Provincial health officials and hospital workers tampered with blood tests in a case of lead poisoning that sickened more than 250 kindergartners in western China, Chinese authorities said, in a rare acknowledgment of a high-level hush-up of a public scandal.
The authorities in Gansu Province also accused education officials in the city of Tianshui of turning a blind eye to the fact that the kindergarten in question was unlicensed and accepted unauthorized gifts from an investor in the school. Food safety inspections at the school were perfunctory, according to an official report released on Sunday by a special investigative team convened by the Gansu provincial Communist Party committee and government.
Even before the release of the report, the lead poisoning scandal had dominated public discussion for weeks in China, where food safety has been a long-running concern.
The poisoning stemmed from powdered pigments that the school staff had used as food coloring, the report said. Some of the pigments, which were marked as inedible on its packaging, consisted of more than 20 percent lead; lead levels in the food the children were given exceeded the national food safety standard by 2,000 times.
But the investigation results further fueled public outrage at the official misconduct on multiple levels. Some parents at the preschool had already said they suspected a cover-up, even taking their children to other provinces for testing. Now their fears were confirmed.
One child was found to have elevated levels of lead six times over the course of half a year, starting in November 2024, without the hospital, Tianshui No. 2 People’s Hospital, issuing any alert, the report said. The hospital also modified the records of two more children who showed elevated lead levels, reporting a blood lead level nearly seven times lower than the actual result for one of them.
“What should have been followed up on was not, and, in fact, test results were directly modified,” the report said, adding that the hospital’s management was “chaotic.” It also said the hospital had previously modified other unspecified blood lead test results, which were under investigation.
After many children began showing symptoms, the Gansu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention this month was then tasked with conducting its own testing of 267 students and staff at the school, Peixin Kindergarten. But officials there did not take the work seriously, the report said. They shook the blood samples or let them sit for nearly three hours, allowing the samples to separate, “resulting in a huge difference between the test results and the actual values,” according to the report.
Afterward, the report continued, staff there “evaded responsibility and obstructed the investigation in various ways,” though it did not give details.
The Chinese authorities tightly control the flow of information after any public disasters or scandals. In recent food safety scandals, such as when cooking oil was transported in dirty fuel tankers, or a restaurant sprayed carcinogenic paint on barbecue skewers, the authorities have promised to hold individual companies or low-level officials accountable. But acknowledgment of active higher-level cover-ups is relatively rare.
In the Tianshui case, parents who took their children for testing in neighboring Shaanxi Province said the results of tests administered there showed significantly higher lead levels than those taken in Gansu.
Six people have been arrested, including the preschool’s principal, the school cooks and the investor who had given unauthorized gifts. Another 17 people are under criminal investigation, including leaders of the hospital, the provincial health commission and the city’s education bureau.
The principal and the investor had bought the pigment to make the school’s food look more appealing in photos, in an effort to attract more students, according to the report. The school cooks colored buns to look like bright yellow corn on the cob, and adorned cakes with layers of teal and pink.
School staff, including the principal, ate the contaminated food, too. Out of 251 children and 34 teaching staff currently at the school, 247 children and 28 staff members had elevated blood lead levels in recent testing. So did five students who graduated from the kindergarten last year.
As of Sunday, 234 children had been hospitalized and discharged, and one was still in the hospital, the report said.
After the report was published, commenters online said that the official cover-ups would undermine trust in the government. While some praised the level of detail in the latest official report, others questioned whether it, too, might have some gaps.
Some videos shared on social media on Sunday appeared to show dozens of people gathered near the kindergarten to demand government accountability, while surrounded by a large police presence. Those videos were quickly deleted from Chinese platforms, though they continued to circulate on overseas sites.
The Times verified that four different videos were shot in front of Peixin Kindergarten but could not verify their dates. Reached by phone on Monday, the owner of a restaurant near the kindergarten said he had seen many people gathered around 9 or 10 p.m. the night before.
Siyi Zhao contributed research from Beijing, Jiawei Wang from Seoul and Berry Wang from Hong Kong.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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