Why China needs its own progressive Era: recalls of Chinese products echo America's economic growing pains a century ago when reforms were enacted to put capitalism on a better path. Will China do the same today?

• Author: Kahn, Joseph
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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Poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients. Filthy shellfish. Contaminated pet food. Toys tainted with lead paint. Faulty tires.

A long list of recent Chinese product recalls--and an angry outcry from countries that import Chinese goods--has exposed the dark side of China's booming economy. Last year, China exported $1 trillion worth of goods, nearly a third of which went to the United States, where consumers have grown accustomed to buying a wide range of inexpensive Chinese products.

With China's government embarrassed by the recalls and the nation's export-driven economy potentially at risk, the question is whether China can fix the problem before consumers take their business elsewhere.

For a model of how to tackle the problem, some experts say, China should look to another country that went through similar economic growing pains a century ago: the United States.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. had its own series of product-safety scandals: Phony fertilizer destroyed crops. Stores sold deodorized rotten eggs and chemical glucose that was passed off as honey. Exports slumped when European regulators found dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.

By the turn of the 20th century, investigative journalists like Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis--known as "muckrakers"--had exposed so many of these unsafe products and working conditions in the U.S. that the government was forced to act. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the law that created the Food and Drug Administration. Antitrust laws were passed to limit the power of big business and break up monopolies.

So many reforms were enacted that the period became known as the Progressive Era.

Like America's industrializing economy a century ago, China's economy today is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act as much like pirates as businessmen. And like in 19th-century America, Chinese regulators today are too inept, corrupt, or lacking the necessary authority to do much about the epidemic of unsafe products.

Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia, says China is like a younger version of the U.S. "China's fast-and-loose brand of commerce is not an expression of national character, much less a conspiracy to poison us and our pets," he says, "but a phase in the country's development."

"Call it adolescent capitalism, if you will: bursting with energy, exuberant, dynamic," Mihm says. "Like any teenager, China's behavior is also maddening...