China's Communist regime has seen off every challenge it has faced over the past six decades. It survived a faceoff with its Soviet big brother in the 1960s. It crushed an uprising by its own people at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It brushed off the Western leaders who called for a transition to democracy. Wouldn't it be delicious if, after all that, it succumbed to an unorganized horde of fretful Western shoppers? The crisis that faces China's leaders after the "Made in China" scandal is, in its way, more dangerous than any strictly political challenge. Their claim to legitimacy rests almost entirely in their remarkable success at delivering unprecedented prosperity to the Chinese people. That feat, in turn, relies heavily on the export of cheap consumer goods to the shopping malls of Fresno, Calgary, Birmingham and Frankfurt.

What if shoppers stopped buying those goods? Where would Beijing be then? China's authoritarian system is so brittle that any interruption in its pell-mell economic progress would put it in grave peril. A recession set off by a boycott of dubious Chinese goods in foreign countries could unleash the pent-up resentment of Chinese citizens that has simmered ever since Tiananmen. A revolution set off by tainted cat food and toxic toys - now that would be one for the history books.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But don't underestimate the power of the consumer in a globalized world. As the American author Nathan Gardels wrote in the Los Angeles Times this month, shoppers don't have to organize mass protests to make their power felt. They just need to stop spending.

What he called their "bargaining agents" - huge retailers such as Wal-Mart and Toys 'R' Us that buy billions of dollars of goods from Chinese suppliers - hold far more leverage over the regime in Beijing than Amnesty International ever has. A recent poll showed that two-thirds of American consumers would consider boycotting Chinese products until authorities brought in stricter safety standards.

Of course, China's leaders have vowed to do just that. But their promises are worthless unless they put a working democratic system in place. Edicts from on high carry little weight in a sprawling country where provincial party bosses are often a law unto themselves and where officials collude with factory managers to keep profits flowing and regulators at bay.

The best Beijing can do is chop off a few heads, as it did when it executed the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, for approving counterfeit medicines and accepting bribes from drug companies. Such feudal methods seldom work. China has been executing wayward officials for decades, rounding them up in countless drives to wipe out corruption "once and for all."

The corruption continues, growing like kudzu in the sunless thickets of a one-party state. It's not just a few bad apples that cause the problem. Corruption is an inevitable product of the system. And the inevitable response of the system is to cover it up.

As long ago as 2001, factory worker Zhou Huanxi was imprisoned for extortion when she blew the whistle on her company for using fake ingredients in vitamins and herbs for pregnant women. In a similar case last year, drug researcher Zhang Zhijian was jailed and accused of sabotaging his company for the "crime" of posting an essay on the Internet that exposed crooked links between a pharmaceutical company and government regulators. The allegation turned out to be true and it led directly to the execution of the regulator, Mr. Zheng.

Dickens helped expose the poverty and injustice that were the blights of Victorian England. The muckrackers of the U.S. Progressive Era helped bring about sweeping social reform. Zhang Zhijian went to jail. He has yet to receive a single word of apology from the government.

In an interconnected world, Beijing's cult of secrecy is not a problem for China alone. It's a problem for all of us. Beijing may have caused the international health crisis over severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, when it covered up the first outbreak of the disease, giving it time to spread. Its tardy response to avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease raised the threat that those diseases would spread, too. Now its head-in-the-sand reaction to the faulty products scandal is blackening its international reputation, threatening to damage its economy and endangering consumers around the world.

What China needs is glaringly obvious: accountability and transparency. That means a free media that can root out the graft and corner-cutting that lead to things like lead-painted toys and poisonous toothpaste. It means independent courts that can bring the perpetrators to book without worrying about the displeasure of their high-placed friends. It means a representative government that voters can throw out of office if it fails to keep disasters like tainted food and toxic medicine from happening.

In short, it means democracy.