Dyed Pork Sold as Beef: Sichuan's Latest Food-Fraud Case Ends in a Seven-Year Sentence
CCTV has exposed a Mianyang operation that disguised cheap pork as beef with yellow dye, flavouring and tallow, netting over a million yuan before a seven-year prison sentence — and prompting a province-wide meat-market crackdown.
A mobile stall of "fresh beef" in Mianyang, Sichuan looked right at a glance — until inspectors from the district market regulator noticed that the meat's connective tissue was dyed in uneven shades. It turned out to be pork. Tests on the seized meat confirmed it: 30-yuan-per-jin "beef" was entirely pork shoulder, bought at 10 to 14 yuan a jin and passed through a three-step disguise — lemon-yellow dye to colour the sinew, beef flavouring sprayed over the surface, and a final coating of beef tallow to complete the smell.
CCTV Finance aired the case this week, and the numbers did the persuading. The scheme's lead operator made more than a million yuan over a year of sales before being caught and sentenced to seven years in prison. The report also documented a related case from Luzhou, where a food factory processed expired frozen rabbit meat into cured products, colouring pig's trotters with an additive called Allura Red outside its permitted range.
The exposure lands in a country where food-fraud scandals carry a long memory — the 2008 melamine milk crisis that sickened hundreds of thousands of infants still shapes how Chinese consumers read a bargain. The comment sections on this week's report were correspondingly unforgiving. A business commentator writing under the handle Lanlun framed the scam as what they called "trust arbitrage": exploiting the information gap between seller and buyer to pass off a cheap product as a premium one, "drawing down the credit of the whole market."
The enforcement response is the part an outside reader might miss. Sichuan's market regulators did not just prosecute this one case — they launched a province-wide "special rectification campaign" on meat products, the standard Chinese regulatory reflex when a single exposure suggests a systemic pattern. Campaign crackdowns sweep widely but briefly, which is why food-safety stories on Weibo tend to end the same way: viral outrage, a broadcast exposé, a provincial campaign, and a return to normal once the cameras leave. For now, the practical advice circulating alongside the report is to treat underpriced "beef" with suspicion and check whether the connective tissue looks dyed. The scammer's seven-year sentence is the part Chinese readers are quoting; the dyed sinew is the part they are checking their own fridges for.