Free Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar by Matt McAllester Page A

such a moment would be commercially damaging. More important, any official who failed to do his national duty and suppress such negative news at such a sensitive moment could say good-bye to his career. Fonterra’s baby milk stayed on the supermarket shelves. The stories were not published.
    The Olympics were judged a success. The opening ceremony, choreographed by film director Zhang Yimou, was the most lavish in history, even if it was discovered later that some of its effects were digitally mocked up for TV. China had won a record haul of medals, and the tactic of deporting potential troublemakers from the capital, well out of sight of foreign journalists, had largely worked. By the time the Games were over, three hundred thousand babies had suffered kidney damage and eight had died.
    Once the Olympic fever had died down, the dogged journalist He Feng returned to his story and located hundreds more cases in dozens of hospitals. But it was not until September 12 that, in a carefully calibrated loosening of the valve, the official Xinhua news agency finally reported that there was an anonymous accusation against Sanlu from Gansu Province.
Southern Weekend
was not allowed to publish its story for a further two days, until the contaminated baby milk was finally removed from supermarket shelves.
    In the scramble to save careers and reputations that followed, the spotlight turned to the New Zealand investors and their role on the joint venture’smain board. Fonterra’s own account of its role in the scandal of the poisoned babies was that the company had struggled heroically to act with integrity despite obstruction from its Chinese partners and the Chinese authorities. Fonterra officials claimed that their first intimation of trouble came on August 1, six weeks before any public acknowledgment. They had remonstrated, they said, with their Chinese partners, and when Sanlu had refused to take the milk off the shelves, Fonterra had turned to the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, for assistance. It was her intervention, they claimed, that finally worked, but only once the Olympics were safely over.
    On September 15, two brothers who had supplied three tons of milk a day to Sanlu were arrested, along with seventeen others, including several Sanlu managers. The elder of the two brothers, a Sanlu supplier since 2004, admitted that he had been adding melamine to his milk for the best part of a year. Parents and doctors had begun to complain in March, and the press had been on the case by July. The Chinese authorities, however, claimed they had been unaware of the poisoning until September 8.
    In the aftermath of the scandal, Sanlu went bankrupt and Fonterra wrote off $201 million in worthless shares. The milk producer and a supplier were executed; the former chair of Sanlu, a woman, was sentenced to life in prison; and sixteen others, mostly midlevel executives, were punished. The mayor and the party boss of Shijiazhuang, Sanlu’s home base, were sacked. For the bureaucrats who had suppressed or ignored the scandal, there was no sanction. How could there be? They were obeying a central government order that nothing should be allowed to disturb China’s big Olympic moment. The twenty-two other companies discovered to be selling melamine-tainted milk, a list that included one of the official suppliers to the Beijing Olympics, appeared to have escaped major punishment.
    Nor was there any sign that the dead and sick babies had spurred the state to reform the morass of corruption and political interests that generated the affair. This was not the first milk scandal in China, but it was oneof the worst. Hopes that the government might take steps to ensure it was the last proved illusory when, in February 2010, the authorities admitted that they had recovered more than 350,000 pounds of melamine-contaminated milk powder from across China. Some of it, they surmised, was stock salvaged from the product recall in 2008