Fake Chinese beer seized in Metro Manila

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

05/04/2012

The Bureau of Customs (BOC) has seized from three warehouses in Metro Manila nearly 10,000 bottles and cans of counterfeit Chinese beer that was illegally imported into the country.

The beer, contained in 780 cases, was valued at over P395,000 with unpaid duties and taxes of P221,362, said Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon.

The fake Tsingtao beer was also declared “unsafe for consumption” following an inspection and testing by authorized distributors of China’s second largest brewery, Biazon said.

The customs chief said the distributors declared the beer unfit for consumption due to the disparity in container sizes, particularly the bottled beer.

Read morer at Global Nation

May 4, 2012 3:48:06 AM | Current Affairs