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http://hk.asia-city.com/city-living/column/we-too-can-do
We Too Can-do
By Chip Tsao | Mar 14, 2013
The two-can limit policy on baby milk formula has triggered a civil war between Hong Kong and the mainland. Potential mainland offenders find the maximum two years’ imprisonment and a fine of HK$500,000 an insult worse than a Chinese coolie getting his bottom kicked by an Indian policeman in the British Quarters of 1930s Shanghai. With hatred imbibed from their mother’s milk, a campaign of abuse was unleashed against the yes-we-can CY Leung regime, headed by the e’er-belligerent Global Times. “How dare the ungrateful Hong Kong impose an embargo on the Motherland, treating us as an enemy state,” was the outcry from tens of thousands of angry Weibo users, who accuse Hong Kong of violating WTO rules, the Basic Law which guarantees Hong Kong’s “free trading” status, as well as filial moral principles.
Western baby milk formula manufacturers have been exporting millions of cans directly into China. Most unfortunately, even if rows of shining Cow-and-Gate or Mead Johnson cans are placed on Shenzhen’s supermarket shelves, Chinese consumers are still suspicious of the authenticity of their contents, which could have been replaced with Chinese powder by custom officers or even supermarket managers. Empty maotai bottles have sold for high prices to underground manufacturers, who filled them with fake spirits to maximize profits. Only if the cans are purchased in the former colony will Chinese mothers have full confidence.
It is reported that a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Greenwich, London has expelled and blacklisted a Chinese shopper for over-buying milk powder. A German supermarket refused to sell a Chinese teenage girl a few cans on the grounds that “You look too young to be pregnant and German milk powder is not for Chinese babies.”
Passing the two-can law in a hurry in response to Hong Kong’s outrage against the mainlanders, made Chinese blood boil. Worse is the absence of a “sunset clause,” which means there is no mention of when these measures will end or if they are permanent. Government officials hinted that you cannot attach a sunset clause of, say, a fortnight, which would hint to milk powder smugglers that they can take a 13 day-long shopping leave in Paris and Milan with the profits they have made so far, then come back on time to get their empty suitcases filled in Sheung Shui again for the next round.
It is technically impossible to predict when the sun will rise again on a corruption-free new China, where food and water are as clean, safe, and hygienic as those in Helsinki. While shocked by the sunless, fatally-polluted Beijing clouded in poisonous gray smog, we Hongkongers are only too glad that with the ICAC, a food and consumer safety bureau left behind by a former colonial government, and some British-style common sense, the sun on the Far Eastern horizon of the former British empire hasn’t really set. Nor do we secretly hope that, God forbid, it ever will. |
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