It seems China has a slightly more extreme approach to countering government corruption than Australia. I wonder what they’d do to someone who allowed millions of dollars in bribes to be sent to a country they were at war with?
Of course the death penalty is not to be taken lightly and is a centrepiece of China’s appalling human rights record.
There’s a long but fascinating article in NY times about how Chinese diethylene glycol (highly toxic) labelled as glycerine (non toxic) ended up in cough medicine in Panama. It’s a great article, and most of it reads kinda like a medical detective story, similar to the medical drama ‘House’. Link below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?ex=1180670400&en=0d2a2a3bfc3c7c0b&ei=5070
One interesting and scary thing is that the company they traced the fake glycerin to, called ‘Taixing Glycerine Factory’ is still in business, and you can visit its website here:
http://www.chinachemnet.com/chinataixin/index.htm
The NY times article notes that the large and futuristic multi-storey building that’s front-and-centre on their homepage is actually not to be found in Taixing at all, let alone host the factory’s facilities! Taixing is apparently a backwater rural town whose tallest building is one storey.
That is definitely an interesting story - and you can’t imagine that company still being in business in the west, can you?
I suppose this is the flipside to all of the advantages we gain from cheap asian manufacturing and industry - those things are cheap mainly because there are a lack of human rights, workers rights, environmental standards and safety standards. By bypassing these things and using their products, we not only reward that lack of standards but we run the risk of receiving products that are not surprisingly not up to the standard we would expect in and of themselves.