Confronting standards-making in food safety: Standards recalibration and regulatory reforms in China’s dairy industry

Abstract

In 2012, the Beijing First Intermediate Court’s ruling reignited public controversy over a 2010 revision of China’s national raw milk standard. A consumer rights activist filed an open information application, requesting that China’s Ministry of Health disclose meeting minutes related to the revision. His request hinged on public perception that China’s dairy corporations helped lower quality and safety thresholds for domestic raw milk supplies, while the country still reeled from the 2008 melamine scandal. The case re-emerged as Chinese policymakers, seeking to strengthen and respond to domestic and international food safety concerns, crafted and revised standards and restructured government agencies to address shortcomings in the 2009 Food Safety Law. As the case unfolded, China was flexing its international power in standards-setting despite criticism of its domestic standards regime. Grounded in fieldwork conducted during this period, I trace the intersection and dissonance between standards, regulations, and best practices crafted by government institutions and private sector actors alongside their recalibration in practice. I use the 2010 revision debate to explore the efforts of scientific experts and government officials to convey the standard to different actors, not as acts of translation but rather as acts of transformation, as regulations and regulatory practices move across disparate sites and media.

Chinese standards from the ground up

“…They are co-created in and beyond administrative offices. 39 Early observers, such as Scott Kennedy, described standardization in China in precisely those terms: as a collaborative endeavour. 40 Kennedy records the efforts of Chinese experts to develop standards for home networking in the 2000s.…”

“…46 Furthermore, standards are mutable, before and after their promulgation and publication, as Megan Tracy shows in her insightful analysis of the contention over the raw milk standard in China. 47 Standards are made and interpreted by a wide range of actors, from industry representatives to activists and journalists to consumers. Tracy uses the concept of transductionthe conversion of signals from one medium to anotherto describe the recalibration of standards across scales and media.…”