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China's newest foe: killer beer bottles
Exploding beverages are just one peril in a society rife with shoddy consumer products.
MIRO CERNETIG
China Bureau
Friday, March 31, 2000
Beijing -- Liu Xing loves the price of beer in China, about 50 cents a litre for a bottle shaped like a bowling pin and called a da ping. But he has some cautionary advice for his comrades: Beware the killer beer bottles.
In a society where consumer rights remain largely an alien concept, some beer companies cut corners by using glass too thin to withstand the gases that build up. So an innocent da ping can suddenly turn into a table-top grenade, bursting in an explosion of suds and razor-sharp glass that can kill.
"One moment, you are drinking your beer. The next moment the bottle has blown up," said Mr. Liu, a bicycle repairman who was carefully opening a bottle in a noodle shop. "You never know."
In just two months last year, exploding beer bottles maimed or blinded 80 and killed five Chinese. Compared to the 85,000 who died in car accidents last year, it's not the sort of casualty rate that makes headlines.
But the killer bottles reflect deeper unease in everyday Chinese life. Cutting corners and duping consumers with fancy packaging and false labelling is a ubiquitous danger. The old rule, caveat emptor,applies in spades.
"The beer bottles are surely a symbol of a bigger problem," said Wang Hai, China's leading consumer-rights advocate.
"Only 80 per cent of Chinese products meet national standards. Shoddy products are one of the big problems in Chinese society."Mr. Wang ought to know. He is China's version of Ralph Nader, going around the country trying to expose abuses. With his funky, black glasses, used to keep his face from becoming too well known, Mr. Wang has become something of a working-class hero.It all started five years ago, when the 26-year-old bought a $21 (U.S.) pair of Sony headphones from a state-run department store.
They were fakes, but the store refused to replace them, even though a 1994 consumer law states he should get a refund plus a 100-per-cent return. He eventually won, getting $42, a tidy profit for fighting what he viewed as an economic crime against the state.A native of the city of Qingdao, whose residents pride themselves on plainspokenness and fair-minded tenacity, Mr. Wang then decided that, with so many substandard or pirated goods in the Chinese marketplace, he could make a handsome profit uncovering such abuses.
In 1995, he formed a company called Beijing Dahai Consultants and hired private detectives to search out other injustices. Since then, Mr. Wang also has prospered from the patronage of legitimate companies, which want to get shoddy products off China's store shelves.Mr. Wang, who gets death threats and is embroiled in legal challenges, says being China's Ralph Nader is a lonely job.
"I have now made big enemies," he said, adding he has increasingly gone after bigger companies, often with ties to the government's state-run enterprises."Powerful and rich people want to stop me in my work. I've become a target. Many powerful people do not like what I do."China's freewheeling marketplace has long been a bastion of the cheap knockoff. Pirated CDs and Hollywood films and fake Gucci bags are everywhere.
Chinese consumers also must endure shoddy medicines, which might have too much of a particular pharmaceutical ingredient, or too little.In what may be the ultimate symbol of marketplace uncertainty, even China's own currency is suspect.All this may be about to change, with China poised to enter the World Trade Organization. Beijing is taking a closer look at the "shoddy-product" economy, with an eye to preventing lawsuits by companies that might fight the "black goods" in court.
China's Communist regime, albeit with a long track record of doing a poor job of policing the ripoffs of Western goods, does not want to be seen exporting goods that are infringements of intellectual property rights or plain shoddy goods that would give it a bad name in the global marketplace.The police now often carry out high-profile attacks on suspect manufacturers.
Also at play is the growing sophistication of middle-class Chinese, who are increasingly outraged at paying high prices for goods that fall apart, don't work, or, as in the case of the beer bottles, blow up in their face.
"We now are putting a man in space," said Guo Min, a labourer at a Beijing car wash. "So how is it, friend, that our government can't ensure we produce a beer bottle that doesn't kill a comrade when he is eating with his family?"
Mr. Wang sees a mountain of challenges in the years ahead. He detects a spiritual vacuum and widespread money lust in Chinese society that is creating the rampant exploitation of the Chinese consumer.
"Too many Chinese have no religion, no belief other than making money," he confides. "People don't understand how to serve each other any more. ... People must learn that they have to respect each other. We will have less of these problems if they think of each other and think of what they must contribute to broader society."
China's government is doing what it can to create a sense of responsibility through public-education campaigns. There is now a national consumer hot line, an address for e-mail complaints and an annual Consumer Day for muckraking, March 15. |
