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.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          4 months ago

          China has been a so-called communist country for over half a century and the number of private billionaires has grown, so this whole “billionaires happen during the gradual transition to communism” argument doesn’t really work when you start with zero billionaires with Mao and now have 814 billionaires.

          Or am I to believe the number of billionaires keeps going up and up and then -bam- elimination of market economies?

          But I’m sure Roderic Day, who appears to have no academic credentials, can find all kinds of explanations.

          And in 20 years when there are over 1600 billionaires in China? Communism is just around the corner, baby!

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            This is such an oversimplified way of critiquing the world it defies response. Pack it in everybody, Flying Squid has determined that when a society gets many times wealthier than it was prior to the communists taking over, if they can’t successfully micro manage every single yuan to ensure that that wealth is perfectly evenly distributed then the communist project is a bust and the working class has been betrayed. Turns out it doesn’t matter which economic class controls the flow of Capital within a country, communism is when everybody gets the same paycheck.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              4 months ago

              Do tell me which workers control Nongfu Spring Water’s means of production. Because as far as I can tell, the control rests in the hands of Zhong Shanshan, China’s richest man, and not the company’s 20,000 employees.

              But I’m sure if we wait another half-century, at least two workers can control the means of production at that company.

              (Now it’s your turn to tell me that the workers controlling the means of production is not something that helps define communism.)

              • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                Who controls Zhong Shanshan? The Communist Party, which is the highly popular and effective representative of the workers. If he breaks the rules he gets punished harshly, if he tried to flee the country his Capital would be seized. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m a practical person who believes in evidence based policy and not letting perfect be the enemy of good - and it is a system that outperforms any capitalist system currently on this earth, not only in terms of growth, but in its ability to service the people who make it up over the profits of the people who nominally own things within it.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  4 months ago

                  Who controls Zhong Shanshan? The Communist Party

                  Prove it.

                  If he breaks the rules he gets punished harshly, if he tried to flee the country his Capital would be seized.

                  Which… also happens in capitalist countries.

                  So, let’s review all of the features of communist countries we have discussed so far:

                  • Wealth-hoarding billionaires
                  • Publicly-traded companies on a global stock market
                  • Workers making a fraction of what the owners of those publicly-traded companies make
                  • Those workers not controlling the means of production
                  • The ability to bake over $5 billion in a day
                  • Laws that punish people by seizing their capital
                  • Capital

                  Wait a second… you said something…

                  his Capital would be seized.

                  Capital… capital… where have I heard that word?

                  Oh right!

                  Another feature of communist countries:

                  • Capitalism

                  But the government is very popular with the workers. Unless you’re a Tibetan or a Uyghur worker. I’ll give you that.

                  • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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                    4 months ago

                    Instead of arguing with me over every single little point, I suggest you read The East is (Still) Red: China as a Socialist State for a more comprehensive overview that cites multiple western and eastern academic sources.

                    I’m going to be at my actual job for the rest of the day, so I won’t be able to argue with you further.

        • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Good read, if a bit long if you’re not expecting it. There needs to be more discourse among Marxists about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Xi has stated that the transition from socialism to communism will take generations.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        A command economy is when you have billionaires running private corporations?

        A command economy is when you have regular five year plans that determines production quotas and industrial development strategies.

        Clearly, they have eliminated capitalist hierarchies

        Have you confused Communism with Anarchism?

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            In their willingness to faithfully implement the central economic plan, just like every other economic participant.

            “Capitalism is when people have different amounts of money” is definitely a take, though.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              4 months ago

              Please do show me where in Captial or the Manifesto Marx approves of the existence of private owners of corporations to get extremely rich. You can just quote a passage or two. I don’t remember any of that from when I read them, but perhaps you can fill me in on how the workers are controlling his means of production.

              • viking@infosec.pub
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                4 months ago

                You might as well be talking to a wall. There’s no way in hell you’re going to change a tankie’s mind… I live in China and everybody here knows it’s a capitalist society. The five year plans exist mostly on paper. The government will implement it in the sense of making specific grants available for specific target industries.

                As a result you’ll have a ton of startups in that field popping up, and then slowly burning through the funds over the next 4 years, rinse & repeat. A few companies make it, most just take the cash and die.

                They also change the plans often enough, in reaction to the markets. You know, just like any capitalist regime would.

              • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Not explicitly, but implicitly it’s in the link from SSJMarx.

                Marx from the “German Ideology:”

                It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse.

                And Engels from the “Principles of Communism:”

                Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  4 months ago

                  You do know they wrote those passages in the 1800s, right?

                  So how long, exactly, was it supposed to take to eliminate the multi-billionaires that didn’t exist yet and didn’t even exist in China until relatively recently?

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  4 months ago

                  Am I supposed to read the whole thing to find the defense of the billionaires that didn’t exist when he wrote that or do you feel like quoting me a relevant passage rather than make me waste my time to see something that isn’t there?