As a long-time resident of Beijing, concern about food and product-safety is almost a chronic neurosis. Over the past year alone, health scares have ranged from carcinogenic textiles and toothpastes, to the sale of rancid pork from dug up pig carcasses, to hormone and pesticide-laden fruits and veggies and most recently, melamine-laced milk.
This latest episode of the tainted milk has caused particular outrage because of the life-threatening impact on a large number of toddlers (53,000 affected on the latest count). What appeared at first to be a company-specific incident quickly spread to engulf the entire industry, implicating an ever wider web of co-conspirators including the very people whose job it was to police the corporate malefactors.
The story that is unfolding tells of unbridled greed, political wrangling and high-level cover-up. It has thrown up searching questions about China’s own brand of über-capitalism, characterised by weak regulatory oversight, compromised public institutions and entrenched collusion between businesses, the media and government officials in the brazen pursuit of profit.
The extent and sophistication of media involvement in high-profile campaigns of criminal misinformation to protect and promote tainted brands is now coming to light. David Bandurski, of the China Media Project, has covered this story in detail. Even as questions were beginning to surface about the safety of milk powder from Sanlu Dairy, the company’s supposed contributions to the lives of ordinary Chinese were being trumpeted loudly across the media:
“In early August, as the stage was set for the Beijing Olympic Games and news about poisonous milk powder was being suppressed by corporations and officials, scores of print media and major Web portals across China ran a story about how the dairy brand Sanlu, now at the center of the dairy industry scandal, had been honored in an award campaign called “30 Years: Brands that Have Changed the Lives of Chinese.””
It later emerged that the these stories, ostensibly written by staff reporters in the leading Chinese newspapers, were in fact penned and planted by the head of the PR department of Sanlu Dairy.
It is typically at the local level that collusion between the media and government is at its worst. As Will Moss, a Beijing-based public relations expert explains, local governments have been keen to safeguard this cosy relationship with the local media:
“In recent years, Chinese journalists have reported a number of tactics used by provincial and local officials to curb cross-regional reporting, including you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours pacts in which local party leaders agree to discourage investigative reporting by media under their immediate control.”
The complicity of food quality watchdogs is also apparent. A glimpse at the website of the China Food Quality News is revealing about how profit-oriented this government-designated food quality mouthpiece has become: the homepage is studded with corporate logos, including of several ‘tainted’ brands such as Sanlu and Yili. Thus the very institutions that are meant to quality-control the dairy companies are being brought out by them, and used instead as instruments of corporate branding.
Will Moss eloquently sums up the challenge facing China in the wake of this scandal (see: Sanlu melamine milk powder crisis becomes a national issue):
“the larger challenge for China is not just to prove that it can clean up the dairy industry, but to prove that its commercial environment can evolve into something other than a cozy swamp where insiders get rich and outsiders get kidney stones.”
