Deadly milk shows China's rules of political survival

By Chris Buckley - Analysis

BEIJING (Reuters) - "We worked real hard for half a year, now we're suddenly back to before the Games were here," goes the translation of a rhyme doing the rounds in China.

And so it is.

Mass poisonings from toxic milk powder, official claims of a cover-up, and other deadly incidents involving official mendacity have shown the stagecraft of the Beijing Olympics did not much alter the backstage workings of China's one-Party state.

Premier Wen Jiabao has vowed an overhaul of food safety after some 13,000 children crowded into hospitals, ill from an industrial chemical in the milk. Four have died.

Managers have already been arrested, officials dumped.

Yet after similar scandals, similar sackings and arrests, and similar vows last year, many Chinese are reluctant to invest high hopes that such worries will soon be behind them.

"Consumers have been given one chemistry class after another by the food industry," wrote a commentator in the latest issue of the Chinese magazine Southern Breeze, listing past scares over rice, eggs and seafood.

"Although after the fact the government applies its fire-fighting style to resolving them, over time the public has easily evolved into treating government action as a game."

That game often involves central leaders pleading ignorance and punishing local and junior officials blamed for hiding or underplaying problems. The milk scare has been no different.

But a closer look at how the contamination bloomed into a national crisis suggests the problems run deeper in a political system that has before also treated health threats as, foremost, political and economic threats.

"Many central policies and rules are hijacked by officials at the local level, but the center has so many different demands that local officials do this to survive," said Zhou Shifeng, a Beijing lawyer who has volunteered to help milk powder victims.

"Local officials are where problems emerge, but they're not the only problem."

A POLITICAL EXCUSE

In China, even when alarming information amasses, official warning bells can be muffled by other priorities.

Parents began reporting outbreaks of kidney stones in babies months before the scandal became public, health and quality control officials have said.