Free Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar by Matt McAllester

catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan added to a litany of bad news that threatened to overwhelm even the Chinese state’s capacity for propaganda. It was not a good moment to talk about dying babies.
    The trouble for the babies had begun in June 2006. Spotting an opportunity in China’s growing appetite for milk and dairy products, New Zealand’s giant dairy enterprise, Fonterra, invested heavily in the Chinese market. Fonterra’s biggest purchase was 43 percent of a Chinese dairy company called Sanlu, with whom they set up a joint venture that would ensure, the company boasted, a “world class dairy research and manufacturing capacity.”
    If the company’s promises had been borne out, it would have marked a welcome improvement in a dairy industry that had already been responsible for some notorious scandals. In the worst one to date, in 2004, thirteen babies in Anhui Province had died as a result of consuming what turned out to be fake baby milk. No doubt in choosing Sanlu as a partner, the New Zealand enterprise was reassured by the fact that it was owned bythe Hebei provincial government and, as China’s leading infant-formula company, it had outsold its rivals for fourteen consecutive years. A month after the joint venture was set up, the Sanlu brand won an award. Sanlu’s marketing promised that the group had “shouldered to the utmost degree its responsibility and mission to ensure the highest quality and safety of each bag of infant formula.” The vice-CEO of the group, Wang Yuliang, promised perfect, high-tech production of its infant formula. After all, he said, “the quality of the product is the infant’s life.”
    Doctors picked up the first signs of trouble in the spring of 2008: unusual clusters of infants were presenting with symptoms of kidney disorders. They duly reported their concerns to the Health Ministry, and a few journalists began to work on the story. By July 2008, a month before the Olympics, He Feng, a reporter on the well-respected newspaper
Southern Weekend
, knew of twenty babies in Hubei province hospitalized with kidney ailments. All had been fed Sanlu baby milk, which, unbeknownst to the babies’ parents, had been contaminated with melamine.
    Melamine is a chemical that can mimic protein and can be used to disguise the fact that milk has been watered down. It was the same substance that had killed a number of dogs in the United States in 2007 after they had consumed pet food in which melamine had been used to counterfeit rice protein and wheat gluten. The animals had died of kidney failure. The source had been traced back to China.
    He Feng was not aware that he was looking at a case of widespread melamine adulteration, but he did know that something serious was going on with the nation’s infants. His problem, though, was how to get his story published. In the countdown to the grand Olympics opening ceremony, China’s propaganda bureau regarded bad news like this as close to treason. The censors repeatedly spiked his story.
    Nor was there much enthusiasm in other parts of the Chinese state to investigate what might turn out to be a negative episode that could reflect badly on the national image. Sanlu had been certified as exempt from anysupervision by China’s overstretched health and food inspectors and the state inspectors, nominally the guardians of public safety, were clear that excessive zeal at such a delicate political moment would be unwise. The General Administration for Quality Inspection reported no problems with Sanlu’s products; the Health Ministry’s disease control center declined to respond to the growing number of reports from doctors across the country of kidney stones in infants; the Food and Drug Administration found nothing that merited intervention.
    Sanlu and its majority shareholder, the Hebei provincial government, were aware of the medical reports but were equally clear that a food scare at