'Illegal smuggling routes' exposed after rotting meat from the 1970s seized by Chinese customs

Smugglers are shipping hundreds of thousands of tonnes of beef from India into Guangxi through Vietnam, exposing a second illegal route into China, news website Thepaper.cn said yesterday.

The revelation comes a day after it emerged that frozen meat from the 1970s was being smuggled through Hong Kong and into China. 

The website said it had uncovered a smuggling route that was shipping the beef into the Vietnamese city of Haiphong. The beef would transit through Mong Cai, also in Vietnam, before finding its way across the border into Guangxi, after which it was served up in hotpot restaurants across the country.

This route was in addition to one in which illegal frozen meat was smuggled from the Americas through Hong Kong and Haiphong and onto Guangxi’s border city of Dongxing and Guangzhou in Guangdong.

Frozen beef is a key ingredient of Chongqing- and Beijing-style hotpot.

News of the smuggling routes comes amid a crackdown by Chinese customs across 14 provinces this month that seized more than 100,000 tonnes of frozen chicken, beef, pork and other meat, worth over 3 billion yuan (HK$3.8 billion). More than 20 groups of smugglers have been detained.