The Spectator Podcast

The Chinese middle class can now be very discerning about the food that they eat, and who can blame them? In the last twenty years, there seems to have been a steady stream of food safety and hygiene scandals – most infamously melamine-laced milk powder in 2008, which poisoned tens of thousands of babies. Since then, we’ve heard about pesticides being put into steamed buns to improve their texture, used cooking oil being retrieved from gutters to be reused, and lamb meat that might contain rat or fox.The latest scandal, breaking over the last couple of months, is that of fuel tankers being used to carry cooking oil without the tankers being cleaned in between. So what gives? Are these scandals a particularly Chinese phenomenon? Why hasn’t government regulation or punishment worked? And how does this impact political credibility in the eyes of the middle class?Cindy Yu is joined by two brilliant guests to discuss all of these questions and more.Dali Yang is a political scientist and sinologist at the Universit