Wei?! Ni Hao!

Looking for a landline reminded me to write something about online shopping in China. It's crazy. And fun!

I look up www.taobao.com, type 电话 (dianhua or telephone) and the adventure begins...

Almost 900,000 different kinds of phones and online phone shops pop up. Simple phones, funky phones, classic phones, Hello Kitty phones, you name it, they have it. And incredibly cheap most of it. This is where you realize again what "Made in China" means. 

So I browse and click, and google translate helps me to read what other people said about this product and what kind of rating the store got. I have a good laugh at some more crazy models.. 

When I decide against the €2 Coca Cola phone, and find a integer looking model from Siemens, I fill out my details, pay online, and close the browser. Delivery service is usually only €0.60 within Shanghai. 

Now I just have to sit back and wait for the next morning. It almost never takes more than one night for the courier to arrive, his scooter packed with parcels. He is always in a hurry, makes you sign and runs off to the next address. 

In this particular case, I unwrapped the phone, put the pieces together, and to my surprise, it has everything, except for the brandname. Siemens is nowhere to be found. Haha! 

Tea time

From two weeks of news headlines:

Greenpeace has tested Lipton teas in Beijing and found excessive levels of toxic rare earths. They are not up to European quality standards. Lipton reacts that they are well within Chinese quality standards. Consumers should not worry. The rare earth must've been in the soil, there's nothing they can do about that.

The Chinese government states that the pesticides must be coming from nearby crops. It must've been blown over by the wind.

Microbloggers on Weibo (Chinese twitter) wonder how much pesticide is used for it to blow over and still be beyond European quality standards. Bloggers are worried.

A Chinese tea farmer states that he grows tea for Lipton. They usually buy it off season (summer & autumn) when the risk of diseases is bigger and much more pesticides needed. It's called rough tea. He usually doesn't get more than 20 yuan per kg of tea (€ 2.40).

Lipton agrees that they haven't met the quality standards. They ran a report months ago that revealed this but they kept it a secret.

The Ministry who issued the statement about the wind gets laughed at on Weibo. Lipton takes its products back.

The story doesn't end here. In the same two weeks coca cola has been found to use the water for washing the bottles to make the actual drink, chlorine in the coke as a result; gelatin has been found poisoned in huge amounts; certain medical pills are wrong; a addictive additive for pork that is widely used in restaurants to cover bad flavor and get customers to come back is discovered, high levels of toxic heavy metals in Shanghai's drinking water... etc. etc.

I say, bon apetit!

ps, scary that multinationals apply different quality standards in different countries.
pps, interesting that 18 other Chinese brands who also failed the tests weren't scrutinized by media. (according to Financial Times)
ppps, A Shanghainese student of history took a year off to make a website about food safety, even though in Chinese, the graphic is very telling, and clearly I'm not the only one who is concerned, 230,000 people looked at it so far. ZZCE is Mandarin and short for 'throw it out of the window'.