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.
This sounds very close to the description of the US in this very moment. From an outsiders perspective China seems to be doing about as good and bad as the US all things considered.
Except Chin’s dictator is grown up.
U.S. has been complete shit for the last 8 years, but somehow we haven’t collapsed and life goes on as usual. So I’m usually pretty skeptical of specific predictions (though the trends are worth paying attention to).
The single most accurate predictor of a country’s future is their demographic structure, and China’s is one of the worst, not just in the world, but in history. It’s pretty normal for nations to go into cycle of prosperity and despair where they expand and shrink, however, what China is going through is unique. China’s population is predicted to shrink down from 1.4 billion people to just 587 million by 2100. That is insane. It’s scale, speed, intensity is something we’ve never seen before. China’s demographic collapse is going to be worse than Europe during the black plague or China during the Great Chinese Famine or Germany after WWII. China is about to go into uncharted territory. We don’t know what things will be like on the other side because we’ve never seen it before and we have no model or system to deal with it. One thing is for certain though, China as we know it today under the CCP is going to go away.
As for the US, if it were to continue on it’s current demographic trends, it’ll reach China’s current demographic situation at some point in the second half of this century, that’s a lot of time to figure things out. At that point, other countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, as well as China would have been decades into their demographic collapses. That’s a lot valuable time to learn from what these countries went through and proceed with more knowledge captiously based on what minimized the damage and what didn’t.
Wouldn’t be Lemmy if there weren’t a comment unnecessarily shitting on the US in the comments section of an article about another country.
Maybe I overreacted, but the person that was shitting on China themselves seemed to just spout US propaganda talking points, when in reality both have huge issues and also their good parts.
If I had to chose, I’d lean in the US’s favor overall, but not by much, thankfully I don’t live in either of them.
What country are you living in that isn’t threatened by some or all of these?
Thank goodness. Otherwise people outside the U.S. wouldn’t know how bad it is there.