Nearly three weeks after China's melamine-tainted milk powder scandal first came to light, Beijing is scrambling to assure the public nothing like this will ever happen again. Yet the Communist Party's insistence on maintaining press controls still presents a significant stumbling block to addressing China's quality control problems. Greater press freedom is not on its own a solution to product safety problems in China, but it has to be a component of any strategy to deal with the issue. Free media could help keep companies and regulators honest, expose lapses, and provide the public with critical updates on safety problems -- especially in a nation like China, where rule of law is still a long time coming.
China's milk disaster might have been averted, or fewer people affected, had China's leaders permitted journalists to do their jobs. In late July, journalist He Feng of Guangdong's Southern Weekend newspaper began investigating reports that infants had fallen ill after consuming milk powder from dairy giant Shijiazhuang Sanlu Group, the company at the center of the milk powder scandal. But Southern Weekend's report was never published. It was only after the story came to light six weeks later that one of the newspaper's top editors, Fu Jianfeng, revealed on his personal blog that this report on poisonous milk powder had been suppressed by authorities.
In August, with the Beijing Olympics in full swing, Chinese media were under enormous pressure from state leaders to carry out only "positive reporting." Problems in China's dairy industry were off limits. At the same time, Sanlu Group itself was honored by scores of national media in an award campaign called "30 Years: Brands that Have Changed the Lives of Chinese." The press release on the honor, written by a senior public relations manager at Sanlu, ran unchanged as news content on the Web site of the official People's Daily and in other media.
The suppression of bad news has continued, and by some measures gotten worse, since the scandal has come to light. The specific nature of media bans remains unclear, although it appears from news reports that media have been instructed to stick to the government line as reported by the official Xinhua news agency. Chinese journalists tell me any further reporting on problems in China's dairy industry is impossible. Discussion of the causes of the crisis and government responsibility, including questions about government cooperation with dairy companies, is strictly off limits. Nor are Chinese consumers being offered information about the breadth of global recalls.
For the past six years, Hu Jintao has promoted a policy combining rapid commercial media growth with strict media control under the banner of "guidance of public opinion." Just over a week ago, party leaders sent the message that these policies are unlikely to change: They ordered a three-month suspension for China Business Post, a Beijing-based newspaper that dared to report on questionable accounts at a major state bank without first seeking the bank's approval as required under little-known CCP rules. It's exactly this kind of approach that has greatly exacerbated the milk powder tragedy.
With contaminated dairy products, candies and milk teas being pulled from shelves around the world, it's clear that China's quality-assurance failure is a global problem. And that makes Beijing's refusal to let the media act as effective watchdogs a global problem, too.
Mr. Bandurski is a researcher at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.
