After Dichlorvos in Chain Restaurant Kitchens, China's Top Legal Body Orders Courts to Stop Going Easy on Food Crimes

The undercover investigation that broke open China's food-safety week reads like a relic of a stricter decade: a pest-control contractor serving dozens of well-known chain restaurants — Green Tea Restaurant among them — had for years been spraying dichlorvos, a mid-to-high-toxicity farm insecticide, across dining rooms and tableware, with the liquid poured into mineral-water bottles and the labels torn off to evade inspection. Workers also deployed an unlicensed rat poison. Swabs taken from dining-room floors after treatments tested positive.

The investigation, relayed by Sohu News from the Beijing News, carries the detail that has done most of the circulating: an employee of the contractor saying of the restaurants his company serviced, "I personally would never eat at them — never, no matter what." The economics behind that refusal were laid bare in the same report: the boss rejected swapping to a legal chemical because the cost was too high, and told complaining staff to simply wear protective masks. In one trade group chat, restaurant owners demanded to know why their seafood was dying after treatments; the contractor blamed the weather and the ponds' oxygen levels. More than a dozen restaurants lost the fish in their tanks.

Then the machinery moved. Xiamen police criminally detained six people connected with the contractor, which by the official count had serviced hundreds of clients in a single month, including postnatal care centers. The State Council's food-safety office put the case under direct supervision, and on Monday the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission — the party body that coordinates China's police, prosecutors and courts — published an interpretation of a new directive on food-safety crimes, citing "formaldehyde-tainted cabbage" and the dichlorvos case as attacks on the bottom line. The directive orders harsher sentencing in serious cases and, notably, strict control over suspended sentences, the mechanism through which food offenders have historically avoided prison. Caixin reports the Food Safety Law itself is being revised, with public consultation, to tighten rules on school meals and online food sales.

The Weibo reaction was less about one contractor than about trust. Commenters tracked the cost logic — what a legal chemical costs per liter versus what a poisoned table costs a brand — and one widely shared post reduced the case to four characters: 谋财害命, taking lives for profit. Whether anything changes will show up not in announcements but in verdicts — beginning with the Xiamen case, whose six detainees now face exactly the courts the directive was addressed to.