It’s been a rough few weeks for the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. On July 15, Changchun Changsheng, a Chinese drug manufacturer, was told to stop production of a rabies vaccine. Then news broke that the same company had produced 250,000 bad doses of vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus followed by news that regulators had identified inconsistencies in company records as early as 2017 and failed to act.
Yesterday, the problem became international as AP reported that defective vaccines had also been exported.
Needless to say, reminders such as that included in a viral WeChat article, now censored, that “these vaccines they produced are being injected into you and your kids everyday,” galvanized public outrage.
Clearly, Beijing recognizes the potential for instability stemming from the incident. The regime quickly responded by both cracking down on the spread of information and with calls for severe punishment for the individuals involved. They seem to be signaling and intent to make good on this promise as police reported that they were looking to arrest several Changsheng executives.
Officials also rushed to assure those within their jurisdictions that the vaccines had not been used or had since been discontinued.
Even the China Daily and the Global Times, both run by the state, called on the Chinese government to take action. The Global Times went so far as to acknowledge that lack of transparency about the facts of the case had prompted many to agree with “public outrage over vaccine manufactures and suspicion toward the nation’s supervision department.” The editorial added that “supervising and regulating the safe production of vaccines can be argued as a test of a modern country’s governance.”
Yet, pledges from the government and calls for increased transparency are unlikely to reassure Chinese citizens. Indeed, this is the fifth vaccine scandal to plague China’s pharmaceutical industry since 2010, including an incident in fall 2017 that revealed that a different company, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, had produced 400,000 substandard vaccine doses.
Such incidents erode public trust and support of Xi Jinping’s government, which is constantly worried about being turned out of power by mass demonstrations or political mobilizations. The biggest such scandal, whose implications continue to redound until this day, came in 2008, when fertilizer in powered milk sickened hundreds of thousands of Chinese infants and killed six. As a result, Chinese consumers still don’t trust domestic milk production, despite heavy government regulation.
That scandal permanently undermined China’s baby formula industry, to the point that a million tons of foreign powdered milk are imported into China each year, a significant amount smuggled by Chinese travelers who fill up suitcases while abroad.
Since the era of reform and opening up beginning in the late 1970s, the authority of the ruling Chinese Communist Party has rested not on any ideological commitment (which it largely abandoned), but on its ability to maintain a stable and growing economy while avoiding massive loss of the public’s trust. Scandals, especially those that potentially harm a family’s only child, are especially dangerous.
For all of the international focus on Beijing’s ambitions abroad, the recent pharmaceutical scandals and the outrage they produced show that China has a lot of work to do at home. Unless Beijing can address these domestic issues, the Communist Party will face growing difficulty at home, and that will impede its goals abroad.
After all, no matter how much empire-building abroad solidifies China as a world power, it does not reassure parents of their children’s safety or garner domestic trust in President Xi Jinping’s regime.
