This article does not address what, if any, ethical safeguards were in place at Sanlu that may have prevented the contamination from occurring. The only safeguards utilized were the ad hoc tests ordered that eventually determined melamine to be the cause of the contamination. Proposal

The title of the paper is to be "Sanlu Group: China's Tainted Baby Milk Powder." The paper will discuss the tainted baby powder scandal at Chinese dairy Sanlu, wherein milk was contaminated by melamine, an industrial chemical that causes kidney ailments in humans. Six babies died and thousands were made sick as the result of this contamination. Management at Sanlu was aware of the contamination for months before it was reported, and in that time knowingly sold contaminated milk. This raises questions about the ethical culture at Sanlu and about the competence of the China regulatory system. Government response to the scandal has involved taking to trial those deemed responsible, which culminated in a pair of executions, and tightening regulations on melamine content.

This study is worth conducting because this failure of ethics had serious consequences not only for the company...

China has had a long struggle with tainted food scandals and it is worth studying these scandals to better understand the underlying corporate ethics and government regulatory faults that have lead to these scandals. The major hypothesis to be studied in this research is that the unethical behavior of Sanlu executives was responsible for the scandal and the resulting suffering. This research will be focused strictly on the Sanlu case, not on other cases. The findings of this study can be used in comparison with other cases to build knowledge of trends in Chinese corporate ethics but that is outside of the scope of this paper.
Although there is surely culpability on the part of the Communist Party for the contributions that its policies made to the crisis, this paper will focus mainly on the failures at Sanlu. The company had ethical policies in place, but chose to ignore them in favor of profits, and this was at the heart of the scandal. The other actors involved, including the middlemen and milk suppliers, are also guilty of ethical breaches, but the bulk of the literature is focused on Sanlu so that is where the focus of this paper will lie.