The Milk Scandal and the Fourth Estate

It was almost heart-rendering to observe the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiaboa, in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. The emotion he displayed when working with the rescue teams was, in my opinion, genuine and now it is Wen Jiaboa again who is apologising for a milk scandal that has left over 50,000 children sick and, at least, three dead. He has promised to reform China's dairy industry and, I believe, he is sincere. However, over a year ago, the Chinese government spent 1.1 billion dollars and sent 300,000 inspectors to examine foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals in response to other safety scandals and that, I am afraid, is the problem; nobody doubts that in a party that has about seventy five million members there are a lot of decent people, nevertheless, the question has to be asked, is transparency and regulation possible in a system where the government needs to maintain control of information? The government knew about the contaminated milk before the olympics but one is left suspecting that, because of those olympics, companies such as the main offender, the Sanlu Group, were exempted from inspection. Heads will now roll but they will not roll in Beijing, which is already blaming greedy companies and local officials for the health disaster. However, as I have just indicated, we have the evidence that Beijing Knew what was happening and, indeed, they knew more than two months before the scandal became public.1
In a post a couple of weeks ago I addressed the fact that there had at least been a tentative admission on Beijing's part that the school buildings in the earthquake area had been badly built, and followed that with another couple of points one of which was that the state news agency, 'Xinhau, was continuing to report on the topic, despite having been told by certain people in the government to stop doing so. It now appears that a certain Mr. Fu, the editor at 'Southern Weekend', published details of the milk scandal in his blog before the Olympics and that Sanlu tried to block the news using its 'guan xi'. However, it was the timing of the report that ensured that it wouldn't be published. With the Olympics looming no real investigation would be possible. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasise that Mr. Fu's newspaper also gets a mention in Philip Pan's book, 'Out of Mao's Shadow'2 The evidence would appear to suggest that there is already a fourth estate in China and this should give us a reason to be, if not optimistic, at least hopeful.
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/world/asia/27milk.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
2 Philip Pan, 'Out of Mao's Shadow' Chapter 9, 'The Newspaperman'