The social contract and communication model in China's oil tank truck story 🚚| Following the Yuan
The social contract and communication model in China's oil tank truck story 🚚| Following the Yuan
This story is just one of many hidden under China’s broken information system that will never see the light of day.
Author’s note: The recent public outcry over cooking oil revealed a dark secret in the road transportation and oil industries: industrial oil trucks are not cleaned before switching to transporting cooking oil. This scandal has been the talk of the town since early July.
This story is just one of many hidden under China’s broken information system that will never see the light of day. Information like this, that threatens the interest of Sinograin (a “state-owned, large and important backbone enterprise approved by the State Council, involving national security and the lifeblood of the national economy”), carries significant weight, especially before the Third Plenum (July 15-18) where Beijing maps out where the country’s headed for the next five years and beyond.
The social contract, food safety edition
China analysts often discuss social contract — an agreement between the state and its people based on economic growth. They note increasing cracks as China’s economy stalls. It gets overused quite often, and when it comes to a broken social contract, outsiders often over-expect the consequences.
Here’s my quick take: the cooking oil controversy is a serious breach of the social contract, but it hasn’t and won’t cause large-scale disturbances. Ultimately, when it comes to food safety, many Chinese people believe that they have the right to demand an answer, unlike issues only affecting marginalized communities, and the state would give them one. (In comparison, clamping down on LGBTQ rights doesn’t break the social contract for most, nor is creative freedom; these issues are too high-up in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.)
Some food safety news, like the poisonous milk powder scandal in 2008, have had a long lasting effect on the society’s psyche. Melamine, an obsolete chemical and the contaminant that affected 300,000 infants and young children, has become a household name. Many who can afford foreign milk powder still prefer it it over domestic brands until this day. Meanwhile, other food safety incidents, like fake lamb meat, fake eggs, chemical-induced bean sprouts appeared as small-scale, isolated incidents, and have faded into urban myths.
People often feel powerless in these situations. “We fed you Sanlu back in the days,” said my parents in an apologetic tone when Sanlu Group, the chief culprit in the milk powder scandal, became the public enemy. “But it was the best on the shelf then [early 90s].”
Public opinion, self-censored and memeified
It is notoriously difficult to gauge the impact and public opinion when you’re competing with AI-enabled, real-time censorship machine, combined with the top-down propaganda system.
The original article on Beijing News survived censorship. However, those late to the news cycle might not find it easily.
According to communications theory (i.e. the 1948 Shannon–Weaver model), the message from a sender often gets distorted by noise. I believe that in the context of China, this distortion happens at every stage, not just during transmission.
Here’s how I see it: the news was already censored to an extent when it was created (via top editors and in-house censorer), then the transmission gets distorted by propaganda orders and regulators like the Cyberspace Administration of China, as well as mainstream information channels like Baidu and Douyin, etc. before being transformed into a format the receiver prefer. According to the 2024 CNNIC report, online video (including short videos) is the most popular format (97.7%), while 75.7% of internet users use search engines.
Aside from censorship and change of format as noises, another major noise during this process is semantic, as ‘tank truck’ (罐车) has been turned to ‘oil tank truck’ (油罐车) in public discourse, which adds difficulty and barriers to the receiver when/if they want to check the original sources.
One self-censored expression of public opinion I saw, published on the youth culture publication “What You Need” on WeChat, captures the sentiment. (Some of the publication’s past posts include procrastination on life chores and lesbian culture.) It goes like this:
The news in recent days made me full of questions, but I also don’t know where to turn the microphone. I’m thinking, would it be the same as before? With time, everything will fade away.
I’m reminded of what my friend once told me.
When her mother was little, she lived in a village very close to the provincial capital, where many residents got cancer. People suspected it was due to the water resource because, for a long time, every household’s tap water had a strongstrange odor.
But no one proposed that the water quality should be checked. Those with means moved out or bought bottled water from elsewhere, and more people stayed.
One year after another, the villagers lived with the ticking time bomb, hoping they were lucky, or pretending they could not see the problem. If sickness falls on any of them, then it’s ‘fate’.
At this very moment, it’s like I was living in the village, too.
When I was in high school, the water station in class had a strange smell.
Someone first voiced their concern, and then more students and more classes felt it was off.
We all went to the teacher's office to confront them. The teacher explained, "The water we drink is the same as yours, don’t worry, we will report this issue."
A week later, it was found that the factory's water purification equipment was faulty; the water we were drinking was not truly purified.
Sometimes I think we are experiencing a process where questions are no longer asked because it’s hard to find a space where we collectively seek answers.
These days, life feels increasingly like living in a makeshift shelter by the roadside. Nothing is safe, nothing is worth insisting on, and nothing is irreplaceable. When faced with collapse, we can barely exclaim, "This is too much!"
In the past, whenever I called my mom and we had nothing to talk about, we’d ask about each other’s meals. She’dremind me to order less takeout, and I’d remind her not to eat leftovers. Now, I ironically think that neither of us is healthier than the other.
So, we have nothing left to say to each other.
Information like this, which beats around the bushes (due to censorship), and doesn’t cite the original story (due to censorship), doesn’t travel far. It doesn’t get redownloaded and gets reposted to other platforms as easily as short videos on WeChat/Douyin/Xiaohongshu, etc. It stays within a community who’s already in the know and has means to choose their life.
There are also examples where the ‘receiver’ appropriates the message and memeify it.
To jokingly say someone seems confused, one says ‘have you had too much mixed oil (混装油)?”. Extract pork oil (炼猪油), traditional a way for families to add oil to their diets before industrialization, is now seen as measure that guarantees food safety (not that people will actually to do it). One example I saw was under a question why the Chinese public doesn’t seem to care about the Olympics anymore, one internet user comments, “I’m too busy extracting pork oil.”
That gives me a giggle, but it’s also as far as the majority of the public would go. 🔚
Final words: Language-wise, I’m certain that
will find many more creative, useful words to learn from this news story for .)Do you agree with my conclusion on the communication process of China news stories? Let me know in the comments below. You can directly reply to this email!