a country of countries.
The Soviet Union included Russia,
but also about 15 others,
like Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and, well,
almost all of the Stans.
After the Soviet Union dissolved,
for the most part these countries
went back to being independent countries.
But the People's Republic of China
is basically a single country.
If that government collapses,
maybe Tibet would want to split off.
But under the current situation,
it would be difficult for it to succeed,
because now there are more
ethnically Chinese residents in Tibet
than ethnic Tibetans.
This the result of a decades-long campaign
by the Communist Party to permanently merge
Tibet into China.
My hope is that
when the Chinese Communist Party collapses,
Tibet could at a minimum have meaningful freedoms
under a more benevolent Chinese leadership.
The same difficulties exist for Xinjiang,
a.k.a.
East Turkestan.
And as for Taiwan,
it’s never been part of the People's Republic of China,
and it has its own independent government.
So it’s in a completely different situation
than Tibet and Xinjiang.
But who can predict what’s going to happen
in China this century.
Thanks for your question, Karan.
And for everyone else,
we rely on support from viewers like Karan
who contribute a dollar or more per episode
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Without viewer support,
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Click the like in the Description to learn more.
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored.
Once again, I’m Chris Chappell.
See you next time.