It’s rare for Chinese citizens to laugh outwardly at their president. But when Xi Jinping appeared to scold his New Zealand counterpart over food safety during a face-to-face meeting in Bali on Sunday, the irony proved too delicious to ignore.
During a short get-together ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, Mr. Xi reminded New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that food safety mattered to people’s health, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Xinhua said Mr. Xi “urged New Zealand to take tough measures to ensure food quality and thus maintain the sound momentum of economic and trade cooperation between the two countries.”
Chinese social media users, inundated on a monthly basis with reports of domestic food scandals, responded with a collective face-palm.
“The entire country is laughing,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service, where the news was greeted with an outpouring of animated guffawing emoticons.
Mr. Xi’s comments were motivated by a scandal involving New Zealond’s largest dairy exporter, Fonterra, which saw some of its products banned in China earlier this year because of concerns over bacterial contamination. Revelations that some of the company’s exported whey protein products might contain Clostridium botulinum, a bacteria that can cause botulism, led to extensive recalls, dragged down the New Zealand dollar and prompted Fonterra chief executive Theo Spierings to issue an apology.
While China’s new leader has won praise at home for his aggressiveness in pushing China’s interests abroad, this is one situation in which his boldness was bound to backfire. Reason: As bad as the Fonterra scandal appeared, China’s own dairy companies have seen far worse.
The worst came in 2008, when nearly 300,000 people were sickened after consuming milk power tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical added to milk to make it appear to contain more protein. Six babies died after consuming the powder and thousands more were hospitalized.
Fonterra owned a stake in the now-defunct Sanlu Group, one of 22 companies implicated in the melamine scandal. The New Zealand company said it pushed for a recall as soon as it learned of the problem.
Chinese authorities sentenced two people to death in connection with the scandal and rolled out a raft of new food safety measures designed to prevent similar tragedies from occurring again, but melamine has nevertheless continued to surface in Chinese dairy products.
In a country where authorities routinely accuse other governments of casting hypocritical stones, the notion of Mr. Xi berating another country’s leader over food safety proved too much to bear for many social media users.
“He should be saying this to himself,” wrote one microblogger. “How does he have the gall to say this to the New Zealand prime minister?”
Chinese state media lavished attention on the Fonterra scandal in what many Chinese consumers saw as a transparent ploy to distract from China’s own food safety issues. After admitting its mistakes and pledging to improve inspections, Fonterra earned kudos from a number of Chinese Internet users, some of whom recalled the reluctance of Chinese dairy producers to act even in the wake of the 2008 melamine scandal.
Chinese confidence in its dairy exports in important for New Zealand, sometimes referred to as the Saudi Arabia of milk. As Mr. Xi noted in his meeting with Mr. Key, China became the island nation’s largest trading partner for the first time earlier this year. But if China’s president was hoping to capitalize on that economic leverage to score political points at home, he appears to have miscalculated.
On Monday, some Weibo users joked that Mr. Xi was more concerned with New Zealand dairy products because, while most Chinese families were forced to rely on Chinese products, Chinese leaders were filling their children’s bottles with foreign milk.
“I suggest we make officials’ children consume domestic milk powder,” said one Weibo user.
“Who says Chinese people don’t have a sense of humor?” wrote another.
– Josh Chin
CLARIFICATION: Fonterra owned a stake in Sanlu Group, one of the Chinese dairy companies at the center of the 2008 melamine scandal. An earlier version of this post omitted that information.
Source: WSJ