Land of melamine and money
THE HORROR of contaminated baby formula in China, like earlier instances of poisoned dog food and unsafe construction in earthquake-crumpled schools, is what happens when free markets meet an unfree political system. If brand China has been devalued, China's ruling Communist Party has nobody to blame but itself.
It is the human dimension of the milk powder scandal - the suffering inflicted on Chinese infants and their families - that ought to be the first concern of party officials. More than 50,000 babies have been sickened, often with kidney disease or kidney stones, and at least three have died. The milk is tainted with the industrial additive melamine, a chemical used in plastics and glue. Dairy farmers used melamine to raise the protein count in their milk, and personnel at milk collection centers ignored it.
The primary cause of this failure to protect the health of infants in China is a corrupting symbiosis of capitalists and communists - the intertwining of corporate managers and highly placed party officials. The chairwoman of the dairy corporation at the center of the tragedy was appointed to the post by the Communist Party bosses of Hebei province, and she herself was a prominent party official.
Warnings about the effects of melamine in baby formula were first sounded last December. They were squelched by the powder's producer, the Sanlu Dairy Co. More complaints appeared on Internet sites in March. The authorities responded by enforcing a pre-Olympics blackout of bad news. Through the summer, Chinese editors and reporters refrained from investigating the story and informing the public, bridled by government censorship that was justified as the journalists' patriotic duty.
As happened in similar instances in the past, communist suppression of information the public needed to know was toxic. In this case, it killed and sickened infants.
The dysfunction illuminated by the contaminated baby formula tragedy in China is systemic. The country's one-party political structure prevents the sort of competition that can hold the party in power accountable. More often than not, it means that communist officials feel obliged to protect the party's interests before the public's.
From the ruling party's reflex of self-protection flows an institutionalized mistrust of free speech and a free press. When the communists' fear of exposing their system to sunlight is interwoven with a pervasive culture of bribery and "back-door" business dealing, the inevitable result is that the people become the victims - of both unregulated capitalism and the vestigial system of Chinese communism. 