THIS year began with a number of exposes about food quality scandals.

It was reported last week that various brands of peanut cooking oil made in the southern province of Guangdong were found to contain excessive levels of flavacin M1, a strong carcinogen particularly harmful to the human liver and kidneys.

What's more, some brands of oil were revealed to be mixed with contaminated oil and industrial flavors.

This revelation came hard on the heels of the scandal that hit Mengniu, a leading dairy producer, toward the end of last year.

The nation's quality watchdog had discovered that a batch of the company's milk products contained 140 times as much flavacin M1 as allowed under the safety standards.

When grilled about why it failed to prevent flavacin M1 from getting into its milk during nominally strict internal quality inspection, Mengniu blamed the scandal squarely on farmers who provide the raw milk, saying they raised their cows with rotted hay.

Thus, the company wasn't the chief culprit.

The fact that the dairy maker ignored its due responsibility for the quality of its finished product demonstrates demonstrates a breathtaking lack of corporate ethics - more than lectures are needed to bring the message home.

In a recent visit to Hunan Province, Premier Wen Jiabao talked about the high-speed train collision that claimed 39 lives on July 23 last year. He attributed the tragedy to a combination of lapses, the most important being the lack of attention to safety and quality.

"A product's quality reflects the ethics of its manufacturer," Wen said, adding that the drive for perfection and an impeccable sense of responsibility are central to ethics.

It's not the first time the premier has admonished the business community on morality. Barely a year ago, he spoke about the need for businesses to thicken their "moral blood."

At that time, the public zeroed in on greedy property developers for their thin "moral blood."

One year on, astronomical home prices were finally brought down a bit, but on the whole it appears that the moral blood running through the veins of some companies remains as thin as ever.

To his chagrin, the premier may talk the talk of enhancing ethics, and mean it, but his audience routinely talks the same talk, while walking the walk of maintaining unscrupulous business practices.

This prompts the question: Are his pleas too little, too late for a country that seems to be irreversibly descending into a moral abyss?

In many respects, the premier's words may have been futile in stoking soul-searching on the part of firms obsessed with quick profits, judging by the frequency of quality scandals.

But it's still worth reminding them from time to time of the traditional Chinese emphasis on moderating the pursuit of profits and not placing them above the greater social good.

Modern-day Chinese businessmen often boast that they are heirs of that spiritual legacy, and some even call themselves "Confucian businessmen," but talk is cheap.

What we see instead is that some hardly live up to their claim of being model corporate citizens; worse, we increasingly see a worrying tendency to negate that honesty and integrity that could impede business calculations.

Blatant questions like "how much does a jin (500 grams) of conscience cost" represent moral nihilism at its worst.

Such talk would make their ancestors turn in their graves. In ancient China, craftsmen and Confucian scholars alike believed that before they hastily built something or wrote essays, they first had to find inner peace and focus their mind.

Only those with a pure mind at work can produce durable works that last for centuries.

Moreover, our ancestors were convinced that there is life in even a "lifeless" object.

As such, every product must be treated with great care when it is created, something unthinkable in modern corporate world.

What now comes to be known as "quality supervision" is often a travesty of the great importance ancient Chinese attached to this process. Examples abound. Take the large stone blocks used to build the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) Great Wall and the Palace Museum.

Individual signature

Throughout the procedures, from being fired in kilns to being transported, and then piled on one another, every block had a craftsman assigned to take responsibility for its quality. And there is the engineering and chemical wonder of gluing or "cementing" together these blocks with lime and glutinous rice paste.

In Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, every brick that makes up the ancient city walls dating back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) bears a signature of the kiln worker who fired it. That information would be used to trace every single flawed brick to its original maker, thus making it easier to identify responsibility.

Construction of bridges and cities' enclosure walls then was often the labor of years or decades, following quality standards that are incredibly stringent by today's standards. That explains why the Zhaozhou Bridge, an arch stone bridge built in Hebei Province during the Sui Dynasty (581-618 AD), has remained intact for 1,300 years and survived 10 floods, eight wars and numerous tremors.

It is a lasting symbol of the high premium our ancestors placed on quality and durability.

Nowadays that premium is cast aside like trash. In the most notorious case of jerry-built bridges in years, the Fenghuangdi Bridge in Huan Province collapsed hours after it opened to traffic in 2007.

Months ago, cracks and pot holes appeared on an expressway linking the cities of Tianshui and Dingxi in Gansu Province after only half a year in service. The highway, costing 8.7 billion yuan (US$1.28 billion), was dubbed "the road with the shortest lifespan."

Craftsmanship today is usually associated with Japanese- and German-made products. But we need to look no further than our own past for clues about how to improve our business ethics.

If our ancestors could pull off the feat of building sturdy relics with their bare hands and simple techniques, why couldn't we, with advanced know-how and tools, ensure that trains don't derail and cooking oil isn't extracted from gutter oil, which is the humblest of requests?

Premier Wen is certainly right in saying we now lack a drive for perfection in our national ethos. It will take more than a few history lessons to restore those lost values about honesty and dedication.