China is facing a product-quality scandal once again, another in a seemingly endless string ― though right now the blind dissident’s great escape last week and the Bo Xilai family cataclysm are smothering all news of it.

Still, the new scandal and the Bo case derive from a single cultural cause.

A few days ago, the state announced that it has detained 54 suspects, shut down 80 “illegal production lines” and seized 77 million gelatin capsules used for prescription drugs, all of them heavily contaminated with chromium, a carcinogen. The public security ministry added that it is “paying top-level attention to the case of excess chromium in capsules for medical use.”

How did this happen? For several years, the government has been pushing health-care companies to lower costs. So pharmaceutical manufacturers picked up a new strategy: They began using far cheaper industrial gelatin, normally used to make glue for shoes.

This comes barely a year after China’s “leather milk” scandal. Chinese dairies, trying to make more money, diluted their milk with water. But then, they knew, the watery milk would not pass protein-content tests. So the dairies bought leather-waste byproducts from tanneries ― high in protein but also carcinogenic ― and dumped that into the milk.

Looking at these and so many other similar cases ― like the milk spiked with chemicals that caused infants still in the crib to begin growing breasts ― you might choose to accept a charitable explanation.

The United States didn’t create the Consumer Product Safety Commission until 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency until 1970. The Food and Drug Administration is older, 1906, and came to be only after muckraking journalists pointed out widespread patent-medicine fraud.

“Gullible America” will “swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud,” Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote in Collier’s magazine in 1905. By then, of course, America was more than 125 years old.

China is an ancient nation, but it has grown to be an industrial power in only one generation. And it hasn’t yet set up an effective regulatory structure to police its manufacturers.

That certainly plays a part. But there’s another, institutional problem:

China is a nation of cheaters!

No, it’s not my intention to besmirch 1.35 billion Chinese. Certainly, many do try to be honest ― even if it puts them at a disadvantage. But the state holds so many selfish, deceitful people that they have given the entire country an ugly reputation.

For example, a Chinese social-networking site’s recent survey of college students found extensive cheating among those applying to American colleges. At least 70 percent of application essays are ghostwritten, the survey found. Transcripts are falsified. Better-educated substitutes are hired to take Scholastic Aptitude and English-language tests.

Many Chinese newspapers and magazines, the New York Times recently reported, hand out rate cards to anyone who wants to purchase a faked, flattering published profile. And not long ago, a cheating school-bus driver crammed 64 kindergarten children into a nine-seat van and then crashed head-on into a truck. Nineteen children died.

Accidents like this are commonplace. In fact, China has more fatal road accidents than any other nation, even though automobile ownership per capita, while growing fast, remains low ― on a par with Sri Lanka. The trouble is, people often buy cars before learning how to drive.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, published a despairing piece about needless Chinese deaths on the roads. It notes that government figures on traffic deaths grossly underestimate the problem ― admitting to less than half the accidents ― and concludes that “until the Chinese government is honest with its people, and with itself,” the problem won’t be solved.

How does all this dishonesty, this cheating, relate to Bo Xilai, his wife the accused murderer and their profligate son? Bo, it has been disclosed, is worth at least $160 million ― though his government salary is $19,000. Corruption, a form of cheating, is a certainty.

But then Hurun Report, which chronicles the lives and foibles of China’s wealthy, reported that the Chinese legislature’s 70 richest members are together worth $89.8 billion ― 12 times more than for the U.S. president, Cabinet secretaries and all 535 members of Congress.

Millions of ordinary Chinese are fed up. “I have no choice but to buy foreign brands,” Liu Shou, a mother concerned about her child’s milk, told Reuters last month. “I don’t trust them.”

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)