The Melamine Milk Scandal and Its Implication for Food Safety Policy in China

Graduation date: 2015China suffered its biggest food-safety crisis in 2008 when it was discovered that melamine had been illegally added to the milk formula. More than 290,000 children were poisoned and at least six infants were dead. Chinese citizens and the governments around the world gave the Chinese government a lot of pressure to reform food safety fundamentally in China.\ud \ud \ud This paper uses the melamine-contaminated milk scandal as a case study and seeks to answer two primary questions: what caused the milk safety scandal in China; and what is the reform on the food safety system carried out by the Chinese government following the melamine milk scandal of 2008. The information used in this study comes from official government documents, government reports, and media coverage. The milk scandal made the Chinese government take steps to improve the policies and regulations concerning food-safety, including the establishment of a food-safety law, development of its food control management, improvement of food safety inspection, and the revision of food safety standards. Furthermore, the paper applies the theoretical and conceptual insights coming from a social construction theory to help understand China’s policy-planning mechanisms of food-safety policy and the policy prescriptions for establishing an effective food-safety system so that the social construction of Chinese dairy producers will be shifted from negative to positive