Fast food chain Shanghai Husi Food Co and three of its former workers have been blacklisted over the 2014 expired meat scandal. [Photo/Shanghai Daily]

Fast food chain Shanghai Husi Food Co and three of its former workers have been blacklisted over the 2014 expired meat scandal.

The Shanghai food watchdog yesterday said former executives Hu Jun, Liu Lijie and Zhang Hu has been convicted of food safety crimes and have been banned from the food industry for life.

The trio and the company also face restrictions on bank loans and land use permits.

Shanghai Husi was found to have supplied meat that had passed its use-by date to companies such as McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King between April, 2013 and July, 2014.

Husi’s food processing plant in Jiading District was raided by officials from the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration following a TV program accusing it of using out-of-date and substandard meat.

Husi was fined 1.2 million yuan (US$176,470) and its food production license was revoked.

The three executives were jailed.

The Shanghai Food and Drug Administration also said yesterday it had blacklisted nine people working at four restaurants for using poppy or other banned products in their food.

In one case, Ren Dongyun, the operator of a beef soup restaurant in Jinshan District, which was unlicensed, was jailed for seven months and fined 5,000 yuan last year by the Jinshan District People’s Court after the restaurant’s beef soup was found to contain papaverine — an anti-spasmodic drug — and morphine.

In another case, two people working for Afandi Snack Restaurant in Jinshan were sentenced to up to seven months in prison and fined 30,000 yuan last year for adding poppy capsules to soup to enrich flavor. These people face a lifetime ban from the food industry.

Beijing starts to remove illegal rooms and buildings under the ground of the core area of the city. [Photo/Chinanews.com]

Beijing has started to remove illegal rooms and buildings under the ground of the city’s core area. The government has vowed to remove nearly 14,000 square meters of illegal buildings this year.

On Feb. 28, more than 700 illegal rooms under eight residential buildings of the Hepingmen Community in West Chang’an Street have been removed. Nearly 350 people left the illegal buildings.

According to staff, the removing work at Hepingmen Community began early this year.

During the past two months, they have removed 13,862 square meters illegal buildings, 1,157 underground rooms, and helped 2,010 inhabitants find other places to live.

The government plans to rebuild the underground space and construct a range of facilities, such as parking lots to provide more convenience for the nearby residents.

Yu Changyuan, 78, attends a job fair in Zhengzhou last Saturday for seeking a job to pay for his granddaughter’s tuition. [Photo/zynews.com]

A construction job fair was held in Zhengzhou last Saturday. The oldest job seeker was a 78-year-old man named Yu Changyuan. He is a retired senior engineer and wants to find a job with a 4,000-yuan (US$580) monthly salary, with the hopes of paying his granddaughter’s tuition.

According to Yu, he was a senior engineer in Henan Fifth Construction Group, and he wanted to find a management position at the construction job fair to pay for his granddaughter’s university tuition, as his son died last year. “Although I am old, I am still healthy and I can still work,” said Yu.

However, Yu could not find a proper position at the job fair, because most of the positions were at construction sites and no one wanted to hire a 78-year-old man.

This was not the first time Yu went to a job fair. Liu Kai, a worker at the job fair, said that Yu started to seek a job after the Lantern Festival, which fell on Feb. 11 this year. At first, he thought that Yu was there to help his kids to find a job. However, he was shocked when Yu asked him whether there was any position for himself. According to Liu, the old man has a lot of certifications and this is the third time he came to the job fair.

According to Yu, he was born in 1938 in Shanghai and graduated from the Shanghai Urban Construction Academy in 1960. Then he was assigned to work at the Architectural Design Institute of Henan Province. After three years, he was assigned to work in Henan Fifth Construction Group until his retirement. He had participated in the construction of many projects in Zhengzhou since the 1980’s.

After his retirement, he was hired by the Institute of Geodesy Photogrammetry and Cartography for 10 years. At 70, he was truly retired.

Yu had a son and a daughter. His daughter is a teacher in a middle school while his son used to work for Henan Rural Credit Cooperative. However, his son suffered from suffusion of blood on the brain last September and died three months after surgery for the ailment.

“He cried everyday over our son’s death,” said Yu’s wife.

“My granddaughter is a top student and she will go to college next year. We want to help her and share her mother’s burden after my son’s death,” said Yu Changyuan.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]After sending a probe to Mars in 2020, China plans to explore three asteroids and land on one of them to conduct scientific research, according to a Chinese asteroid research expert.

Experts and academics are calling for greater policing of schools and for regulations to be drafted to prevent abuse, after claims that teachers in Beijing and Shanghai sexually assaulted students during periods of private tuition.

The attacks attracted widespread public attention and triggered debate about how parents, schools and society in general should protect children.

In January, a junior middle school teacher in Beijing was detained on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old female student. The teacher, who previously taught the student math at school, was hired by the family in September 2015 to provide private tuition.

The student claims that the first assault occurred in April last year, followed by more attacks in July, August and December. The teacher is also alleged to have intimidated the student to prevent her from telling anyone about the incidents.

In December, the teacher was caught sexually assaulting the student by a surveillance camera the father had installed at his daughter’s insistence. Once he had seen the footage, the father reported the matter to the police, who are investigating the allegations.

The teacher, who charged 700 yuan ($102) for each hour’s tuition, had been paid more than 160,000 yuan during the previous 14 months.

“If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed that a teacher from a well-known school could have done this,” said the girl’s father, quoted by The Mirror.

In a similar incident, a teacher at a private junior middle school in Shanghai was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for sexually assaulting and intimidating a female junior school student during private tuition sessions at his home.

There are no official statistics about teacher-student abuse, but in 2015, the Supreme People’s Court told media in Gansu province that the nation’s courts heard 7,145 cases of child sexual abuse between 2012 and 2014.

Inadequate protection

Xi Xiaohua, executive director of the Beijing Youth Social Work Research Institute, which is affiliated to the Capital Normal University, said the fact that the incidents happened in large cities was “shocking” and “harrowing”. However, she said the parents of the girl in the Beijing incident should bear some of the blame because they left their daughter alone with an adult male.

Yao Jianlong, a professor of law and the director of the school of criminal justice at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, agreed with Xi’s stance.

“The absence of a parent or guardian is especially dangerous for children, which explains why more sexual assaults on students are found among ‘left-behind’ children,” he said, referring to children whose parents have moved from their hometown in search of work in cities and towns, leaving the children at home.

In the Beijing incident, Yao said the father, who believed the teacher he had hired at great cost was above suspicion, had been unable to identify the potential threat to the child’s safety.

The consequence was that when his daughter told him she no longer wanted to be tutored by the teacher, instead of questioning the man, the father thought the fault lay with his daughter. The father’s failure to act left the girl open to more abuse, according to Yao, who conducts research into the sexual assault of children by adults.

“Parents should never leave young children alone with adults. They should be cautious all the time to ensure that there are no blind spots in the guardianship of children－boys or girls,” he said, adding that boys are also vulnerable to sexual assault.

Xi said children should learn about the dangers of sexual assault and learn techniques to avoid possible threats.

“Our center has provided a lot of self-protection courses for children at schools and communities in Beijing. We explain to the children what constitutes sexual assault, the signs to look for, and how to deal with it,” said Xi, who has spent many years working to raise awareness of the problem among parents and children.

She and her colleagues have long advocated the inclusion of such courses in the school curriculum, but they are a low priority in China’s exam-oriented education system: “Under such circumstances, the onus is on the parents to teach their children how to protect themselves.”

That’s easier said than done, according to Yao. “Chinese parents, including some well-educated people like myself, are too shy to talk about these things. Even when sometimes I want to talk to my son about this, I don’t know how to open the conversation. This situation also needs to change,” he said.