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Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China pp 73–108Cite as

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Feeding Fears: News Coverage of the Infant Formula Scandal and Health Risk Communication

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Abstract

Chapter 4 examines news representations of food safety incidents as another major area of parental concern. It draws on theoretical perspectives from the concept of risk and the theory of social amplification of risk to analyse news representation of the 2008 infant formula scandal, and examines the roles of the news media in shaping parental risk experiences and related anxieties. It investigates news coverage of the food scare in three popular local newspapers in Chengdu. It analyses how food safety risks are constructed by the these newspapers in relation to their intensity, severity and solution; how expert opinion based on scientific knowledge has been represented in the news; how parents and grandparents make sense of the news coverage based on their specific cultural views; and finally whether such news coverage has resulted in aggravated parental experiences of anxiety.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is consistent with the risk experience of my focus group participants most of whom did not have direct personal experience with the health risks posed by the contaminated infant formula.

  2. 2.

    The researchers (Frewer et al. 2002, pp. 701, 703) acknowledge that the collection of the attitude data before and after the media attention are ‘fortuitous, rather than by design’ because it is difficult to predict ‘when conditions likely to result in amplification effects will occur’, which means that ‘it is difficult to examine changes in risk perception that are contemporaneous with increases and/or decreases in social or media discussion of the risks associated with a particular risk event’.

  3. 3.

    The same research also shows that social media such as microblogging and online information are the least trusted overall, although groups within the research sample with higher education and income levels have reported greater trust of these sources (Veeck et al. 2015). These findings suggest that urban Chinese consumers live in a multi-media environment in which they make sense of various media messages based on their varied socio-economic backgrounds.

  4. 4.

    One of the questions asked in the focus group discussion is whether parents (or grandparents) have read/watched news about the infant formula scandal and what they make of it.

  5. 5.

    The search criterion was for ‘melamine’ or ‘naifen’ to appear anywhere in the news report. Infant formula is commonly referred to as milk powder (naifen) in Chinese.

  6. 6.

    Jian Guangzhou, the investigative journalist hailed as a national hero, resigned from his job in 2012 (Zhang 2012).

  7. 7.

    The level of melamine in contaminated infant formula produced by Sanlu was reported to be as high as 2,560 mg/kg body weight compared with the 0.5 mg/kg maximum tolerable daily intake (TDI) recommended by the European Food Safety Authority (2010; People’s Net 2008).

  8. 8.

    Fuyang infant formula was not actually ‘toxic’ as it involved low-nutritional level milk powder. The milk powder with few nutritional elements caused ‘big-head diseases’—‘symptom of acute malnutrition describing the lack of flesh on the torso and limbs, which appear to shrink in comparison with the cranium’—among babies, and resulted in 50 fatalities in Fuyang city in China in 2004. This baby food safety episode was widely referred to as the Fuyang ‘toxic’ infant formula incident (Watts 2004).

  9. 9.

    Some companies in foreign ownership produce infant formula in China. For example Dumex, Danone’s baby nutrition brand operating in East Asia, has its production plants in Shanghai.

  10. 10.

    I will take up this point in more detail in Chapter 5.

  11. 11.

    Wenchuan is a mountainous county about 150 km from Chengdu.

  12. 12.

    Mid-market foreign infant formula products are usually sold at ¥200–300 (£20–30) a tub (800–900 g) which is a week’s supply for a baby who exclusively bottle-feeds. That makes monthly expenses on infant formula reaching ¥900–1,350 for the parents, many of whom make ¥2,000–3,000 per month. Domestic infant formula products are usually sold at ¥70–200 a tub (900 g). Gottschang’s (2000, p. 180) earlier study in Beijing also found that parents spent around 18% of their monthly income on imported infant formula.

  13. 13.

    Parents and grandparents also use lay methods such as ‘rules of thumb’—smell, taste and texture—to determine the safety of baby food (Gong and Jackson 2012).

  14. 14.

    The supplementary newspaper Western China Metropolis Daily analysed in this study has been found mixing official discourse and popular sentiments in its reporting. See further analysis of the Western China Metropolis Daily in Gong (2015, p. 257).

  15. 15.

    The green channel was only applicable to children under the age of 3.

  16. 16.

    Lay methods were introduced or recommended in only five news articles in my sample.

  17. 17.

    I will take up this point with great detail in Chapter 6 when I discuss how parents synthesise a range of healthcare information from a range of media sources.

  18. 18.

    The demonstration farms are specifically built to receive visitors including inspection officials, journalists and consumers. Figures 4.3 and 4.4 show a demonstration dairy farm near Chengdu that I visited in 2011.

  19. 19.

    The development of modern (Western) science in China can be traced back to the late Qing dynasty (Elman 2014). Here I focus on the ‘scientific development’ in the official discourse of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. The national strategy of ‘scientific development’ accelerated with the assistance of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. It stagnated in the 1960s and 1970s due to the withdrawal of Soviet experts and the Cultural Revolution, but continued throughout the late 1970s until the beginning of 2000 (Gong and Jackson 2013, p. 304).

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  1. University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Qian Gong

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Gong, Q. (2016). Feeding Fears: News Coverage of the Infant Formula Scandal and Health Risk Communication. In: Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49877-9_4

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