Opinion | Toxic school uniforms add to anger over quality control
Inspection in Shanghai discovers student outfits tainted with carcinogenic dye, and shows that product safety is still a major problem
The mainland's primary and middle-school pupils are often dubbed "the country's flowers", but a toxic-school-uniform scandal in Shanghai this week shows they haven't been getting sufficient care from the authorities.
Shanghai Television reported that in a routine inspection of school uniforms, the municipal Bureau of Quality and Technology Supervision found that six out of 22 batches were substandard, including a bunch of school uniforms that contained aromatic amine - a carcinogenic dye.
They were produced by the Shanghai Ouxia Garment Company, operating out of a small workshop in the city's Pudong district.
The district's education authority immediately set out to discover which schools had been its customers, and the authorities confiscated 26,444 sets of school uniforms bought by 21 schools.
Four schools in other Shanghai districts were also found to have ordered uniforms from the same batch.
Of the other five batches of school uniforms that failed quality examinations, one batch had a substandard pH level, three had fibre content that did not match their labels and one had a label that did not conform to requirements.
Shanghai's education authorities have encountered problems with poor-quality school uniforms before, jointly issuing a circular with the municipal quality-inspection authority in 2011 requiring all primary and middle schools to treat the issue as important.