When food quality control in china meets mobile and wireless technology: interactions, potentials and pitfalls

With the fast economic development and industrial evolution in China, the surge of product quality and safety control issue has become one of the top concerns country wide in recent years. On one hand, citizens, academics and nonprofit organizations urged government to further refine product quality supervision strategies and install new food safety monitoring mechanisms (Qu, 2009). On the other, because of the popularity of wireless sensor systems and mobile data collection and transferring technologies in goods production, transferring and processing worldwide, they quickly gained their popularity among Chinese national quality control administration (Ruiz-Garcia et al, 2009; Jiang, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive review of China's newly installed mobile and wireless quality control system based on the analysis of both first hand and second hand data. Specifically the study focuses on how changes in monitoring and tracing technologies interact with the current quality control and food safety administration, goods production and supply, and inspection systems. The paper concludes that although China's food quality control administration did attempt to bring new technology to enforce quality control code, the current implementation of mobile and wireless monitoring tools still demonstrates a highly reactive nature. In addition, the distribution of mobile and wireless monitoring device is still very uneven when it comes to different types of food. This to certain extent prevents the government from employing the new tools to their full extent to establish a meaningful monitoring system for further food quality crisis prevention.

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