Why Chinese Babies are Dying

We blame bad regs for China's melamine myopia. This isn't the problem. China lags centuries behind the West when it comes to corporate governance.

With Wall Street in full melt down, it's easy to forget that most American companies are governed pretty well -- meaning, they, by and large, don't poison their customers. Why? Because 400 years of corporation law in the West have made transparency and good governance mandatory, punishable by fine and imprisonment.

Capitalism is 25 years old in China. Most Chinese companies are totally opaque, and engineers are often penalized for stopping the assembly line if there's a quality control problem.

Better regs can't fix this. Only acculturation can.

Comments

[outnow]

Mr. Haft,

You should stick to your area of expertise which is not consumer protection. The tort law is what protects consumers from greedy corporations. Tort law is what China lacks.

Silent tort reform is what Bush did to de-fange the regulators. You are witnessing our own economy melting down due to de-regulation. The Consumer Product Safety Commission would have banned all dangerous materials from China and the imposition of punitive damages against these criminals deters such conduct as no criminal law or regulator could.

Most safety measures in automobiles were taken as a result of lawsuits. Safety belts, long avoided by the wonderful corporations were finally adopted despite government regulators and the criminal law.

Law school is a good background for those interested in consumer protection rather that a knee-jerk corporations will solve all consumer problems response. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco, asbestos, rear-mounted gas tanks, padded dash boards, telescopic steering wheels were areas that the criminal law and governmental regulation failed completely.

The earthquakes casualties in China would never have happened if the engineers and contractors knew that they could be bankrupted by lawsuits. Plus the VICTIMS would be compensated monetarily. The Union Carbine disaster in Bopal. India was another example of this, Corporate greed solves nothing. The government is bought off with the profits from the greed. Trust the jury, not the recipients of campaign contributions or bribes.

[SamEllison]

Babies are dying in China because of one word; greed.

[hopeless277]

It seems to me that the USA is going the way of China faster than China is going the way of the USA. You don't really think all that censorship software on China's servers is going to stay THERE, do you???