"Quality and safety are the founda-tions of social harmony," proclaim posters at the headquarters of the Sanlu Group in Shijiazhuang, capital of China's northern province of Hebei. Sanlu was until recently one of China's biggest producers of milk powder. Now, dozens of people, many clutching infants, queue in the hot sun outside to return powder that could be contaminated with a potentially lethal chemical. The harmony of China's consumers has rarely been so tested.rnThe safety scandal engulfing not only Sanlu, fingered as the main culprit, but much of China's dairy industry, is an embarrassment to China's leaders. In July last year, after widespread complaints at home and abroad about tainted Chinese-made food and medicine, the authorities executed a former head of the country's food-and-drug safety agency for taking bribes. This year, to improve monitoring, the agency was put under the Ministry of Health. The sale of tainted milk powder, which has so far made more than 6,000 infants ill and killed four, shows controls remain dangerously slack.
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