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.
The “Han Chinese” ethnic category is actually a lot less secure in its definition than one would think. Not defending the Chinese government, far from it actually. The CCP has a vested interest in promoting a unitary ethnic identity in the idea of “Han Chinese”.
Despite that though, strong identities often tied to the various unique cultural differences and “dialects”(modern day linguists often consider alot of these “Han Chinese” dialects as really, distinct languages with unique and sometimes mutually unintelligible phonetic differences, with the caveat being somewhat similar grammar, tied together through a common logographic script and considered part of a broader family tree of sinitic languages), survive despite that.
It’s why overseas Chinese who sequester themselves in various Chinese communities, oftentimes identify as “Cantonese” or “Teochew” and other terms that, although tied to this greater “idea” of “Han Chinese”, they think to be distinct from one another.
Like they were their own ethnic groups.
“Han Chinese” is, at least I think, an idea closer to pan-ethnicity, than it is it’s own ethnicity.
When it comes to the Chinese language, the main “dialect” is mandarin, and the CCP has done a good job in slowly eradicating other “dialects”(languages). With one of their strategies being, well, classifying as many sinitic languages as possible as, “dialects”. The loss of these “dialects”, these languages, are tragic.
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy” - Max Weinreich
Edit Addendum: In any case this shit complex and nuanced and shit. I’ll post an interesting article here, because I think it applies. https://www.michigandaily.com/michigan-in-color/taishanese-family-and-other-fading-things/
In any case Fuck the CCP!
The problem is that there are lots of other ethnicities in China which are not in any way part of that supposed “pan-ethnicity” and pretty much every high-up government official that is in charge of anything outside their own ethnic group is from that “pan-ethnicity.”
As I showed this person I was talking to already, you can make the same argument about Judaism, that it’s a “pan-ethnicity.” There are Ethiopian Jews, there are Yemenite Jews, there are Russian Jews. There are, in fact, even Chinese Jews. That doesn’t make Israel any less of an ethnostate and defending either country’s bigoted practices by couching behind what does or doesn’t count as an ethnicity is really missing the point.
Sorry I keep editing my original post, added a few things. I don’t disagree with that sentiment. Just thought I’d put out some information that not a lot of people here in the US or in Europe, may know much about.
Ok, fair enough.