SINGAPORE—An intriguing tale of greed, political wrangling and high-level cover-up is fast taking shape as more details about China's tainted milk scandal are revealed by the day.
Months before New Zealand blew the whistle on the case, an anxious father in eastern China had already been trying to go public about the problems with the milk powder from Sanlu, the Chinese dairy giant in the center of the storm.
This first, frantic -- but ultimately failed -- attempt at sounding the alarm is a cautionary tale on the problems with China's food safety system and why consumers here need a stronger voice.
A lonely quest
On May 21, a frustrated Wang Yuanping finally gave up trying to get some straight answers from Sanlu, China's biggest milk powder producer.
For six months or so, the 40-year-old office worker in eastern Zhejiang province's Taishun county had tried -- and failed -- to get Sanlu to explain why his teenage daughter's urine turned sticky and yellowish after taking the company's products.
The 13-year-old also spotted mysterious granules in her urine, and suffered from occasional bouts of diarrhea. But the symptoms disappeared once she stopped taking Sanlu's "high calcium powdered milk."
Initially, Wang thought the 15 packets of milk powder he bought from a nearby supermarket were counterfeit products, which might then explain his daughter's adverse reaction.
He rang Sanlu's customer hotline to report the problem, and was advised to send two packets of the milk powder to the company's headquarters in Shijiazhuang city in northern Hebei province.
Wang did as he was told on February 25, but was informed days later that the milk powder he bought was the genuine stuff. A local agent for Sanlu subsequently contacted him and offered a refund or an exchange for a fresher batch of milk powder.
But Wang refused and said what he wanted from Sanlu was the test results as he was concerned for not just his own daughter but other children as well. The Sanlu agent, however, told him that the test report was confidential as it involved commercial secrets, and repeated his earlier offer for an exchange.
Wang turned to the local consumer watchdog instead, but it was of no real help.
On March 31, he finally decided to lodge a formal request at the county's industry and commerce bureau so that a formal investigation into Sanlu's milk powder could commence. He was determined to go ahead with the investigation even though officials warned that he would have to fork out in advance the fees for the tests, which could cost more than 10,000 yuan ($1,460).
But he was too late. When he and the officials returned to the supermarket days later, the dubious batch of Sanlu milk powder had all disappeared from the shelves, replaced by fresh batches bearing different packaging.
On May 21, a frustrated Wang turned to the last resort -- the Internet. He penned a near 2,000-character account of his attempt to get answers from Sanlu, complete with photos of the milk powder he had bought, and posted them on popular online forums like Tianya.cn.
Writing under the innocuous pseudonym of '789oo88oo88', Wang began: "This incident felt like the longest night, and as if I had just woken from a nightmare. It also shows how far we have to go in fixing our food safety problems.
"It is so difficult to reveal the truth about such incidents."
He had no idea then just how big the problem was. But he soon got a taste of the lengths to which Sanlu would go to cover things up.
The cover-up
On May 31, 10 days after he sent out his online post, Wang got an unexpected visit from Sanlu's regional manager Zhong Yun, who offered him four cases of milk powder worth nearly 2,500 yuan ($365). This was nearly 10 times the value of the milk powder he had bought earlier at the supermarket.
In exchange, Zhong wanted to take back the remaining 13 packets of milk powder in Wang's possession. The manager also wanted him to delete all the online postings on the subject. Finally, Wang had to sign and put his thumbprint to a "certification letter" formalizing the settlement.
Wang eventually relented, and later that day, he told the administrators of Tianya.cn to delete his posting. A cached version, however, remained online though it did not attract much attention in the subsequent weeks and months.
It was not entirely clear why Wang, who declined to be interviewed for this article, gave in to Sanlu's offer.
His story came to light only after the Chinese government acknowledged the problem and openly named Sanlu as the main culprit in the scandal. It emerged that Sanlu's milk powder had been contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical, several hundred times beyond the safety level.
By then, thousands of babies had been affected. Many of them were found to have developed kidney stones, and at least four deaths have been reported so far.
Disappointed Internet users asked why Wang did not persist in his quest for the truth. In an interview with the Dushi Kuaibao newspaper days after the scandal shook China, Wang lamented: “I knew the milk powder was problematic, but I just didn't know what exactly was wrong with it.
"If I knew it contained melamine, I would not have accepted the offer or shared them with my friends and relatives."
His experience illustrates what the experts have been saying for a long time: that it is impossible for tests and regulations alone to police a massive market like China's. What would protect consumers in the long run is a reliable channel to report food safety problems, such as those with Sanlu's milk powder.
"In any (regulatory) system, you can't rely on testing alone. That's the old-fashioned way," said Jorgen Schlundt, a senior food safety expert with the World Health Organization in Geneva.
"You need to have a system that looks at the risks and tries to prevent them as close to the source as possible, (as well as) a system where there's a culture of openness and quick reporting."
But openness and quick reporting are precisely the weak spots of the Chinese system. The same problems were exposed during the 2003 SARS crisis when government officials tried to cover up the outbreaks, and ended up making matters worse.
This year's tainted milk scandal showed that old habits die hard.
The spiral of silence
Disclosures by the official Xinhua news agency now suggest that Sanlu knew about the problems with its milk powder from as early as last December.
But the company did not formally inform the authorities in Shijiazhuang, where Sanlu is headquartered, until August 2 this year, six days before the opening of the Beijing Olympics.
And it was not until this month, when the Games were officially over, that the public began to hear about the melamine contamination in Sanlu's products. China's central government has so far not explained how or why the local officials pulled the wool over its eyes for so long, particularly given the heightened vigilance following last year's spate of food safety scares.
Observers said the cover-up was no surprise, given that over 20,000 foreign journalists were camped out in Beijing for the Olympics last month. An announcement of the melamine contamination then would have been an unprecedented political and public relations disaster.
Sanlu's foreign partner, New Zealand dairy group Fonterra, has also come under fire for not acting earlier and waiting for at least six weeks before it raised the alarm. The stakes involved are apparent -- Fonterra paid $107 million in 2005 for a 43 percent share in Sanlu.
Businessmen and Chinese officials are not the only ones complicit in this spiral of silence. There were signs that some Chinese reporters knew about the problem at an early stage, but held back from exposing the problem for fear of retaliation from Sanlu.
Even those who tried to report about the rising number of infants suffering from kidney problems in July referred to Sanlu merely as "a particular company", or "a certain milk powder brand."
The first reporter to name Sanlu in his report was Jian Guanzhou of the Shanghai-based Dongfang Zaobao. But his report was published only on September 11, two days after the Chinese government had been informed by the New Zealand authorities of the melamine contamination.
Though Jian was hailed as a hero in some quarters for being the first to expose Sanlu, he said he was saddened by, rather than proud of, what had happened.
"It is an open secret that companies use money to keep the media quiet," he wrote on his blog. "In the case of the Sanlu affair, did any media take money to keep quiet? Based on my understanding, it is highly likely."
Meanwhile, China's online forums are still buzzing with rumors that major domestic Internet portals and search engines had been bribed by Sanlu to play down the news of the scandal.
In comments echoing those of Wang, the anxious father who failed to warn the public about Sanlu, the journalist added:
"In this society, where there are so many risks and temptations, it is hard to even tell a simple truth." Chua Chin Hon, The Straits Times
