Last week I called a university professor in Beijing whom I have known for several years. I told him that every day seemed to bring more news of another perilous Chinese good -- pet food, toys, toothpaste, fish -- and I wondered what he thought. He sounded vaguely amused that I was calling from New York to inform him of faulty Chinese products. Here in China, he said, this isn't news.
What is news is that China's integration into the world economy means its chemicals can claim the lives of dozens of Panamanians, and its toxic pet food can kill American dogs. China's trade partners have every right to be alarmed. But at the end of the day, the greatest victims are the Chinese themselves. And for them, deadly products are not news. Remember 2004, to give just one example, when bad formula killed at least a dozen infants and sickened many others?
This recent flood of international attention has given a jolt to the Chinese government. Beijing may slam down a few highly publicized punishments, such as Tuesday's execution of the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration. A stain on the country's export record and increasingly agitated Chinese consumers are hardly in the best interests of the Communist Party. But actions from the top down will not solve this problem, because the problem goes much deeper than Beijing. There still remains that uneasy question lurking in the shadows of China's rapid growth: Why would so many people be willing to cut corners to make an extra dollar, even at the cost of human lives?
What's most frightening about this anything-for-a-profit attitude, which one former diplomat described to me as the national ideology of China, are the far-reaching consequences. Accidents in the country's infamous coal mines, for instance, took thousands of lives last year. "Market demand for coal is at such a height that some mines only blindly pursue profits and push production beyond limits," a spokesperson for the State Work Safety Supervision Administration explained to Reuters earlier this year. Then there was the disaster in Henan province in the 1990s, when companies' pursuit of plasma for medicine led to many poor farmers -- often goaded by local officials -- contracting the AIDS virus through selling their blood at unsanitary stations.
Some Chinese will protest that the current wave of panic -- which came to a head with restrictions by America's FDA on several kinds of Chinese seafood -- is overblown, and that the majority of Chinese goods are perfectly safe. But others don't want to live in an environment where brushing your teeth can be a death-defying act. After it came out that certain brands of Chinese toothpaste were contaminated with cheap substitute diethylene glycol, it wasn't hard to find cries of indignation on one major Chinese-language Web site, translated here:
"There are too many fake Chinese goods. Anything for a profit, that's today's China!" "In this kind of society it's every man for himself." "Are Chinese people's lives not worth money???" Some of the concerns were more practical: "Can't use this, can't use that. What is one going to use to brush his teeth? Laundry powder or shampoo???"
There seems to be widespread agreement among ordinary Chinese and Western businessmen that on the mainland, ethical considerations often get lost in the race to get rich. Some would argue that this "ethical vacuum" is simply an aspect of China's stage of development: Some wealthy people can afford to be ethical, the theory goes, the others just want to grab a piece of the pie.
Xiaobo Lu, a political science professor at Columbia University, says that once the institutions are in place, the Chinese will gradually form certain "ethical rules of the game." "Right now, it is everything goes -- precisely because, yes, everything goes -- no good credit checking system, no well-placed fear of violating good norms, one can get away with cheating, et cetera," Mr. Lu explains. Or perhaps the profit-above-all ideology is just a factor of the current business environment: When competition is fierce and margins are razor thin, every extra dollar does count.
While some will say that this same kind of unethical behavior was rampant in the U.S. roughly a century ago, there are elements here that are particular to China. One commonly heard theory is that the Chinese have nothing to believe in: The communists destroyed traditional values and beliefs, leaving nothing sustainable in their place. Now that many Chinese have lost faith in communist ideology, getting rich has, in a sense, become the national religion.
The chaos of communist rule over the past decades -- from famines to purges to neighbors informing on one another -- has also likely contributed to the blurring of moral distinctions. "The Cultural Revolution created an enormous dent in morality. Society [was] in confusion for a long time. Couple that with the madness of trying to get rich -- you put these things together and you end up getting contaminated toothpaste and pet food," says Peter Humphrey, longtime China hand and founder of risk-management consultancy ChinaWhys.
What is clear from all these safety scandals is that something is seriously wrong, and Beijing's doling out punishments is not going to fix it. Even assuming that the central government has good intentions, it might still be powerless to rein in shady local officials or individual businesses. The larger problem is that in a country without a real rule of law, where everything is subject to Communist Party "interpretation," there is no codified set of ethics to guide national behavior.
A political system without popular elections or an effective system of checks and balances has helped create a culture in which the Chinese are not accountable to each other. William McCahill, a 25-year Foreign Service veteran who is now managing partner of JL McGregor and Company, a China-focused research and advisory group, explains: "There is no sense of social solidarity that would tell you: I put this stuff in and maybe children are going to die."
The good news is that as the ranks of China's middle class continue to swell, consumers will become increasingly demanding. According to the National Consumers' Association, in 2006 total complaints were 702,350, up from 8,041 in 1985, when the association was established. The association attributes this increase in part to the advent of the Internet and the impact of China's Consumer Protection Act. Positive changes could come from the outside too: China's role as an export power will mean that its goods are accountable to the American consumer as well.
Increased consumer activism is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough to guarantee safer products. The moral of this story is that Chinese businesses do not operate outside of their larger political culture. Until China addresses the root causes of these widespread unethical practices, the lives of its people -- and those of its trading partners -- will remain at risk.
Ms. Parker is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
