Milk and media

Chinese dairy in better days
xiaming via FlickrNow the central government is on red alert concerning the milk scandal, many Western media have expressed their surprise about the often subdue reaction of Chinese parents who are visiting hospitals to get a health check for their children. While there might be more than one explanation for that, for many the milk scandal only confirms the worst fears about food security they had already.
China's fast economic expansion has had the hallmarks of a chaos, with all the problems that come along with it. Since the traditional media in China have been ordered to keep bad news away from the ordinary citizen, there has often been suspicions - maybe just because the media were controlled - that all was not well.
What we see now has less to do with the milk, but is an excellent illustration of the power of the new media, the internet. Scandals like this milk scam would have kept under wraps and since Chinese from one city would not know fellow citizens in other regions would have the same problem, this kind of food security scandal only now can get out on a national scale. While Sanlu seems to have been trying to curtail search engine Baidu in sending out the bad news, since nobody really has a monopoly on the news, hiding is no longer possible.
So, what we see here is - after SARS - another nationwide health care problem. And the concerned parents in the hospitals are not surprised. For them it is already amazing the problems has emerged in the media, before it was too late for even more babies.

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