For the most part, Chinese companies ain't to concerned with issues like quality control and very few companies in China adhere to any international standards whatsoever.
Chinese production reminds me of the late 1800's in the West.
Even where I live in Southeast Asia, the governments here have recently and in the past taken a closer look at items made in China. There have been several cases over here that I recall of women dropping dead from slimming pills made in China.
Many people drop dead around the world from Chinese products - it ain't the same for products made in the USA or many of the Western countries.
If I had a choice in US food products or Chinese, I would choose USA food products ~ and at a greater expense to myself here I often do.
Ex...you are NOT a 'layman.' You apparently are there, you know of what you speak, and you experience seems to parallel my experience EXACTLY in my time in Asia.
I think you're exactly correct when you say the East is the new Wild West, (both as a compliment and an insult.)
I know the last time I was there, as I mentioned earlier, there was a 'malachite green' scare where they were putting a carcinogenic dye in eel ponds to kill some kind of fungus or something.
Anyway, over the week or so of this hitting the news, the chicoms explained that there was no problem with the dye for domestic consumption because all of the problem eels had actually been shipped to Japan!
It's reasonable to look at the Chinese countryside (or a Taiwanese river) and assume that you are eating in the nastiest place on earth.
That said, I just can't see how the FDA, USDA or blockade will save Americans from themselves.
If you put me in a field and told me to make a diet coke from scratch, and I gave you an all natural brown fizzy liquid with zero calories, would you drink the damn thing?
Americans eat hamburgers out of paper wrappings from a mill and we think it's clean because, why? Because it's white?
I'm just saying that the entire world is dirty and singling out china ignores the reality that buying unknown stuff off some grocery store shelf leads to unknown stuff from unscrupulous people anywhere.