The Poisoned Rice Bowl

Any parent knows that dinner is a big deal when growing boys are involved. But in Beijing, where I live, mealtime choices for my family are shrinking. In March, a major river that supplies drinking water to Shanghai was clogged with more than 16,000 dead pigs. Can you blame me when I say that pork sounds less than appetizing these days? Now a strain of avian influenza called H7N9 is infecting humans in eastern China. Most of the sick are believed to have handled poultry; two are confirmed to be butchers. Chicken for dinner? Perhaps not. Meanwhile, I’ve seen enough fetid fish farms to cross local seafood off the list. My sons like duck, but that’s iffy too. After the pig scare, 1,000 dead ducks were found bobbing in another river.

This should be a time of plenty in China. It has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy and may eclipse the U.S. as No. 1 as early as 2016, according to the OECD. The country just welcomed a confident new leader, Xi Jinping, who speaks stirringly of “a great renewal of the Chinese nation.” Yet anxiety reigns. The Chinese government has succeeded in filling 1.3 billion bellies, but it has failed to instill in its subjects a sense of security about their quality of life. The rich are taking their fortunes and families overseas. “All my friends have escape plans,” a real estate millionaire told me recently, reeling off a list of food-safety scares that includes toxic veggies and watermelons bursting from a surfeit of growth enhancers. “It’s not safe to stay here anymore.”

(MORE: Bird-Flu Cover-Up? Chinese Social Media Out Possible Cases of Deadly Disease)

It isn’t just eating that’s dangerous: so is drinking, at least for some minors. When I moved to Beijing three years ago, I broke the law by lining my suitcases with bags of infant formula — a banned dairy import — because my family was spooked by the 2008 mass poisoning of Chinese babies guzzling melamine-tainted milk powder. We weren’t alone in our concern that domestic food-safety regulators aren’t to be trusted. Chinese thirst for imported formula is so great that Hong Kong has begun arresting smugglers at customs, and supermarkets as far away as England are rationing milk powder.

Then there’s the small matter of breathing, a task made toxic by the record smog that has cloaked urban China this winter. More than 1 million Chinese die prematurely because of air pollution every year, according to one estimate. Children at my boys’ school wear kiddie-size face masks to class; many days they can’t go out to play. My older son chats with other 5-year-olds about the specifics of the air-quality index, as if these numbers were sports stats. Should pollution really be one of my 3-year-old’s first words in Mandarin?

(PHOTOS: U.K. Retailers Begin Rationing Baby Formula in Response to Chinese Demand)

The costs of the world’s longest sustained economic boom have seeped into the air, water, soil and food. For millennia, China’s was a famine culture. In the early days of the People’s Republic, the promise of an “iron rice bowl” was enough to earn the Communist Party another loyal recruit. Today, starvation no longer stalks the land, and the party is rightfully proud of this accomplishment. Yet social tensions are proliferating and being broadcast on social media, which provide citizens a new way of communicating their grievances. Some 500 million users have signed on to Weibo, a local version of Twitter. Hardly a day goes by without some sort of environmental protest.

Beijing’s official version of events can no longer monopolize the national narrative. In early April, as state media assured the world that it had learned lessons from its criminal silence during the SARS epidemic a decade ago, someone who self-identified as a Shanghai doctor posted on Weibo: “Holy god, just now one patient in our hospital died of the new bird flu.” Censors quickly deleted the comment. But later in the week, the official press admitted that a patient at that hospital had indeed perished of H7N9.

(MORE: Bird Flu Is Back in China, but This Time It’s H7N9)

The trust deficit between the public and the government won’t diminish anytime soon, which is why many who can afford it now prefer imported foods. Not long ago, I picked up a perfect-looking orange at a market in Beijing. Upon further consideration, it looked too perfect, too orange. Sure enough, the vendor admitted that it had been dosed with orange dye. “But it’s safe to eat,” she assured me. I remembered a conversation I’d had with a farmer from Shandong, a province famous for its apples. “You don’t eat Shandong apples, do you?” he asked in alarm. “You know that we just pay off local officials to ignore safety standards?” So even apples are on the black list. What, then, can we eat in China to keep the doctor away?

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