Chinese enterprises knowingly export adulterated food, harmful medicines, and dangerous products, killing consumers around the world. They are, in reality, committing long-distance homicide. The issue is whether Beijing will be able to stop these crimes. Most analysts are optimistic, in part because deaths from products have triggered a global crisis that China must address.

In the last few weeks, the Chinese government has indeed been on the offensive. On July 6, a Beijing court handed down a death sentence to Cao Wenzhuang, a former senior official in the State Food and Drug Administration. On Tuesday, the central government unexpectedly executed Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of that agency and only the fourth ministerial-level official put to death in the post-Mao era. People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s self-described mouthpiece, immediately hailed this drastic act, saying that it demonstrated the central government’s determination. At the same time, Beijing revealed that it had adopted a five-year plan to “significantly reduce the number of incidents caused by substandard food or drug products” by 2010.

So should the world’s consumers breathe a sigh of relief? Unfortunately, they should not. Recent history suggests that the Chinese government will not be successful. Zheng and Cao were convicted of taking bribes to approve pharmaceuticals. According to official media, Zheng, who helped form the food and drug agency, took about $850,000 in cash and gifts to issue permits for medicines, and perhaps six of them were fakes. Cao, once in charge of drug registrations, was found guilty of accepting more than $300,000 from two pharmaceutical companies.

China is plagued by bad medicines not because it lacks laws or a regulatory system, although these are contributing factors. China has a grievous problem because it is, in the final analysis, infested by corruption from the top of its political system to the bottom.

Corruption, as bad as it is in the Chinese capital, is worse at the bottom rungs of the Communist Party. At the lowest levels, Party cadres personally profit from protecting offending factories and often hold ownership stakes in them. These officials then buy protection for themselves from officials one level higher up in the Party’s vast patronage system.

The Communist Party is structured like the Tammany Hall of Boss Tweed, except with 72.39 million members it is somewhat larger. Its size permits it to reach into all aspects of Chinese society, so it should come as no surprise that venal officials approve, ignore, and assist the production, licensing, and export of dangerous goods of all varieties across the 31 provinces and provincial-level cities that make up Mainland China.

Corruption has plagued all Chinese regimes, but the country appears to be more corrupt at this time than at any other point in its history. Today, venality costs the country between 13% and 17% of the economy, or somewhere between $360 billion and $472 billion at the end of last year.

The Communist Party has been trying to fight corruption since 1951, just two years after it came to power, but it has proven utterly incapable of investigating itself. There will be progress only when independent prosecutors can go after senior officials and try them in impartial courts. That, however, cannot happen because the Party will never subject itself to the rule of law and the supervision of the people. To do so would implicitly accept representative governance, but it has ruled out structural change of that sort.

At the core of its beliefs is the notion that it not only has the right but also the historical responsibility to lead China for all time. The late Party statesman Chen Yun perfectly summed up the fundamental dilemma that Beijing faces when he remarked, “Not fighting corruption would destroy the country; fighting it would destroy the Party.”

China’s one-party system is capable of accomplishing many things, but it has proven unable to manage the consequences of explosive economic growth. Chinese leaders can conduct periodic crackdowns and campaigns, but they have yet to stop the severe degradation of the country’s environment, eliminate horrible workplace conditions, or deliver justice to its people. Similarly, they cannot root out corruption, and, therefore, will not be able to ensure the safety of Chinese food, medicines, and products.

In recent weeks foreign analysts have suggested all sorts of technical fixes to the toothpaste-toy-tire debacle. For instance, last month A.T. Kearney, the global management consultants, estimated that China needs a $100 billion investment “in improved food safety standards, warehousing, transportation and training.” When corruption is the root of the problem, however, throwing more money at dishonest officials will not help much — and doing so could even make the situation worse by enriching those who are at the center of the problem. China’s shortcomings are not technical; they are political. Only a fundamental change in the form of government will alleviate the food-medicine-product situation.

So we can’t expect Chinese communists to protect American consumers. The only way we can do that is to rigorously inspect imports from China, reject them when they are harmful, and start buying from elsewhere if we have to. We have to begin protecting ourselves from China’s political system.

Mr. Chang blogs at commentarymagazine.com and is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”