The toxic milk scandal in China could never have happened under Mao Zedong (毛澤東) or Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as dairy products only landed on Chinese dinner tables when the nation began opening up to the outside world.
Westerners visiting China 20 or 30 years ago were hard pressed to find dairy products, and were only able to drink yogurt out of a straw from a stone pot carved with Chinese characters, still available in the country.
But in the past few years, supermarket shelves have filled up with powdered or traditional milk, yogurts and milk drinks, in countless cartons and cans, along with all sorts of flavors.
The average Chinese person, who drank 1.2kg of milk a year in 1980 when Deng — the architect of China’s reforms — was in power, guzzled 26.7kg last year, the national bureau of statistics said.
This, however, is still 10 times less than what people in developed countries consume.
“Milk has certainly substituted some of the traditional drinks, such as porridge, soybean milk and noodle soup,” said You Xiuzhen, a retired woman shopping at the Wonderful Supermarket in Beijing.
In the early 1980s, Chinese people in big cities were the first to begin buying dairy products, and purchasing a liter of milk was almost a sign of wealth or extravagance.
Then followed an aggressive marketing drive from big milk brands, including the three market leaders involved in the contamination scandal, featuring young sports or film stars looking radiantly healthy from drinking milk.
“Thirty years ago, adults would not drink milk because we did not have the extra money for something that was not deemed necessary,” said Li Jinxia, another retired woman in Beijing. “We now drink it because it is convenient and, as the ads say, it can supplement calcium and protein and is easily digested.”
Despite a widespread lactose intolerance in China, milk sales increased by 128 percent over the past five years, and those of powdered baby milk rose 185 percent, Euromonitor International said.
“The fastest growth was during 2002 and 2004, with annual growth of more than 20 percent,” said Yang Fan, an economist at the market research company, in Shanghai.
“The dairy industry has been growing unusually fast in China with government support — China’s growth model is unique,” he said.
In 2006, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) declared: “I have a dream that every Chinese, first of all children, can afford to drink 1kg of milk every day.”
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