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.
We have to learn to better frame the issues. When Japan was ascendant, everyone projected them to overtake the US in economic power and we got all afraid and passed a bunch of protectionist rules about car imports. Think pieces get written about how their economic model was better than the US and the US is a crumbling empire.
But it turned out it was a huge real estate bubble combined with/caused by the demographic benefit coming from a boom generation going into their prime labor years and once that generation started aging out there was a real estate slump and a balance sheet recession that lasted a decade, and they never recovered to the levels everyone was projecting 10 years prior.
Now literally the exact same thing is happening with China and everyone is all shocked. Guess what, it’s going to happen again.
It’s not to say the US will never fall to 2nd place in the global order, but it’s not going to be from some country growing at 10%/year forever, that doesn’t actually ever happen.
Perhaps the lesson that will come from all these demographic collapses will be that economic growth should be slow and steady. Countries that try to rush rising up the ranks of standards of living by doing whatever they can to generate economic growth regardless of consequences will end up trading their long term future for short term prosperity.