@nnoble: So a US visa would be easier to get than a 'Europe' visa!

tiger: That sounds about right. My involvement, other than get a small percentage on shipments for eight years ended, ended when they formed their venture. The pharma guy reported and paid me quarterly but it was slow at the beginning.

As a rule, I avoided food and medical stuff due to high regulation risk. I had a SOE company in Zhuhai that develop a product that contained aloe, 100% duty on content, and alcohol, both a hazard material (fire) and with FDA medical exposure. US customs required a detailed chemical analysis as formality. The Chinese side felt the product formulation was secret and refused. Nearly a year, four trips to China, packaging design, landing a USD 600K first order with about USD $25K out of my pocket, I gave up. Lesson learned: Stick to being an agent no matter how good the margins looked.

I've never had any problem getting a US visa.

lemon lover is right about the 100 mg vitamin C tablets. I bought those once but never found them again in Beijing.

Vitamin C is water soluble so your excess intake is pissed away.

I take 1000 mg Vitamin C as suggested by my cardiologist in 1996 after a series of ischemic heart attacks, one a month, where no cause was evident. In 2014, The VA determined Agent Orange caused my heart attacks.

From wikipedia:

"A meta-analysis of 44 clinical trials (2014) has shown a significant positive effect of vitamin C on endothelial function when taken at doses greater than 500 mg per day. The researchers noted that the effect of vitamin C supplementation appeared to be dependent on health status, with stronger effects in those at higher cardiovascular disease risk."

So, lemon lover 大夫, I will continue to consume unnecessary vitamin C at 7 cents a day because I haven't another heart attack since I started doing so in 1996.

BTW pharmacy prices in Kunming seem to be fixed as I found no difference from one pharmacy to the next.

In Feb 2014, I did an analysis of Vitamin C costs. These calculations were at 6.21¥ per USD.

I had my son send me a bottle Costco brand vitamin C, 500 tablets, 1,000mg tablets. My cost, including shipping was $34 U$D.

I compared the cost of two domestic vitamin C products and two imported vitamin C products I found on Nan Ping Jie:

Costco 214¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00007 U$D

Domestic A 108¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.01496 U$D

Domestic B 198¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00674 U$D

Import A 239¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00087 U$D

Import A 98¥ per bottle, cost per mg was 0.00350 U$D

Chinese labelling is not always clear. The size of the tablet will be clearly given but to find the amount of Vitamin C per tablet requires careful reading. Both domestic brands were 100 mg tablets but one contained only 11.8 mg 'C' per 100 mg tablet and the other 32 mg 'C' per 100 mg tablet.
Nearly all the vitamin C sold in the US originates in China.

Aspirin can be found in 50 and 100 mg tablets and the cost per mg is much cheaper than the US 325mg tablets.

In China Tylenol is hard to find and quite expensive. It also doesn't look right.

Full disclosure: One of the imported vitamin C product is well known to me. I brought a Taiwanese business guy, a Chinese scientist living in the US and a Vietnamese born pharma company owner, together to design, manufacture and distribute standardized TCM pills. Their products were to be exported to China. I found only their line of Western vitamins for sale.