A while back, China had been making headlines all over the world with its string of internet-related scandals. One recent one refers to a Chinese milk company called Sanlu that bribed China’s largest search engine (Baidu) to censor any negative information about their milk…. Twice.

Sanlu offered to buy $640,000 worth of advertising in exchange for the mass cover-up of their most recent foible; thousands of infants hospitalized, four deaths, and recurrent kidney illness, after consuming Sanlu’s milk. Sanlu attempted to make up for lost profits by “enhancing” the milk with melamine, rather than actually adding in satisfactory amounts of protein. Melamine is NOT a replacement for protein, and is actually found in plastics and is flame retardant.

Sanlu has since stopped producing this tainted pseudo-milk, but not before offering up the bribe to Baidu to delete and censor any information on the scandal. These kind of things need to be told, and not just shoved under the table and forgotten. Even with Baidu’s censoring, an anonymous proxy could break through the bureaucracy and expose the issue. Sanlu exhibited terrible business ethics by watering down their product just to make a quick buck, and even worse for substituting a substance found in household products in a solution served to infants. On top of this, the melamine was not even top grade! They used the cheapest stuff they could find! Often, low-grade melamine contains ammonia, a noxious substance used to awaken medical patients slipping into unconsciousness.

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