In Beijing

When I invite friends back home to visit me here in Beijing, they usually turn me down. The most common excuse is that there is nothing safe to eat.

That is just nonsense. As long as you steer clear of milk, chocolates, cookies, ice-cream, fish, poultry, pork, eggs and oranges, Beijing is a real food paradise.

Oh wait, include curdled duck blood - a popular dish for steamboat here and yong tau foo in Singapore - in that list too. It was just revealed a few days back that its delicious ingredients include industrial chemicals.

But my friends are often not convinced. And seriously, who would blame them?

The food scandal in China is so widespread today that some joked even emperors would not be able to escape being poisoned.

When it was revealed last week that Emperor Guangxu - the second last emperor of China - was poisoned to death a century back with arsenic, the quip was that there was a mistake. It must have been melamine which killed the Son of Heaven.

But what is worrying about this food crisis is that it is part of a larger culture of counterfeiting and cutting corners in China.

So while food attracts the most attention, there are many segments of China which are similarly in trouble.

The story of Mr Wang Yongxing is an illuminating one. He went to a state-owned shop in Beijing in 1995, one which purported to be an official dealer of Rolex watches.

Since it is a state-owned enterprise, he felt that it was a reliable place to invest in something which he would like to keep as a family heirloom for his son.

So he paid a princely sum of 240,000 yuan (S$53,000) for a gold Rolex. But after taking a swim with the watch, the 50-year-old businessman realised that it was not water proof.

That got him worried. But the shop took it back, fixed it and returned it to him after a month.

More years passed, and the "Rolex" started getting more and more erratic, hardly showing Swiss precision time.

He finally brought it to an independent evaluator, who told him that he has been duped. His heirloom has been a fake.

He is now suing the sellers for some 670,000 yuan in damages. But even he admitted to The Straits Times that the sellers may be victims themselves, such is the depth of the counterfeiting.

"They (the sellers) probably did not know that they were selling a fake too," he said. "It may be the suppliers, the manufacturers. There is just no way of knowing."

In many ways, there is the crux of the counterfeiting problem in China. It is very hard to find the real culprits. Very often, the shop is probably the last stop in a long, convoluted conveyor belt of fakery.

We see that in the milk scandal too. It was a problem that goes all the way from the dairy corporations like Sanlu to the farmers themselves. In between are melamine agents, who sell the farmers the plastic-making chemicals to boost the milk's protein content.

The problem is endemic.

That is why some people, like Mr Wang, are taking no chances. Asked if he has bought any more Rolexes, he laughed: "No no no, I have two more Omegas which I bought overseas. But I don't dare to buy Rolex again."