Swill Oil
Posted by w_thames_the_d on November 20, 2011
These things are filled with swill or gutter oil. This is the stuff that according to chinese sources, at least 10% of all meals here are cooked with. The process is nothing less than filtering out the cigarette butts, the bottle caps and chopsticks and then rebottling and selling it. My friends from Sichuan refuse to eat at the restaurants due to fear of this stuff. The funny thing is that the chicoms say they cannot control this stuff, but each night the streets are filled with trucks hauling it around.
Understanding China, One Blog at a Time 
Brewskie said
Defiantly one industry I’m longing when the global economy goes down the toilet. Become an entrepreneur, make money and poison people; must be willing to rise before roosters.
Say, is it really possible for 1/7th of a province to face land collapse prospects? In Shanxi, I guess it is: Greedy extrapolation of coal (Shanxi farts out a quarter of China’s production) has left the land hollowed, and the ground as stalwart as a Chinese cardboard condo (ok, the latter’s an exaggeration, but still).
So in another loss of superlatives, it appears Shanxi has displaced the US as the land of sinkholes. I’ll provide an excerpt from linked article. As for myself: I’ve been busy, so I’ve been out of the China loop recently and likely will be for a week, maybe a week and a half. But I’m not going anywhere. =)
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20111121000003&cid=1103
“Producing one-fourth of the country’s coal output, the magazine said that nearly 30,000 of Shanxi’s 150,000 square kilometers of land sits atop excavated mines, with over 700 villages deemed uninhabitable and 3 million people now affected. One online user even described Shanxi as “floating.”
In Pangpangta village in the province’s western Lin county, land giving way on a large scale has been ongoing since July, following the local authorities’ June relocation announcement. Coal mining in the village started in 1968, according to Pangpangta residents, who added that signs of sinkhole formation emerged as early as 2000 when several cave houses collapsed in the village, which is built along a mountain.
The situation worsened after a mining company arrived in 2003 and boosted annual coal production from less than 100,000 tons to 3 million tons, the weekly said. After a massive collapse in July, villagers were forced to take refuge in a nearby mine workers’ dormitory that was built in the 1960s and had been abandoned for years. Local Communist party official Guo Yuan admitted that the disaster was caused by mining and said that since 2004 most local residents had been relocated by the authorities to other towns, with less than 100 people, mostly the elderly, continuing to live in Pangpangta, as of 2010.
The once-prosperous Luojianggou village, which the magazine likened to the site of a nuclear explosion, was also destroyed because of the 1.8 million tons of coal housed below it. The village’s key location leading to Nanfeng village, which has a proven coal reserve of 105 million tons, made it a target of miners.
Since it is against the law to mine coal found under buildings, railways and water bodies, the group negotiated a compensation plan with the local government to relocate Luojianggou residents. However, damage to houses and the sound of mining machinery, village official Jiang Yusheng said, indicated that the mining company had already begun excavating under the village before the relocation was completed in May 2002. Also, a rift measuring three meters in width and continuing to an unknown depth, which stretches over 1,000 meters, has also emerged as a result of over-mining.
What is more, the poor construction quality of buildings housing (What’s that? What’s that?) relocated residents, the weekly said, exposed a corruption scandal involving local officials who announced a 11.3-million-yuan (US$1.78 million) compensation package despite the fact that the group paid out 48.87 million yuan (US$7.69 million).”