If you think our politicians and businessmen are nervous about taking the blame for the financial catastrophe, imagine what’s going through the minds of the poobahs in Peking as the poisoned baby formula story unfolds. (Here’s a Q&A about the story.) It’s one thing to be caught putting industrial chemicals into pet food exported to foreigners, but killing babies — and not just babies, but Chinese babies– that’s not the kind of thing you can scare people into shutting up about. What’s the government going to threaten people with — killing their children? So far, a mayor and other lesser officials have been fired and the general manager of the company has been arrested — you know he’s going to be executed, and good riddance, but could this lead to a broader challenge to the State?

On the one hand, this kind of thing is what happens in early stages of industrialization and urbanization — The Jungle and all that. But there’s two differences — with modern technology, everyone knows about everything right away, even in remote villages, and people can easily communicate and organize. Maybe more important, when Britain and the United States were undergoing modernization, there wasn’t anywhere to compare to because we were the first places to undergo such changes. Now, ordinary Chinese can say, “This doesn’t happen in America or Europe or Japan, at least not on this scale,” and I can imagine the public outrage being deep enough and wide enough and persistent enough that you could see this fiasco actually leading to more transparency in the political system. Maybe this is wishful thinking, but it could be that the deaths of those babies (and more to come, no doubt) will help move China toward greater democracy.