China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves (No Shit)

SHANGHAI, July 4 — China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country’s exports come under greater scrutiny overseas.

Regulators said the broad survey of foods, agricultural tools, clothing, women and children’s products and other types of goods turned up sizable quality and safety failure rates for products that are sold domestically.

The government said, for instance, that canned and preserved fruit and dried fish contained excessive bacteria; that 20 percent of the fruit and vegetable juice surveyed was deemed substandard, and that some children’s products were defective or laced with harmful chemicals.

The announcement came in the midst of a growing scandal over the quality and safety of Chinese-made exports and follows a series of international recalls involving everything from contaminated pet food ingredients and counterfeit toothpaste to toxic toys, defective tires and contaminated seafood.

The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the survey, conducted in the first half of this year, showed quality and safety improvements compared with conditions in the period a year earlier. But the announcement also suggested that Chinese consumers are at serious risk of being harmed by purchasing tainted foods, substandard goods and suspect or defective equipment.

Regulators said, in effect, that goods sold in China were far more hazardous than the exports that were driving the country’s economic growth and now partly the subject of safety and quality debates.

Li Yuanping, a regulatory official, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency last month that “99 percent of the food exported to the United States was up to safety standards over the past two years, which is a very high percentage.”

But regulators in the United States, Europe and other countries are growing increasingly concerned about quality and safety failures involving Chinese made goods.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration said it would block certain types of Chinese-made seafood, including shrimp, eel and catfish, from entering the United States unless it was certified to be safe.

American regulators say they were forced to act after witnessing a sharp rise this year in the number of seafood products contaminated with carcinogens or excessive antibiotic residues.

Facing a storm of criticism, China has repeatedly defended the quality and safety of its food and the goods it exports. But regulators have also moved to crack down on fake and poor-quality foods and consumer products.

Nearly every week for the last several months, the government and China’s state-controlled media have provided more evidence of how widespread are the quality and safety problems in this country, despite signs of progress in many areas of commerce.

During the last month, regulators and quality inspectors say they have discovered candied fruit with 63 times the permitted amount of sweetener; excessive additives and preservatives in nearly 40 percent of the children’s snacks surveyed in western Guangxi province; fake human blood protein at hospitals; and food tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.

Last week, the government even said it had shut about 180 food factories nationwide because of food safety violations. From December to May, regulators said they uncovered 23,000 cases involving fake or low-quality food.

Experts say aggressive and opportunistic entrepreneurs continue to take advantage of the country’s chronically weak enforcement of regulations, choosing to blend fake ingredients into products; to sign contracts agreeing to sell one product only to later switch the raw materials for something cheaper; and to doctor, adulterate or even color foods to make them look fresher or more appetizing, when in fact they might be old and stale.

In its report released on Wednesday, the government said 80.9 percent of the food and other products checked in a nationwide survey met safety standards, and that this rate was higher than a year earlier, when about 78 percent of the good surveyed were deemed safe.

The government said that more than 3,000 types of food had been checked nationwide and that thousands of companies were examined.

But regulators offered few details about why certain goods failed the quality and safety standards or how dangerous the products might be.

The government did, however, say baby formula and baby clothing did not meet the safety standards, that animal feed, fertilizer and agricultural equipment were defective and that many food items were mislabeled or heavily colored by additives.