China’s truck tracking system goes offline after surge in users following cooking oil scandal

Calls to the same service line by the Post Office went unanswered.

The site was designed primarily for logistics companies and the mobile app allowed cargo owners to pay to track a specific truck.

But this week the number of visitors has increased as members of the public have begun trying to follow the routes taken by trucks believed to have been used to transport both fuel and cooking oil.

The app began restricting tracking requests on Tuesday, before removing the feature the next day, according to the 21st Century Business Herald.

Last week, the state-backed Beijing News said it was an “open secret” in the industry that the same tankers were used for fuel and food deliveries, including cooking oil, and that the vehicles were not cleaned between deliveries to save money.

The agency named as two of the companies involved a subsidiary of Sinograin, a state-owned stockpile producer, and the Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, a private company.

On Tuesday, an influencer known as Gaojianli, who has 190,000 followers on the video streaming site Bilibili, used Fahuobang to track the movements of one of the trucks involved.

The site’s suspension sparked further suspicion among the public, with discussions beginning to gather momentum on social media platform Weibo.

Hu Xijin, an outspoken commentator and former editor-in-chief of the nationalist Global Times newspaper, wrote on Weibo: “If this feature was removed due to external requests and interventions, no matter who made these requests and interventions, and no matter what their intentions are, the real effect is to damage trust in our society, and ultimately it is official credibility that will suffer the most.”

Gaojianli’s video showed that since March, the vehicle in question had visited several provinces carrying cargo including chemical oils, vegetable oils and animal feed.

One of the routes shows the vehicle collecting a shipment of soybean oil from Sinograin’s subsidiary China Grain Reserves Oil and Fat (Tianjin) in the northern port city and delivering it to a food processing company in Hanzhong, a city in the northwestern province of Shaanxi.

Food processing company Mianxian Xinli Oil Company declared itself a “victim”, adding that the shipment in question had been sealed and stored on July 3 following an investigation by local authorities.

A local vocational school confirmed that the company was a supplier and is awaiting the results of the investigation, domestic media outlet Caixin reported.

Public documents also show that the company had previously provided a local university and public service providers for vulnerable groups.

Sinograin and Hopefull Grain and Oil Group did not confirm or deny the details of the Beijing News report, but said they were conducting their own investigations into the report.