China’s milk scandal bares government failures

updated 7:57 p.m. ET Sept. 23, 2008

BEIJING - The note posted in July on the Web site of China’s food safety inspection agency came from a doctor: There had been a sudden rise in infants turning up at his hospital with kidney stones after drinking the same brand of formula.

The warning, which urged an investigation, went unheeded. In the two weeks since China began piecemeal reporting about contamination of the milk supply, a picture has emerged of official indifference, greed and government dysfunction.

Among the startling details: the practice of adulterating milk was widely known in the industry, and one dairy knew since late last year that its formula was sickening children.

The revelations have dismayed a broad segment of the public — parents — who feel the government has breached their trust. Tens of thousands of children have sought medical care, nearly 13,000 have been hospitalized and four infants have died.

'We trusted the government'
“I’m just disappointed because the government should have done more to protect its citizens,” said Liao Yanfang, a migrant worker whose 1-year-old son was found to have kidney stones Tuesday at Beijing Children’s Hospital. Since birth, her only child had been drinking infant formula made by the company at the center of the scandal, Sanlu Group Co., she said.

“I fed my baby powdered milk because ads said it was more nutritious than breast milk. We trusted that the government would provide adequate tests to ensure food quality,” she said.

In the past two weeks, Beijing has recalled a broad array of milk products — all tainted by the industrial chemical melamine — and arrested Sanlu’s chairwoman and several suppliers. It has dismissed officials and offered free medical care to the afflicted. “Nothing like this will ever happen again,” Premier Wen Jiabao pledged.

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But questions remain about why food and health inspectors ignored growing signs of trouble in the milk supply and when the communist leadership knew about it. Galling to many Chinese is the suspicion that high-level pressures for a successful Beijing Olympics added momentum for a cover-up.

“The dairy products for the Olympic Games were safe. I think the inspection agency already knew about it, and they tried to protect the ’national brand,”’ said Zhou Ze, a law professor at China Youth University For Political Science.

Regaining the confidence of the Chinese public and the world is likely to take concerted doing. The scandal has battered the government’s image, so carefully cultivated during the Olympics.

Governments heavily courted by Beijing have sounded the alarm. Normally pro-China Singapore has banned the sale and import of Chinese dairy products, from yogurt to candy. At least nine other countries have done the same.

Other nations, from Canada to Australia, have increased testing of Chinese food imports. The European Union ordered customs inspectors Tuesday to be on alert for products such as bread or chocolate to insure they contain no contaminated milk.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration expanded its sampling of imports from Asia to include dairy-based candies and desserts. Over the weekend, the agency announced it had started checking imports of bulk food ingredients, including milk powder, whey and some milk-derived proteins. No tainted products from China have turned up.

The overall impression is of an authoritarian government struggling to enforce its writ on a rapidly developing country where officials and businesses often go their own way.

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Just four years ago, Premier Wen issued an apology and promised greater transparency when official cover-ups aided the spread of SARS from China to the world. Last year, after exported pet food, cough medicine, toothpaste and toys made with toxic products sickened and killed pets and people in North and South America, the government promised to overhaul safety inspection regimes.

“Although after SARS, the government promised a more open media environment and to protect people’s right of expression, without essential measures, it’s just empty talk. What is really needed is to change the system’s framework,” said Yang Fengchun of Peking University’s School of Government. “The government and companies have lied to people, so it becomes very difficult to make people believe again in what they say.”

This time around, promises of official oversight fell flat in the boisterously growing dairy industry. Almost nonexistent two decades ago, the industry has boomed, transforming once scarce milk and milk powder into staples that have boosted nutritional levels and health from the urban middle class to the rural poor.

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