The Pest-Control Company Spraying Dichlorvos on Restaurant Tables, Right Up Until the Regulators Showed Up

In Xiamen, a pest-control company that serviced dozens of restaurant chains — among them the ubiquitous Green Tea (Lǜchá) and First Step Half a Fate (Xiānqǐ Bànbùdiān) — was, according to undercover reporting by The Beijing News, spraying their floors, counters, and dishware with dichlorvos, an organophosphate pesticide applied by farmers to cotton and rice. The reporter sampled the residue left on restaurant floors after disinfection and ran a rapid test. The test came back positive. The restaurants stayed open the next day.

The raw insecticide was poured into mineral-water bottles with the labels torn off, the better to slip it past anyone looking. When the market regulator paid an inspection visit in late July, the company did not stop — it switched the name on its paperwork to a compliant chemical, "residual carbamate," but the liquid on the floor still tested positive for dichlorvos. A Worker at the company made the quote that is now the story: "I wouldn't eat in the restaurants I've sprayed, even if you beat me to death."

The incident broke out of the Weibo sphere and onto Baidu and Zhihu simultaneously, because the food-safety scare is visceral in a way few other crimes are. Dichlorvos, known in China as dídíwèi (敌敌畏), is a chemical most people over 40 remember from a childhood of sprayed cabbages and window screens; it is the thing you are supposed to stop smelling by the time you sit down to eat. To learn that it was being sprayed, by the liter, onto the same tables and counters where a family orders dinner, is the kind of revelation that makes a single restaurant visit feel like an exposure event. The experts quoted in the ensuing coverage made it worse: dichlorvos is if anything more dangerous to the workers doing the spraying than to diners, because the application concentration is many times higher than any residue.

The restaurants themselves appear to have been, at best, incurious. Green Tea's response to reporters was that it "didn't know." A staffer at First Step Half a Fate said the company would consider ending the contract if the reports were true and would re-wash the dishes. The regulator in Huli District has closed the extermination company's office and promised a full investigation. The undercover footage, which showed staff continuing to spray on the night inspectors came by, suggested that the real enforcement problem is not the absence of a ban but the ease of operating a business whose product is invisible once the floor dries.

What the story leaves open is the question every diner asks after reading it: if one company was doing this to dozens of national chains, how many others are? The regulator's promise to "investigate to the end" is, for now, the only answer on offer.