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BEIJING — China sentenced the former head of its food and drugs agency to death for corruption on Tuesday in a surprise judgment as the government sought to contain a wave of scandals over health safety.
Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, was convicted on charges of taking bribes and dereliction of duty, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.
The sentence, which was unusually harsh, could still be reduced on appeal. But it reflects the weight China's top leaders are giving to the issues of corruption and food safety as they grapple with the fallout overseas after a series of safety breaches involving toxins in food and other products.
"Zheng was supposed to use the power given to him by the state and the people seriously and honestly, but instead he has ignored their vital interests ... by taking the bribes," Xinhua quoted the court as saying.
"This has threatened the safety of people's life and health and has caused an extremely bad social impact."
Zheng, 62, a native of the southeastern province of Fujian, headed the watchdog agency from 1998 to 2005 after rising through the ranks of state-owned pharmaceutical companies.
But he was expelled from the ruling Communist Party earlier this year after investigators said he abused approval powers to obtain bribes and win illegal profits from drug companies.
The bribes, including cash and gifts, were worth some 6.5 million yuan ($850,000) from eight companies, and were given either directly or through his wife and son, Xinhua reported.
Under Zheng's watch, dozens died in China from fake or bad drugs and food products. In one of the most notorious cases, in 2004, at least 13 babies died of malnutrition in Anhui province after being fed fake milk powder with no nutritional value.
INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT
The safety of China's food has since burst into the international spotlight after wheat gluten and rice protein containing melamine scrap was exported from China and mixed into pet food, causing deaths of cats and dogs in the United States and leading to pet food recalls.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Zheng's sentence was an internal affair but added: "I believe it reflects the Chinese government's determination in fighting corruption.
"China has always attached great importance to the safety and security of consumer goods, food and drugs and sees the health safety of its people as an important task," she told a news briefing.
Zheng was also deprived of his personal property and political rights, Xinhua said, adding that investigators found he lowered standards in renewing drug production licenses, leading to the manufacturing of fake drugs.
A court official contacted by telephone declined to comment.
The last time China sentenced an official of Zheng's rank to death was in 2000, when Hu Changqing, a vice governor of the eastern Jiangxi province, and Cheng Kejie, a vice head of the National People's Congress, were executed for taking bribes.
Zheng left the watchdog agency long before the latest scandals hit, and no official reports have directly ascribed any deaths to his crimes. But Beijing may be making a political example of Zheng to show citizens and other nations it is serious about food and drug standards.
In a related case, the maker of a fake medical additive that was linked to widespread deaths in Panama is under scrutiny, with local media reporting that families of Chinese patients killed by the ingredient have sued a hospital that gave toxic injections.
The 10 plaintiffs are demanding more than 20 million yuan total compensation after the hospital in the southern city of Guangzhou gave injections of fake Armillarisni A, made by the Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., a lawyer for the hospital told the Information Times, a Guangzhou paper.
($1=7.644 Yuan)
Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng and Chris Buckley
source: 29may2007
BEIJING — China's former top drug regulator was sentenced to death Tuesday in an unusually harsh punishment for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths.
Seeking to address broadening concerns over food, the government also announced plans for its first recall system for unsafe products.
The developments are among the most dramatic steps Beijing has taken to address domestic and international alarm over shoddy and unsafe Chinese goods - from pet food ingredients and toothpaste mixed with induso trial chemicals to tainted antibiotics.
Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court convicted Zheng Xiaoyu of taking bribes in cash and gifts worth more than $832,000 while he was director of the State Food and Drug Administration, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Those bribes allowed eight companies to get around drug approval standards, it said.
Zheng also failed to make ``careful arrangements for the supervision of medicine production, which is of critical importance to people's lives,'' Xinhua said, citing the court. Under his watch, six types of medicine approved were fake and pharmaceutical companies got away with using false documents to apply for approvals, it said. No other details were given.
Zheng's acts ``greatly undermined ... the efficiency of China's drug monitoring and supervision, endangered public life and health and had a very negative social impact,'' the court said.
The punishment was appropriate given the ``huge amount of bribes involved and the great damage inflicted on the country and the public,'' Xinhua said.
In one instance, an antibiotic approved by Zheng's agency killed at least 10 patients last year before it was taken off the market.
It was not immediately clear if Zheng would appeal. Under Chinese law, a death sentence meted out by an intermediate court automatically will be reviewed by a higher court and ultimately has to be approved by the state supreme court.
The sentence was unusually heavy even for China, which is believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined - and likely indicates the leadership's determination to deal with the recent scares involving unsafe food and drugs.
Zheng's sentence was unusually harsh given his rank, though the Communist Party has in recent years pressed an anti-corruption campaign with renewed vigor. The last time someone of Zheng's rank was executed was in December 2003, when Wang Huaizhong, the deputy governor of central Anhui province, was put to death for corruption.
``The Chinese government attaches great importance to the safety and security of food,'' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing Tuesday when asked about Zheng's case.
``We stand ready to work with the international community to safeguard the quality and reputation of the Chinese food industry,'' she said.
In its noon newscast, state television showed a gray-haired Zheng, 62, flanked by court police, who handcuffed him while the verdict was being read.
Zheng had 23 years of experience manufacturing pharmaceuticals in the eastern city of Hangzhou before being appointed the drug administration's first head in 1998, China Central Television said in its report. He ran it until he was fired in 2005.
Zheng saw his power increase substantially in 2002 when the government required that all drugs be approved by the agency. The change resulted in a massive backlog, a situation that encouraged corruption and corner-cutting on approvals for often bogus or dangerous drugs.
Meanwhile, China's first food recall measures will be implemented by the end of the year, an official from the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, China's main food safety agency, was cited as saying.
``All domestic and foreign food producers and distributors will be obliged to follow the system,'' Wu Jianping, director general of the administration's food production and supervision department, was quoted as saying by the state-run China Daily newspaper.
The recall system will be put in place gradually and will focus on ``potentially dangerous and unapproved food products,'' the report said.
The report did not provide further details and the inspection agency refused to comment.
Current regulations on product inspection, issued in 2002, mention the need for a food recall system but the issue has never been systematically addressed, the China Daily said.
In recent months, tainted Chinese pet food ingredients have been blamed for the deaths of cats and dogs in North America, and toothpaste from China mixed with an industrial chemical has been found on shelves in Central America and the Caribbean.
The same chemical, diethylene glycol, was cited in the deaths since October of at least 51 people in Panama who had taken medicine made from diethylene glycol shipped from China and falsely labeled as harmless glycerin.
The China Daily also said the State Food and Drug Administration, the agency formerly run by the disgraced Zheng, will blacklist food producers who break rules.
Under a nationwide safety campaign launched Monday, 90 administration inspectors will be sent to 15 provinces over the next two weeks, the newspaper said.
Food safety problem is a serious problem across the vast country, with China's Health Ministry reporting almost 34,000 food-related illnesses in 2005. Spoiled food accounting for the largest number, followed by poisonous plants or animals and use of agricultural chemicals.
According to the official magazine Outlook Weekly, a survey by the quality inspection administration found that a third of China's 450,000 food makers had no licenses. Also, 60 percent of the total did not conduct safety tests or have the capability to do so, the survey found.
source: 29may2007
A death sentence meted out to the former head of China's food and drug watchdog, together with the announced formation of a national food-recall system, suggests Beijing intends to send a stern message amid a series of contaminations that has drawn international attention.
The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court yesterday sentenced Zheng Xiaoyu for receiving bribes of cash and gifts worth at least $850,000 from eight pharmaceutical companies during his tenure at the helm of the State Food and Drug Administration, according to a report from the state-run Xinhua news agency. The court justified the death sentence by the "huge amount of bribes involved and the great damage inflicted on the country and the public by Zheng's dereliction of duty," according to the Xinhua report. The report didn't name the eight companies.
Meanwhile, China announced it is setting up a food-recall system, nearly five years after it passed a law indicating the need for such a mechanism. An official with the SFDA, China's main food-safety agency, confirmed the drafting of a regulation that will be released by the end of the year.
Despite the drama surrounding Mr. Zheng's sentence, the planned recall system may prove more significant for China's first serious attempt to fix recurring food-safety problems. Death sentences for Chinese officials convicted of corruption aren't uncommon. For example, in late 2003, Wang Huaizhong, who as vice provincial governor of Anhui had held roughly the same rank as Mr. Zheng, received a capital sentence for taking bribes totaling 5.17 million yuan ($676,000) and was executed a few months later.
An official at the court confirmed Mr. Zheng's sentence. A recent written request to the court to attend the hearing had gone unanswered.
It wasn't clear whether Mr. Zheng, 62 years old, would appeal. A person who answered the phone at Beijing New Era Law Firm said that Zhang Qing, a lawyer at the firm representing Mr. Zheng, wouldn't accept interview requests about the case. Under Chinese law, a death sentence imposed by an intermediate court is automatically reviewed by a higher court and ultimately must be approved by the state Supreme Court.
China is struggling to contain a snowballing crisis of confidence in the safety of its food and drugs, both at home and abroad. Global concern began growing in late March, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it had identified a small manufacturer in Jiangsu province as the source of wheat flour contaminated with melamine, a chemical used in plastics and fire retardants that is unfit for use in food. The FDA later said that a second Chinese company was also a source of tainted ingredients. The contaminated wheat flour, used to make pet food in the U.S., has been blamed for the deaths of a number of cats and dogs, leading to a massive pet-food recall.
More recently, concern over Chinese imports has spread beyond pet food. Last week, the FDA ordered that imports of toothpaste from China be stopped at the U.S. border until they are tested and proved safe. This followed reports that health officials had found diethylene glycol, a potentially dangerous chemical used in products such as antifreeze, in Chinese toothpaste in Panama, the Dominican Republic and Australia.
The safety of China's drugs has also been an issue. Last spring, more than 10 people fell ill after injections of a gallbladder medicine made by Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical Co. Five people died. "Those directly responsible for the incident and those who fail to fulfill their supervisory duties will be punished," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said last May, according to Xinhua. "The pharmaceutical market is in disorder."
A government investigation determined that Qiqihar had used diethylene glycol, the same chemical recently found in the toothpaste, to cut costs in producing the drug. The deaths drew a national outcry, and the company was shut down.
"The Chinese government has always seriously regarded consumer products, especially with regard to the safety of food and medicines, and we treat the protection of our citizens' lives and safety as an important responsibility," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing yesterday. "We are willing to work with the international community to safeguard the quality and reputation of China's consumer products."
The food-recall regulation will lay out specific recall procedures, though it remains to be seen how effective it will be in preventing future food crises. Many agencies are involved in China's food-safety supervision, including the Ministry of Health and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce.
The draft regulation applies only to food production. That's the responsibility of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which is in charge of making sure food made in or brought into China meets safety standards, and which is the agency now drafting the food-recall regulation. Food sold in stalls and restaurants is overseen by other ministries that currently don't have clear laws on how to recall or address unsafe food.
Chen Xitong, an official with the news division of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, declined to be interviewed about the regulation.
--Kersten Zhang and Sue Feng in Beijing and Tang Hanting in Shanghai contributed to this article.
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