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MARCO: I'm Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. China is in the international spotlight again over the tainted milk scandal. And this time it's because Chinese authorities detained a group of parents whose children became ill after drinking milk products laced with melamine. That's an industrial compound that was added to watered-down milk by a number of Chinese dairy companies including one called Sanlu. Six Chinese children died and hundreds of thousands got sick as a result. The World's Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing. So, Mary Kay, these are the parents of children who, who drank tainted milk. What, what reasons are police giving as to why they were detained?

MARY KAY: Well, the police aren't giving any reasons. They didn't even give any reasons to the people who were detained themselves. Uh, but what was happening was that, uh, about 20 parents wanted to give a news conference today to talk to the press and to basically to call for urgent research into the long-term effects of melamine. They said, "You know, this is a new thing that people are putting this stuff into our food and into our milk, and we want to know what we're going to be dealing with for our kids and for ourselves down the line." There were five people detained, so five of the...

MARCO: And these, these were people who were giving the news conference; these five people?

MARY KAY: Those five people were planning the news conference. They were detained just before midnight local time last night and released, uh, about 24 hours later. But there were some people who still tried to have the news conference and the hotel where they were going to have it did not allow them to have the news conference there. So they actually did meet some journalists out on a footpath, uh, with three police cars watching them as they sort of tearfully told reporters, "Look, this is really important. It's important for us. It's important for everyone because we don't know what's in our food; we don't know what's in our milk."

MARCO: And what did the police, what's the government worried about if, if these parents of these, of these victims, uh, speak out?

MARY KAY: I think they're worried about, uh, a big organization that's very angry about something that happened where they feel the government should've stepped in long before it did. And that the organization could grow and could possibly become an opposition group that was more directly politically opposed to the government.

MARCO: Some dairy farms who sold tainted milk, uh, issued an apology. They issued it via text message though, which seems kind of impersonal. Or is that just the way business is done in parts of high-tech China these days?

MARY KAY: No, it's too little too late and actually quite insulting to families since it comes out at just about the same time as the former Chairperson of Sanlu said yes she did know months in advance of when she informed the government that there were problems with their products.

MARCO: Now, this Chairperson of the Sanlu group pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of producing and selling fake or substandard products. She's expected to be sentenced to life in prison according to one, uh, source in China. It sounds like the Chinese government is willing to take action against companies manufacturing faulty products like milk, but they're not going to tolerate families or individuals kind of being freelance activitists. Is that what we're to kind of draw away from all of this?

MARY KAY: Pretty much. There are 21 people now on trial including the person we're talking about, Tian Wenhua, the former Chairwoman of Sanlu. But this sort of thing has happened before where specific people are singled out to send a signal, but it doesn't seem to send a strong enough signal because companies still do things like this. Uh, there were all kinds of scandals with food safety and toy safety last year. You would've thought by now that they would've cleaned up the Quality Inspection, but it hasn't happened.

MARCO: The World's Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing. Thank you.

MARY KAY: Thank you, Marco.

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