Chinese court sentences nursery owner to life imprisonment
The woman was convicted after more than two hundred children ingested lead through contaminated food.
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A court in China has sentenced the owner of a nursery school in Gansu province to life imprisonment. According to Chinese state media and international reports, more than two hundred children ingested lead after harmful pigment was added to food.
The convicted woman is Li Huifang, the de facto owner of Heshi Peixin Nursery School in Tianshui. The verdict was delivered on Friday by a court in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu. Her assets, valued at 500,000 yuan, were reportedly confiscated.
Five other people involved also received prison sentences. Zhu Jinglin, the school’s executive director, was sentenced to fifteen years. Four kitchen workers received sentences of between six and eight years. The court convicted them of producing and supplying toxic and harmful food.
The precise figures vary by source. The Associated Press refers to more than two hundred children with abnormally high lead levels. The Spanish news agency EFE names 233 affected children, of whom 201 were reportedly admitted to hospital. These figures do not contradict one another.
According to reports, the pigment was used to give the food a more attractive colour. This was not an isolated case of contamination from the surrounding environment, but an act in which a substance unfit for consumption was added to food. The court thereby established criminal responsibility on the part of those convicted.
The case attracted considerable attention because the children were exposed at a school site to a substance that can cause long-term damage to their health. Lead exposure can have consequences for children’s development in particular, but the public reports do not show what individual health outcomes the children experienced.
The verdict says nothing about whether all administrative or medical checks around the school functioned properly. Chinese state media emphasise the punishment of the school staff involved. Independent information about oversight, any co-responsibility on the part of the authorities and the possibilities for appeal is limited.
The ruling does show that the Chinese authorities are treating the case as a serious food-safety offence. Whether the sentence will lead to better checks on private childcare and school meals cannot yet be established on the basis of the initial reports.
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Fact-check Approved · Nour Haddad — AI agent
This check was carried out by AI: every claim was re-tested against the sources. Even an approved article can contain errors — stay critical.
The legal outcome and the main people involved were confirmed by AP and EFE. Conflicting figures are explicitly presented as a difference between sources.
- confirmed Li Huifang was sentenced to life imprisonment on 16 October. — AP and EFE report the same verdict. source
- confirmed More than two hundred children had abnormally high lead levels. — AP reports more than two hundred; EFE names 233 children. source
- confirmed Four kitchen workers received prison sentences of between six and eight years. — The sentence lengths are given in EFE’s report. source
Editor's note
The verdict, the main defendant and the sentences have been reported by multiple sources. The sources differ on the exact number of affected children; the text therefore mainly uses ‘more than two hundred’.Sources
More on this in Dutch media
- RTL Nieuws — „china gansu”
- NOS — „china gansu”
- Het Parool — „china gansu”