The Milk Stain That Won't Go Away

The China milk scandal, a vicious
circle of corruption (EPA photo)

The more we dig into the Chinese tainted milk scandal, the worse it stinks, and at the core of this boiling pot of corruption is the Chinese regime's hermetic tendencies.

Reporters without Borders' Washington Representative Licie Morillon confirms that official censorship was the main culprit of the scandal's disastrous consequences that have left four babies dead and 53,000 sickened in China.

Last July, a journalist working for the investigative weekly Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) gathered reliable information regarding a wave of hospitalizations of new-born babies, with four killed and 53,000 sickened. These illnesses were linked to powered milk made by Chinese dairy company Sanlu. The writer's editor, however, decided not to publish the story for fear of government reprisal. As a result, China had to wait until after the Olympic Games, until early September, before another news outlet dared to publish this explosive news.

Fu Jianfeng, an editor at Southern Weekend posted a damning indictment on his blog after the scandal became public in September:

"Actually, our reporter He Feng had received the information at the end of July that more than 20 babies were hospitalized for kidney stones in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan city, Hubei province as a result of consuming the tainted Sanlu milk powder. But for reasons that everybody knows, we were not able to investigate the case at that time because harmony was needed everywhere. As a news editor, I was deeply concerned because I sensed that this was going to be a huge public health catastrophe. But I could not send any reporters to investigate. Therefore, I harbored a deep sense of guilt and defeat at the time."

Morillon provides pains-taking details of how an entrenched bureaucracy's addiction to secrecy made a bad situation catastrophic.

Talking about the absolute opposite of milk and honey.