My friend’s partner grew up in China, when I asked them they said people who tend to have more money prefer imported food due to their negative association with food produced in China.

When I asked why, they said some of it seemed to be a holdover from the earlier tumultuous periods in China’s recent history. They said their family would only eat imported beef for example. Note, this person could attend a school in the imperial core as an international student, they aren’t representative of the average Chinese citizen, this is only an anecdote and should be treated as such.

I don’t have a source for the following, unfortunately, but I was reading about the introduction in China of domestic production of pharmaceuticals to decrease costs and, you know, own the means of production. Some drug manufacturers couldn’t compete or had to reduce costs by a large margin. For some that couldn’t compete, they would license their branding for the domestic drugs since they had the trademarks and IP for it. One thing which I think is a corollary to what my friend’s partner said, is that the article mentioned some wealthier Chinese would import brand-name drugs with the same active ingredient as the domestic one, because they thought they would be more effective.

What really got me was in the article they mentioned that only like, a set number of drugs are introduced, and even then places like hospitals have to bid on them in some way. As well, they don’t get approved without rigorous testing. The anecdotes from the wealthier folks was that the imported stuff was better (i.e. more effective), if only slightly. The article also mentioned a few reports (I think from social media?) of people having apparent adverse reactions after they changed to the domestically produced drug. They also mentioned that there wasn’t any research or studies showing that to be the case, and it was only a handful of reports. Something that was being investigated at present.