Bawang Group in license-sharing scandal

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Yangtse Evening Post, July 21, 2010

Jiangsu’s Yangtse Evening Post calls attention to the potential for rain in the evening. It also says that rain lowers temperatures by 10 degrees centigrade. However, tomorrow brings another hot day. The photo itself was actually taken the day before at Nanjing Xinjiekou at 3:40pm.

Main news items are listed on the side column:

  • The first showing of Aftershock (the film about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake by Feng Xiaogang) is at 12 midnight tonight.
  • Actor Sun Honglei sues an imitation biography.
  • A white baby girl is born to a black couple.

Another interesting headline is related to the ongoing Bawang Group Chinese herbal shampoo scandal. The license for the product is shared with a product called Litao anti-hair loss shampoo (丽涛防脱洗发液), a product that had already expired, according to the State Food and Drug Administration website.

The original report, made by a National Business Daily journalist, also interviewed someone who works inside the Administration:

The main reason that the Administration can’t “officially approve” the product is because they can’t verify its special ability. In the fax published by the Bawang Group stating its original license it really did say that “the Ministry of Health did not organize the verification of the abilities of the product, and this license doesn’t not recognize the effect that the product claims to have.

In other words, Bawang Group’s shampoos, which claim that it could turn hair black using only natural herbal ingredients, were not approved by the relevant State bodies to begin with. In other myth-busting news, an article in China Entrepreneur Magazine calls into question Bawang’s claim that it is a ‘golden family of Chinese medicine with one hundred years of history’ (百年的’中药世家’). One reason: the company was set up in 1989, according to the article.

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