Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (8 page)

In 2008, the toxic underworld of China's food industry and the Communist Party's propaganda machine collided in a spectacular scandal that threatened to wreck the party's most important moment in the international spotlight for thirty years. For a decade the nation had been mobilizing for a global demonstration of the transformational miracle of the previous thirty
years: the 2008 Olympic Games, symbol of China's new importance in the world, were meticulously planned to be the most lavish display since Germany's effort in 1936. A countdown clock in the heart of Beijing ticked off the days as tens of thousands of migrant workers labored around the clock to complete the spectacular venues and spruce up the city. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong.

As the spring of 2008 gave way to summer, a malign demon seemed bent on wrecking the party. The Olympics were sold as environmentally friendly, but everywhere the symptoms of China's toxic industrial revolution were breaking through. International athletes threatened to boycott the games to avoid breathing Beijing's contaminated air. The city's officials quietly moved the air-quality monitoring stations to the suburbs in the hope of getting better readings. A toxic algae bloom of biblical proportions broke out in the coastal waters of Qingdao, threatening the sailing events. A full-scale revolt in Tibet and a catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan added to a litany of bad news that threatened to overwhelm even the Chinese state's capacity for propaganda. It was not a good moment to talk about dying babies.

The trouble for the babies had begun in June 2006. Spotting an opportunity in China's growing appetite for milk and dairy products, New Zealand's giant dairy enterprise, Fonterra, invested heavily in the Chinese market. Fonterra's biggest purchase was 43 percent of a Chinese dairy company called Sanlu, with whom they set up a joint venture that would ensure, the company boasted, a “world class dairy research and manufacturing capacity.”

If the company's promises had been borne out, it would have marked a welcome improvement in a dairy industry that had already been responsible for some notorious scandals. In the worst one to date, in 2004, thirteen babies in Anhui Province had died as a result of consuming what turned out to be fake baby milk. No doubt in choosing Sanlu as a partner, the New Zealand enterprise was reassured by the fact that it was owned by
the Hebei provincial government and, as China's leading infant-formula company, it had outsold its rivals for fourteen consecutive years. A month after the joint venture was set up, the Sanlu brand won an award. Sanlu's marketing promised that the group had “shouldered to the utmost degree its responsibility and mission to ensure the highest quality and safety of each bag of infant formula.” The vice-CEO of the group, Wang Yuliang, promised perfect, high-tech production of its infant formula. After all, he said, “the quality of the product is the infant's life.”

Doctors picked up the first signs of trouble in the spring of 2008: unusual clusters of infants were presenting with symptoms of kidney disorders. They duly reported their concerns to the Health Ministry, and a few journalists began to work on the story. By July 2008, a month before the Olympics, He Feng, a reporter on the well-respected newspaper
Southern Weekend
, knew of twenty babies in Hubei province hospitalized with kidney ailments. All had been fed Sanlu baby milk, which, unbeknownst to the babies' parents, had been contaminated with melamine.

Melamine is a chemical that can mimic protein and can be used to disguise the fact that milk has been watered down. It was the same substance that had killed a number of dogs in the United States in 2007 after they had consumed pet food in which melamine had been used to counterfeit rice protein and wheat gluten. The animals had died of kidney failure. The source had been traced back to China.

He Feng was not aware that he was looking at a case of widespread melamine adulteration, but he did know that something serious was going on with the nation's infants. His problem, though, was how to get his story published. In the countdown to the grand Olympics opening ceremony, China's propaganda bureau regarded bad news like this as close to treason. The censors repeatedly spiked his story.

Nor was there much enthusiasm in other parts of the Chinese state to investigate what might turn out to be a negative episode that could reflect badly on the national image. Sanlu had been certified as exempt from any
supervision by China's overstretched health and food inspectors and the state inspectors, nominally the guardians of public safety, were clear that excessive zeal at such a delicate political moment would be unwise. The General Administration for Quality Inspection reported no problems with Sanlu's products; the Health Ministry's disease control center declined to respond to the growing number of reports from doctors across the country of kidney stones in infants; the Food and Drug Administration found nothing that merited intervention.

Sanlu and its majority shareholder, the Hebei provincial government, were aware of the medical reports but were equally clear that a food scare at 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's
main 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 one
of 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 and recycled back to the consumers.

By then, however, the state had found other miscreants to punish. In March 2010, in a court in Beijing, the trial opened of Zhao Lianhai, an advertising executive and father of a Sanlu baby. Zhao was a prominent campaigner for justice for the Sanlu victims and their parents. He had been demanding a level of compensation that would allow parents to pay for the continuing medical treatment their chronically sick children required. His actions had marked him out from the many parents who had been bribed or intimidated into silence. As his trial opened, Zhao had been languishing in detention for five months. Now he was facing charges of “chanting slogans and holding illegal gatherings” as well as “provoking many people to cause trouble,” crimes against the harmony of the People's Republic that carry a five-year prison sentence. The trial closed again after a few hours. After keeping him a further eight months in detention, the court finally handed down its verdict. Mr. Zhao was sentenced to two years in prison for “inciting social disorder.”

SCOTT ANDERSON

“YOU'RE DOING WHAT?” MY GIRLFRIEND OF THE TIME ASKED.

I raised the beer bottle to my lips, took a good pull. “Training.”

“Really? It looks to me like you're just drinking.”

I finished off the bottle, moved it across the table to join the other empties, shook my head. “No. I'm drinking a lot faster than I normally do, and a lot more. That's why it's called training.”

I didn't really expect her to understand; she wasn't a journalist.

Before embarking on a story, a journalist needs to prepare. That might mean reading background information, arranging interviews, whatever. If going to a war zone, it might also mean lining up a fixer, a translator, borrowing a buddy's flak jacket. To get ready for Belfast, which is where I was headed that summer of 1993, my preparations were a good deal simpler, if more physically taxing: to get my beer-drinking abilities up to a level where I could stay even with the Andytown Lads—which was another way of saying to a level that would cause the average person to curl up in a fetal position and wet himself.

I'd first gone to Belfast in 1985 with my brother for part of an oral history we were compiling on different conflict zones around the world. From the outset, there was something about the place that fascinated me. Undoubtedly
part of it was that, being a culture very much like my own, Northern Ireland had none of the confusing exoticism of other war zones. Instead, it was like a little lab school for understanding how armed conflicts can start, how they can be perpetuated, the difficulty in ever bringing them to an end. Plus, it was a place where you had to work at getting hurt. Sure, as a visitor you stood the same random chance as the natives of being in the wrong place when a bomb went off, of being on the same sidewalk where gunmen were performing a drive-by shooting; but Belfast was never Baghdad or Beirut—hell, it was barely Detroit—and it wasn't like anyone was going to deliberately target an American journalist. It was a way to study the inner workings of war with very little risk.

After that first trip to Northern Ireland, I began going back for extended stays—a couple of months at a time, once for nearly four months—whenever my finances would allow. It wasn't altogether clear what I was doing there. I had vague plans to maybe write a book about it one day, perhaps just a long magazine feature piece, but my ongoing lack of productivity, the absence of anything appearing under my byline back in the States that might piss people off, had the pleasant effect of reassuring those who talked to me that I was harmless, innocuous.

One person who appreciated my continued journalistic inaction was a man I will call Seamus. He was in his mid-thirties, a former boxer with fists the size of bear claws, but now a small businessman with a young family. Despite his somewhat intimidating appearance, Seamus was actually a very sweet, funny guy, and we became fast friends, a friendship cemented over copious drinking sessions at out-of-the-way pubs in the Belfast city center. Eventually, Seamus introduced me to his closest mate, another former boxer whom I'll call Harry.

The two had very similar bios. They had grown up together in Andersonstown, a hard-line Catholic ghetto in West Belfast that was one of the principal strongholds of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and both had signed on with the Provos when “The Troubles” started in 1969. In
1972, Seamus and Harry had been swept up in the British government's anti-paramilitary Internment campaign, and had spent the next four years in Long Kesh prison.

Physically, though, the two were very different. Seamus was a short, barrel-chested man with a quick smile and an easy laugh, quite handsome despite his broken nose and rough-hewn face. Harry was leaner, much taller, and wore a constant earnest frown that lent him a slightly befuddled manner, as if he were always straining to follow the conversation. But maybe having only one ear does that to a man, because Harry's most distinguishing feature was that the right side of his head appeared to have been melted away, just a mottled lump of scar tissue indicating where his right ear should have been.