China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Established EU foodstuff brands get boost from bilateral trade agreement
European agri-food exports to China are expected to be further boosted thanks to the bilateral agreement on geographical indications (GIs), which took effect on Monday — a bid to promote registered agri-food products and protect iconic brand names in both the European Union and China.
An EU delegation visiting China said the agreement initially protects 200 European and Chinese agri-food brands against imitation and usurpation, thus bringing mutual trade benefits and introducing consumers to guaranteed, authentic products from “two regions with rich culinary and cultural traditions”.
An additional 350 GI names from both sides will be covered during the next four years.
The EU list of GIs to be protected in China includes products such as Cava, Champagne, Feta, Irish Whiskey, Munchener Bier, Ouzo, Polska
Wodka, Porto, Prosciutto di Parma and Queso Manchego.
Among Chinese GIs, the list includes Pixian Dou Ban (Pixian Bean Paste), Anji Bai Cha (Anji White Tea), Panjin Da Mi (Panjin rice) and Anqiu Da Jiang (Anqiu Ginger).
“China and the EU will now work together with many cooperation and promotion projects to ensure good implementation and enforcement of the agreement on each other’s market and promotion of their iconic GI names,” said the diplomatic delegation.
Being the third-biggest destination for EU agri-food products in 2020, the Chinese market “has highgrowth potential for European food and drinks,” said the EU mission.
China is already the second-biggest destination of EU exports of GI products, accounting for 9 percent by value. “The Chinese consumers appreciate the safety, quality and authenticity of European agri-food,” said the mission.
The deal is expected to bring more authentic European agri-food products with competitive prices for consumers in China, further strengthening bilateral trade and economic cooperation, and helping consumers and enterprises from both sides, said industry insiders.
Andrzej Juchniewicz, chief representative of the Polish Investment and Trade Agency’s China office, hailed the implementation of the agreement.
Among the first batch of registered products on the list, there is a product from Poland — a Polish vodka. The representative said his country is expected to add more names to the forthcoming batches on the list. “The list will definitely play a big role in bringing our products and brands closer to Chinese consumers and to winning their preference,” said Juchniewicz. “We are now making efforts to add more alcoholic beverages and agricultural food products, particularly our dairy products on the list from our country.”
Dairy exports from Poland to China have been on a sharp rise since last year due to the rising health awareness among Chinese consumers. The volume of dairy products from Poland to China, including milk, milk powder and cheese, grew by 70 percent in 2020, compared with that of the prior year.
“Interest among local consumers in Polish dairy products has been significantly enhanced,” Juchniewicz said.
In October, the China-Europe Railway Express carrying the first batch of Polish dairy products arrived in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, with about 50 containers of 1,100 metric tons of milk and milk powder products. In the future, the Polish “Dairy Express” will run regularly, two or three times a month, expanding its exported products to apple juice and cereals, he added.
According to Metro China, a leading membership-driven retailer, after the third China International Import Expo held in Shanghai, the company has brought more than 150 imported European products, including branded agri-foods such as Iberia Ham from Spain. Its European imported products available at its stores in China include wines, juices, dairy, meat, fruit and frozen desserts.
According to JDDJ, the on-demand retail platform of Dada Group — it is a leading platform for local on-demand retail and delivery in China — during this year’s Spring Festival holiday, revenues from imported products on the platform have grown 70 percent year-on-year. Among them, the amount of yogurt from Greece sold through the platform was 6.5 times that of the previous year. Sales of Polish milk brand Mlekovita and Pilsner Urquell from the Czech Republic, have also surged.
Chinese consumers have been found to increasingly favor quality brands, said JDDJ.
Sales of brandy and rum on JDDJ during the Spring Festival holiday are 13.6 times and 8.8 times that of the same period of last year, respectively. Western foods in five big cities, including Chengdu, Shanghai and Beijing, have seen strong growth.
Underpinned by people’s increasing acceptance, the domestic market outlook for minimally invasive aesthetic medicine — like dermal fillers, laser therapy and other nonsurgical procedures — is expanding quickly despite the impact from the pandemic on the overall aesthetic medicine market.
However, the public should have a better understanding of the risks of minimally invasive procedures, and choose certified institutions to minimize such risks, said industry insiders.
Nonsurgical procedures booked on SoYoung, China’s leading online platform for aesthetic medicine, surged 15.6 percent during the second half of 2020 on a yearly basis, while surgical procedures dropped 10 percent year-on-year, the company said.
Gengmei, an online platform for aesthetic medicine, said its most popular 10 procedures in 2020 were almost all minimally invasive, such as hyaluronic acid injection, photon rejuvenation and chemical peels.
Among them, orders for thergical mage treatments rose 2.81 times, topping all procedures in terms of growth, followed by teeth scaling, hair implants, photon rejuvenation and hair removal.
“Compared with surgical procedures, minimally invasive aesthetic medicine procedures are relatively inexpensive, usually need short treatment times and allow a fast recovery, with results seen in a few days, and thus are very popular among customers,” said Liu Di, CEO and founder of Gengmei.
Jin Xing, CEO and founder of SoYoung, said the minimally invasive treatment market will further expand as people become more aware of such options thanks to customer education by industry players over the past few years.
Jin expects a large number of small practices focusing on nonsurprocedures to spring up over the next few years to meet growing demand.
Aesthetic medicine institutions used to view minimally invasive treatments as a means to attract and retain consumers for more expensive surgical procedures, but such business models cannot continue in the future when customers become better informed, he added.
Liu said young consumers are now the main customers of aesthetic medicine, and as they came of age in a wired world, they are better informed and have their own tastes in beauty.
Yet both executives said treatment safety remains a concern for consumers, and this somewhat impairs a more healthy growth of the industry.
Liu said consumers should closely inspect certificates of service providers to avoid getting services from illegal service providers, as there is a universal shortage of qualified doctors due to surging aesthetic medicine market demand.
Jin said there is still a long way to go before the domestic minimally invasive aesthetic medicine procedure market becomes mature, wellregulated and standardized in terms of both supply and demand.
Many customers are not aware of the differences between minimally invasive aesthetic medicine procedures and cosmetic treatments in general — the former is a medical treatment that requires doctors with certificates to perform in a medical setting, Jin said.
“The procedures are minimally invasive, but not risk-free. Every year a lot of customers become victims from treatment services provided illegally, but people are not alert to such problems. Customers have to bear in mind that skillful doctors and quality drugs are preconditions for a desirable treatment result,” he added.
Song Jianxing, deputy head of the Chinese Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Doctor under the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, said the concept of “minimally invasive aesthetic medicine treatment” is often referred as qingyimei in Chinese, which literally means “slight aesthetic medicine” and is very misleading.
“It’s called slight aesthetic medicine, but the risk is not slight,” Song said.
On Tuesday, the UK embassy released an article attributed to British Ambassador to China Caroline Wilson with the headline “Do foreign media hate China?”.
It said that some Chinese media were claiming that foreign media outlets’ criticism of China proved their dislike of the country, mentioning China Daily as an example of the Chinese media calling its Western counterparts “China-haters”.
In fact, while we are critical of the reporting of some Western media outlets on China because of the prejudice and lies that characterize their reporting on China, the China-haters we were referring to are those Western politicians whose dislike of China seems to know no bounds. They seem happy to make spiteful remarks that bear no relation to the truth simply in the hope of smearing China’s image or causing trouble for it.
What earned these “China-haters” that moniker is their own words and deeds. The reason why the reports of some Western media outlets are met with scorn in China is because they seem content to follow the lead of these malice-mongers.
No doubt the UK ambassador is aware that the BBC has been pulled off the air in China since Feb 12. That was not because its reporting was critical of China, but because it was proven to have repeatedly fabricated and spread lies in its reports.
The UK ambassador should know that press freedom is not tantamount to having a license to spread rumors and hatred.
And it is not just the BBC. Many Western media outlets “reporting” on the rioting in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019 were guilty of employing a double standard. Arguably, the nature of their reporting and their search of “the story” contributed to the escalation of the violence in Hong Kong.
China holds an open mind to the world and recognizes that there will sometimes be criticism and questioning of its actions. However, there is a fundamental difference between criticism and rumors and lies. The former means different views on the facts. The latter is distortion, and even fabrication of what are purported to be “facts”.
Editor's Note: Beijing has been dispatching COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries in keeping with its promise to supply 10 million doses of Chinese-made vaccines to the global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX. Two experts share their views on China’s role in ensuring equitable distribution of vaccines with China Daily’s Yao Yuxin. Excerpts follow:
Vaccine distribution must be based on need
The devastating novel coronavirus pandemic and the shortage of vaccines have prompted rich countries to grab the lion’s share of the vaccines given their strong purchasing power. Some of them have even placed orders for tens of millions of more vaccines than they need to inoculate their entire population.
By contrast, many low- and middle-income countries have received few or no vaccines, which, as World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, may put the world on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure”.
Driven by profits, private enterprises in some developed countries have little interest in making vaccines global public goods. Besides, vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, both US companies, need to be stored at ultra-low temperatures which many low- and middle-income countries cannot, thus creating another vaccine barrier.
On the other hand, in line with the spirit of building a community with a shared future for mankind, China, despite the majority of its population awaiting vaccination, has been supplying vaccines to other developing countries.
China joined the WHO-led COVAX in October, and since then it has taken measures to ensure equitable vaccine distribution, including supplying 10 million vaccine doses to other developing countries.
But some Western politicians have deliberately misinterpreted China’s goodwill gesture as “vaccine diplomacy” to win the support of other developing countries. This is a classic example of the West playing the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” card against Beijing.
China, however, should keep doing what it believes is right regardless of the West’s criticisms, not least because many developing countries have appreciated its timely help with vaccines.
The distribution of vaccines should depend on need, not on money power. And to ensure developing countries get fairer access to the vaccines, the United Nations should play the most important role in vaccine distribution.
The lack of standardization (under the International Organization for Standardization) for the vaccines made by different countries is hindering the global cooperation for the free flow of the vaccines. For example, a German diplomat in Beijing recently told me that he can neither take a Chinese vaccine nor a German vaccine, because the former isn’t covered by his German health insurance company against any eventuality, and the latter is unavailable in China.
Since the novel coronavirus has already infected more than 114 million people worldwide and claimed 2.53 million lives, perhaps the WHO should grant universal licensing for effective vaccines, allowing them to enter new markets without repeatedly going through the complicated procedures of drug certification of different countries.
Given that a number of common challenges require better global collaboration to address such as climate change, the fair distribution of vaccines is a test to determine whether the world can work together to overcome global threats. The “ideology first” approach will not help the world defeat the virus. And vaccine monopoly will put everyone at risk including the rich countries, while making concerted global efforts to contain the pandemic will save lives and boost the global economy.
China is shouldering its global responsibilities
The vaccines of Chinese drug makers Sinopharm and Sinovac meet the medical standards of China and the WHO, and have proven safe and effective at home and abroad. By enacting a vaccine management law, China has strictly supervised the whole process of vaccine production, guaranteeing the efficacy and safety of Chinese-made vaccines.
Since China largely contained the pandemic at home before other countries, the phase-three clinical trials of the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines were conducted in some other countries as well, making it hard to unify the data flowing in from multiple places.
Yet the participation of third parties in collection and analysis of data makes the disclosure open and transparent. The fact that Chinese vaccines are safe and effective is strictly based on the results of the clinical trials.
A growing number of countries have acknowledged the efficacy of the Chinesemade vaccines. And as promised, the Chinese government is supplying 10 million vaccines to other developing countries to facilitate the equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Besides, unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines don’t need ultra-low temperature for storage and thus can be more easily transported in developing countries.
Also, like the other major countries, China has started inoculating its population — more than 50 million people have already been vaccinated in the country. And the domestic demand for about 2 billion doses of vaccines is likely to be met by the end of 2021, thanks to China’s strong production capacity and government support.
Moreover, China has been able to supply vaccines to other developing countries because of its five R&D and 18 production lines. At the R&D facilities, scientists are closely monitoring the novel coronavirus’s mutations so they can replace the strains in the vaccines and put them into production within a short time, and warn the health authorities in advance about a possibly graver health crisis.
According to a paper by Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, published in the preprint research site bioRxiv, the inactivated vaccine by Sinopharm-affiliated Beijing Institute of Biological Products, and recombinant dimeric RBD ZF2001 vaccine in ongoing phase-three clinical trials jointly conducted by Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are effective even against the South African strain of the virus.
In the global fight against the coronavirus, China has not shied away from shouldering its responsibilities as a major country. It has made its vaccines global public goods to make them easily available to the developing world.
Wang Jiaqi contributed to the story. The views don’t necessarily represent those of China Daily.