The fire department in Tar Heel, North Carolina is a volunteer outfit and, apparently, not a very good one at that. A couple of years ago, for example, firefighter David Hunsinger, Jr. died orchestrating a fatal car crash while responding to an alarm; he never even reached the scene of the blaze. Local residents, therefore, may be a tad apprehensive that the world’s largest slaughterhouse, along with the rest of Smithfield Foods, is now in the hands of the Chinese. Recall that only last month, 120 Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry workers died in an explosion and subsequent fire at a facility widely praised by government officials as a model of agricultural modernization. One Communist Party bureaucrat had fawned over Jilin’s “progress into becoming a nationally known enterprise,” while another had crowed that “through an advanced management concept and business model, the company quickly entered into healthy development.”
North Carolinians can also look forward to the fluorescent pink drinking water enjoyed in Shandon province. While residents there logically suspect the 10,000 infected pig carcasses dumped into the Huangpu River, a government functionary offered the following explanation: “It seems someone was trying to steal hot water without paying for it and accidentally switched… the main water pipe and a heating pipe. It’s a harmless dye and will eventually work its way out of the system.”
Yet the threat extends to the rest of our commonweal. A court in Zhejiang Province recently sentenced 46 people for selling diseased pork, while Nanning police seized more than 20 tons of expired beef tripe and chicken feet, some nearly fifty years old. In May, he official news agency Xinhua admitted that 900 people were arrested in connection with a food tampering operation that substituted rat and fox meat for lamb and beef.
Moreover, China has since expanded its melamine contamination project, moving from pet food to baby formula, though whether the animus is population control or simple profiteering remains subject to debate. Ten brands of Chinese toothpaste, according to the F.D.A., contain antifreeze ingredient diethylene glycol, while across 20 states, 100,000 homes have been built with toxic Chinese drywall which corrodes plumbing and electrical systems, and engenders health symptoms from headaches to respiratory ailments.
Because — as Mr. Obama was starkly reminded at Sunnylands — the Chinese own most of our debt and have hacked into more American computers than the NSA, we enjoy precious little leverage with which to alter their behavior. But the good news, according to Barron’s, is that China’s impending financial apocalypse may soon reduce the Chinese to eating each other.
askewedcathits 