An Internet posting being spread by millions of China's netitzens rather sarcastically mocks the daily struggle consumers are facing with inferior and sometimes dangerous food products.
The posting outlines a typical day of a Chinese man: "He gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth with contaminated toothpaste that may to cause cancer; feeds his son baby milk powder containing excessive amounts of iodin; pours himself a glass of milk he bought yesterday not knowing it was stale dated; eats a buns that is too white to be true and munches on pickles made at a stinking roadside ditch.
"He joins his peers at the nearest KFC outlet for a lunch of fried chicken containing the chemical Sudan I. Before he leaves his office at the end of the day, he calls home where his wife is preparing a dinner of chemically contaminated rice, pesticide-infested vegetables cooked with recycled oil, which he'll wash down with beer containing formaldehyde."
Exaggerated as it may sound, the checklist of harmful products above comes from media reports last year that have Chinese consumers baffled and worried.
Already this year two soft drinks Fanta, Mirinda and Henz baby cereal have joined the list suspect products. The vitamin C fortified soft drinks may contain cancer-causing benzene and the baby food was found to contain genetically-engineered rice.
A recent internet survey also shows consumer awareness in China is at an all time high. Sina.com, one of the largest internet portals had 58,000 people respond to its survey on the subject of safety in consumer products and the results show that manufactures had better be more careful.
In the Fanta and Mirinda case, for example, nearly 95 percent of the respondents said they will buy soft drinks less often, or even stop buying them altogether.
Although not all the controversies have been proven the reports and the shear volume of them are enough to spread near panic in the public, the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Weekend, or Southern Weekend, reported.
Food safety, said the newspaper widely known for its investigative reports, is the most worrying issue for the average consumers last year.
Coming next on the list is cell phone, which has been the most complained products for the past two years, according to China Consumers Association.
Souther Weekend noted that 11 percent of all the 78,000 complaints the association received in 2005 targeted low-quality cell phones, a fact that overshadows the domestic market with more than 400 million subscribers.
The short message service that has prospered hand-in-glove with booming mobile communication industry also received the largest number of complaints in the country's service sector, and 34,451 complaints were lodged with China Consumers Association in 2005, up 26 percent year-on-year. These complaints involved mainly illegal promotion of IP cards, lack of transparency in communication charges and junk and fraudulent messages.
The mobile communication sector is therefore suspected of overcharging subscribers 7 billion yuan (US$875 million) a year, according to Lu Xilei, a member of the country's top political advisory, the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
In 2005, medicine was ill-spoken by consumers as the most lucrative product. A 70-percent price cut for a liver drug, announced by Shanghai pharmacies toward the end of 2005, aroused public resentment at unreasonable medicine prices -- some of which are 15 or 20 times higher than their costs.
On the booming Chinese market that has enough of almost everything to cater to the need of consumers. one item always falls short of supply -- train tickets during passenger rushes before and after holiday season.
China's 75,000 km of railway carried 149 million passengers during the passenger rush from mid January to early February, according to the Ministry of Railways.
"A train ticket during the Spring Festival passenger peak is probably the hardest item to get in China during the 21st century," Southern Weekend said.
(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2006)
