The man responsible for overseeing food and drugs for China’s 1.3 billion people was sentenced to death yesterday for corruption. Zheng Xiaoyu was convicted of taking hundreds of thousands of pounds in bribes to approve unsafe medicines that caused the deaths of dozens of patients.

Zheng appeared haggard and shocked when court security officers, standing on either side of him, clapped handcuffs on to his wrists as the judge at the Beijing City No 1 Intermediate People’s Court announced a verdict and sentence, in a hearing shown on national television.

The former head of the state Food and Drug Administration was convicted of taking bribes and other gifts with a value of £425,000. He can appeal but experts said that the courts were unlikely to commute his sentence, given the high profile of his case.

His punishment is severe — even for China, where more people are executed each year than in the rest of the world put together — because of the seriousness of his crime, state media said. The bribes he accepted allowed eight companies to circumvent drug approval standards. In one instance, an antibiotic approved by his agency killed at least ten patients last year before it was taken off the market.

Zheng, 62, is likely to be executed by lethal injection within weeks. If he does not appeal, the sentence could be carried out much sooner.

He would be the most senior official to be executed for corruption in China since Wang Huaizhong, the vice-governor of central Anhui province, was sentenced on similar charges in 2004. The most senior official to be executed for corruption was Cheng Kejie, Governor of the southern Guangxi region and a vice-chairman of parliament, who was found guilty in 2000 of accepting about £3 million in bribes.

Zheng was sentenced on the same day that China announced its first regulation on the recall of food as part of measures to improve nutritional safety in a country where lax controls have catapulted the issue to the top of the national agenda. The move reflects growing domestic and international alarm over shoddy and unsafe Chinese goods, ranging from pet-food ingredients to toothpaste mixed with industrial chemicals and eggs tainted with dangerous dyes.

Given Zheng’s powerful position, a vast range of China’s quality-control systems have been called into question because of approvals while he was in office. An official with 23 years’ experience in pharmaceuticals, he ran the drug administration from its creation in 1998 until he was dismissed in 2005. His power increased significantly in 2002 when the Government required all drugs to be approved by the agency.

That resulted in a huge backlog, giving companies a strong incentive to find ways to expedite approvals. One manufacturer named in the investigation, Kongliyuan Group, is alleged to have given Zheng bribes in return for the approval of 277 medicines, most of them high-profit antibiotics.

One of the worst cases during his tenure was in 2004, when at least 13 babies died of malnutrition in Anhui province after being fed fake milk powder with no nutritional value.

China’s dismal safety record has attracted international attention in recent weeks. The US halted all toothpaste imports after reports that some products sold in Australia, Panama and the Dominican Republic contained diethylene glycol, a chemical commonly used in antifreeze and brake fluid.

The Health Ministry reported almost 34,000 food-related illnesses in 2005. A state-owned magazine said that a survey by the quality inspection administration found that one-third of China’s 450,000 food production companies had no licences. Of the total, 60 per cent did not conduct safety tests or even have the capability to do so.

The administration began a nationwide campaign on Monday on drug-safety inspection, sending 90 officials to 15 provinces over the next two weeks.

Abuse of power

Qiao Hong head of company that produces maotai, China’s national spirit and a staple of state banquets since the days of Mao, is being investigated for bribing sponsors at the 2002 World Cup

Yu Zhifei head of the Shanghai Formula One track, faces criminal charges for embezzling funds from the £122 million spent to bring the sport to China

Chen Liangyu senior party official in Shanghai, arrested last September for misusing pension funds and giving preferential loans to a construction company

Huang Jingao would-be whistle-blower and the official in charge of Lianjiang county, was accused in August 2005 of accepting bribes, including a gold brick

Hu Xing former director of Yunnan province transport department, caught in Singapore after fleeing with 40 million yuan (£2.6m) in bribes

Lin Longfei party secretary in Fujian province, sentenced to death at a corruption trial that revealed he threw annual banquets for his 22 mistresses where he awarded his favourite a prize

Source: Times archive

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