Eating the Food is Better than Taking a Bribe in China

BEIJING, China, July 12. ONE year out from the Beijing Olympics, there's reason for concern over China's problems with contaminated food and products. It has been commonplace of late to find news stories in which China has struggled with contamination issues. As pointed out in a New York Times article, recent problems have included toothpaste laced with a poison used in antifreeze and high bacteria counts in food.

It makes sense then that athletes, coaches and media members will be on high alert and careful with what they ingest and handle in Beijing next year. According to the newspaper article, Chinese officials have indicated they'll have the problems under control by 2010, but long after the Olympics make their way to Beijing. Promises have been made that items in the Olympic Village, most notably food, will be safe from contamination.

So serious are Chinese officials about providing products that are safe and will not provide concern for athletes, they took drastic measures by executing Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration who was found to have taken bribes in exchange for approving untested medicine. Simply, the Chinese are highly concerned that the Olympics go off flawlessly and do no damage to the nation's pride.

The United States Olympic Committee, according to the Times article, will follow through with past protocol by setting up a center in Beijing that is stocked with items for American athletes. The USOC followed such a plan at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.

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July 12, 2007. In your recent article about potential problems with the food in China, you state: "So serious are Chinese officials about providing products that are safe and will not provide concern for athletes, they took drastic measures by executing Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration who was found to have taken bribes in exchange for approving untested medicine. Simply, the Chinese are highly concerned that the Olympics go off flawlessly and do no damage to the nation's pride."

I'm sure that the Chinese government wants the Olympics to appear to go off flawlessly. But, you really shouldn't take too seriously its professed reasons for executing those whom it considers to be criminals or its professed reasons behind events there. Nor should you repeat its statements without appropriate caveats unless you simply want to be one more useful idiot in the western press for the country that has committed more mass murder than any in history (the minimum of 30,000,000 that died in the "Great Leap Forward" is several times the number killed by the Nazis in their death camps). Tludden

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