The milk scandal and the costs of censorship.

What isn't often understood is how far-reaching the consequences of censorship can be. It isn't just about the freedom of expression. It is about the freedom of information, which, as the recent milk scandal in China showed, can cost lives when withheld. An account of the lessons from the milk scandal:

Just when the Chinese government thought the storm about tainted milk had passed, another one seems to be brewing. It has emerged that eggs sold by four Chinese brands as well as animal feed in farms around the country were found to contain the industrial chemical melamine.

The chemical raises the appearance, but not the actual level, of protein in food products and was earlier found in tainted milk sold by Sanlu, China's biggest dairy company. Subsequently, traces of melamine were found in 22 other brands of dairy products sold in China. Reports differ on the number of infants who fell ill from drinking contaminated milk – foreign news agencies estimate that 1 lakh children have developed kidney stones and four died, while the Chinese Government stopped counting the number of sickened children when the tally topped 70,000.

It has now emerged that the chemical is also being routinely added to animal feeds, raising concerns that melamine is widespread throughout every level of the Chinese food chain, from eggs and milk to meat products. In an effort to raise shattered public confidence, the Chinese government launched massive investigations over the weekend. In Shanghai’s supermarkets, inspectors carried out random tests of eggs, milk and meat.

The government has also promised an overhaul of its food safety regulatory authorities, but it remains to be seen if a reform of China's food safety body alone can provide lasting improvements and prevent similar crises in the future. The unfolding of the milk scandal has raised the much larger question of how a lack of transparency in China's political system and the control of information can limit the effectiveness of regulatory authorities.

Chinese journalists first uncovered the contamination of milk in July, but were pressured to suppress their reports as local authorities were keen to avoid a scandal so close to the Olympics. While it is unclear how high up in the political hierarchy the tainted milk problem was known, it has emerged that at the provincial level at least, authorities were well aware of the crisis at least one month before it was eventually publicized.

A reporter at the Southern Weekly, one of China's few independent publications and the first newspaper to report the milk scandal, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the newspaper has come under “serious pressure” in recent months. The newspaper reported in July that infants had started falling ill in Jiangsu province after consuming tainted milk, but it subsequently faced pressure from the government and stopped running stories about the scandal.

When contacted, Fu Jianfeng, the editor of the publication, declined to talk about the milk scandal. “I cannot say anything about the milk scandal,” he said in a telephone conversation. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.” But Fu had earlier written in his blog, as reported in The New York Times: "As a news editor, I was very concerned. I had realized that this was a huge public disaster, but I could not send out my reporters." In July, another newspaper based in Nanjing reported that 15 sick infants had been taken to the city's children’s hospital over two months. The newspaper did not mention the source of poisoning, but rather cryptically urged readers to keep babies away from children's milk products and "breast-feed their children more." By July, cases of milk poisoning were reported in Beijing, Xian and in the provinces of Anhui and Hubei.

How a looming health disaster was allowed to remain concealed from public attention for more than two months is not only an indictment of China's broken health safety system, but also a reflection of the murky machinations of China's political system. Provincial governments have in particular come under fire for not acting fast enough, with some suspecting they prioritized a scandal-free Olympics over the health of the public. An official from the New Zealand-based dairy company Fonterra, which owns a stake in Sanlu, indicated in an email message that the company had faced certain opposition from Sanlu and local authorities from going public about the tainted milk.

The official said the company kept the scandal quiet for more than a month because they had decided "to work inside the Chinese system". The company's executives were first informed of the problem at an August 2 board meeting, but subsequently delayed reporting the scandal to both Chinese and New Zealand authorities. Fonterra only informed the New Zealand embassy in Beijing after the Olympics had concluded at the end of August. New Zealand officials held a meeting in Wellington on September 5, following which Prime Minister Helen Clark directly advised Beijing to go public on the scandal.

"There are two schools of thought about Fonterra's actions when we first learnt of this in early August," the Fonterra official explained in an email. "One view is that Fonterra should have taken matters into its own hands, been the whistleblower in early August, stepped outside the Chinese system and gone public immediately. We chose to work inside the Chinese system and work with Sanlu management and the local authorities to achieve that. We succeeded – in that we got the bulk of product off the shelves within a matter of weeks."

But in the weeks Fonterra – and Sanlu - withheld the information from the public, tens of thousands of parents across China were buying their melamine-tainted products in supermarkets. It is clear from the official's response that the company faced opposition from Sanlu, and possibly the local government, from whistle-blowing.

While reports emerged last week of further contamination in eggs and animal feeds, the Chinese government can ill-afford another crisis. From toys to pet food, consumer confidence both at home and abroad is at an all-time low. Domestically, the government has received unprecedented criticism in the milk scandal's aftermath, prompting outrage from affected parents and stinging rebukes from thousands of Internet users – even the usually placid State newspapers in recent weeks have been unusually vocal in their criticism of the government's handling of the scandal. The strong reaction prompted a rare admission from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who recently conceded the government's culpability in the crisis - initially, much of the blame had fallen on rural dairy farmers and the dairy companies themselves. Mr. Wen acknowledged the government had been "lax in supervision and management", and promised an overhaul of the country's food safety system.

But it is more than just China's food safety system that has come under scrutiny in the scandal's aftermath. Since the scandal became public, the political machine responded in its usual way, with highly publicized firings and recriminations at the provincial level. The firings also hinted at the often close and opaque relationship between corporate and political China. The Chinese government fired Tian Wenhua, Sanlu's chairwoman. According to Xinhua, China's State news agency, Tian was appointed to her position at Sanlu by the local party apparatus. She was also a member of the local corporation committee of the Communist Party, and was removed from her post after the scandal. The sackings did not stop with Tian, with a further four local Party officials from Hebei province, where Sanlu is based, also removed from their posts.

The head of China's food safety body, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) was also sacked last month. It has emerged that the AQSIQ was aware of contaminated milk as early as June – more than three months before the scandal became public. The New York Times reported that in June, a mother from Hunan province had written a series of letters to AQSIQ. Like some journalists, she noticed an increasing number of infants developing kidney stones. She had also written to Sanlu in May. "Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!" she wrote. "Please investigate whether the formula does have problems, or more babies will get sick." Her pleas were ignored by the food safety body.

It is impossible to know how many would have been spared from drinking the contaminated milk had the warnings of a mother in Hunan been heeded or local media reports not been censored in July. But any possibility of that was prevented by the government's issuance of a 21-point directive to the media in the months preceding the Olympics. The eighth point of the directive read: "All food safety issues, such as cancer-causing mineral water, is off-limits." The milk scandal was eventually only made public by the Chinese government on September 15, when the AQSIQ first warned the public that milk powder produced by Sanlu was tainted. But by then, the damage was done. Now, with the latest revelations that food staples from eggs to meat may also be contaminated, the Chinese Government faces a delicate balancing act between trying to restore damaged public confidence in its food safety system, while also trying to limit the fallout from a quickly widening crisis.