Li Xiang, a soon-to-be-married 30-year-old TV reporter, was stabbed to death last week as he was returning home from a karaoke night out. Within a week, the police arrested two persons and described it as a robbery. One of those arrested had already served a six-year sentence for robbery.

Few believe this story. Initial reports said that Li’s laptop was stolen; and his last blog post was about the illegal manufacture of gutter oil near Luoyang, the city he lived in. Netizens had complained about “dens’’ where this manufacture was on, but the food safety committee claimed it couldn’t find any, wrote Li.

The police claimed recovery of only a wallet from the two alleged robbers. Would a robbery entail 13 stab wounds? However, Li’s boss said the reporter had started doing the law beat just two months earlier, and like all legal reporters, got his news from official sources. He was not into investigative journalism, he said.

There’s been a crackdown on illegal factories producing cooking oil out of gutter oil. What was till now a rumour has turned out not only to be true but also prevalent on a frighteningly large scale. Gutter oil is waste oil thrown away (into gutters) by eateries, from where it is collected, processed, mixed with cooking oil and sold as fresh cooking oil. Food safety officials have admitted that they don’t have the means to check such contamination. Photographs of the oil being churned out are horrifying; one reporter found sanitary napkins and plastic bags in the oil waiting to be processed. China’s street food is as cheap as it is delicious; but now, people are wondering if it’s worth the risk.

Unconvinced

The crackdown on contaminated food started early this year. Restaurants display large banners about stamping out adulteration; reporters of the official China Daily have been accompanying food inspectors to supermarkets. Some supermarkets and wet markets now have “fast test stations’’ for pesticides and contaminants. In July, five people got stringent sentences, including a life sentence, for selling clenbuterol as a “lean meat powder’’. Clenbuterol is used as an anti-asthma and weightloss drug, and can also be fed to pigs to prevent accumulation of fat in them. It is banned as a food additive in China.

A huge scandal broke out in March this year after a subsidiary of the country’s best-known and largest pork producer was found to have bought pigs fed with clenbuterol. The company’s sausages are its best-selling item. With branches across the country and even overseas, the scandal forced it to recall almost 4,000 tons of pork products, which were then buried underground in a well-publicized operation. The company lost 1.5 billion yuan in just two weeks.

As part of damage control, the company called a meeting of its employees as well as of its dealers. The meeting, also attended by officials of the health and livestock bureau, was held in a stadium. In front of them all, the company’s president bowed in apology. The meeting ended with employees shouting, “May the president live long! May the group live long!’’ A few days later, its managers were seen in supermarkets, eating the company’s sausages to prove they were safe. But this only resulted in driving customers away.

While those manufacturing and selling clenbuterol were sentenced, no one from the company was arrested. In their defence, the former asked why the company didn’t carry out its own tests. All of them plan to appeal — rather unusual in China. No wonder then that even China Daily has expressed doubts at the food safety committee’s claims of having brought the “upsurge’’ in contaminated food under control, even while expressing gratitude that 5,000 units have been closed over the past five months.