CRACKDOWN ON SUBSTANDARD PRODUCTS: Police in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, put substandard milk powder on display in August 2012. Local police there held major crackdowns on gutter oil, substandard milk powder and illegally used food additives (SHI WEIMING)

The direct shift gearbox (DSG) transmission technology and its smooth shifting between gears has long been a bragging point for Volkswagen.

What Volkswagen didn't anticipate in its highly touted technology was a defect, one that could be fatal.

A Shanghai native surnamed Li said he will never forget the day when his Volkswagen Octavia lost control.

"I bought the car in May 2011," Li told a China Central Television (CCTV) investigative program. "One time, I was driving at 80 km per hour when I stepped on the accelerator to surpass the car ahead of me. The car suddenly lost engine power and slowed down. It scared the hell out of me. Luckily, there was no accident."

The CCTV program, which falls on March 15 each year in conjunction with World Consumer Rights Day, exposed malfunctions of the DSG transmission in some Volkswagen models that could cause sudden loss or gain of engine power, posing a great safety hazard.

Li is just one of the many Chinese consumers who have encountered the defect. In June 2010, some car owners set up several live chat rooms online to share their experiences and come together to fight for their rights against the company. Within two years, there were thousands of people in the groups.

At the beginning of 2012, Volkswagen offered a free software upgrade to cars equipped with its DSG system. But car owners soon learned the defect remained even after the upgrade. Last May, the company extended its DSG quality guarantee period in China to 10 years.

Still, consumers are not happy. Defects do not always unearth themselves during inspection, and there's no way to guarantee the defect won't wreck havoc again once the problem has been purportedly fixed.

After the CCTV exposure, Volkswagen said it would recall a total of 384,181 DSG-equipped cars in China.

Another exposed carmaker was JAC Motors, one of China's largest domestic automakers. CCTV reported that many drivers have been complaining about rust problems with the company's Turin car model.

JAC Motors announced it will recall 117,072 units of its Turin model over the concerns. The Anhui-based automaker says it will repair those vehicles with rust problems for free and improve the coating of the metal plates for those that have not rusted.

Other exposed corporate malpractices in the CCTV program included the leaking and selling of personal information by companies, Apple Inc.'s post-sales policies in China, an advertisement plug-in secretly installed by Internet access providers and false drug advertisements.

Chinese have become more aware of protecting their rights as consumers, as indicated by the number of growing consumer complaints each year.

China Consumers' Association (CCA), a nationwide organization that gathers consumer complaints and works to protect consumer rights, has received 543,338 complaints in 2012, ranging from quality and price issues to contracts and safety. No industry, it appears, was spared of complaints, including financial services, automotive and food. Among the total, 505,304 were addressed. Complaints on the quality of products accounted for 51.6 percent of all complaints, according to the CCA.

More supervision from the government is called for to improve the less-than-satisfying consumer environment, including increasing compensation levels and introducing class-action lawsuits into the legal system, says experts.

Beefing up supervision

While consumers need to take action and remain vigilant, the government should do more to protect consumer rights, says experts.

Food safety is a major concern for the country, with regular news reports of scandals, such as tainted milk, gutter oil used to cook foods, toxic capsules, exploding watermelons and the illegal use of banned additives and antibiotics.

Oversight in the food sector has long been criticized for being too scattered, too overlapped and too riddled with finger pointing.

For instance, from the time a chicken is raised on a farm to the time it reaches a dinner table, no less than five government departments are involved in the process, including the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Health and the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA).

A CCTV investigative report found that several Shandong-based farms fed excessive amounts of growth-boosting drugs to their chickens, but no ministry at the time stepped up to tackle the issue.