Sina Corp.

A screengrab from Sina Corp.’s Weibo micrblog service showing an illustration of a Snow White-like character apparently poisoned with Mengniu milk. “Mengniu: The stepmother’s new choice,” the caption says.

What’s the newest way to curse people in China? “I hope your entire family drinks Mengniu.”

The phrase is making its way around China’s Internet, as consumers flock to Sina Corp.’s Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service, to criticize China Mengniu Dairy Co. following recent findings by government inspectors that a batch of its milk contained carcinogens.

Despite apologizing to consumers and stating that it destroyed contaminated products before they got to market, Mengniu is facing a significant public relations crisis. The speed and vehemence of the criticism offers a reminder of the power of Sina Weibo and similar online social-networking services over brands in a country with few approved venues for mass public expression.

Investors have also punished the company. Shares of Mengniu’s stock, listed in Hong Kong, were down nearly 24% to 20.10 Hong Kong dollars (US$2.58) in Wednesday trading.  The findings were released over the weekend, but Hong Kong’s market was closed on Monday and Tuesday for the Christmas holiday.

A spokesman for the company didn’t respond to phone calls on Wednesday.

The brand has become the hottest trending topic on Weibo, according to the service’s measuring system, with nearly five million posts complaining about the quality of its products.

One Weibo user in Henan province, referring to China’s population, said: “Mengniu, you’ve taken 1.3 billion lives for granted, have treated 1.3 billion people as your lab rats.”

One illustration frequently posted shows a cartoon of fairy tale legend Snow White poisoned with a Mengniu beverage in hand. A caption below stated, “Mengniu, the stepmother’s new choice.”

Mengniu has overcome public crises in the past, rebuilding trust with consumers in the wake of a 2008 milk scandal in which its brand was one of 22 whose baby formula was found to have contained melamine and caused the deaths of six infants and illnesses in 300,000 others.

But this time is different thanks to the evolution of social media, which makes it far easier for consumers to voice their opinions of a company and quicker to influence others’ opinions of the brands.

Social media sites like Weibo have increased the urgency for companies to respond quickly to consumer complaints, said Debby Cheung, group managing director at Ogilvy Public Relations in China. “The golden rule of crisis management is to react and respond as quickly as possible,” Ms. Cheung said.

Mengniu has weighed in on the social-media scene. The company has its own Weibo account and has been circulating apologies to consumers, noting that it is consistently “learning from lessons.”

In addition to broad complaints, many on the Web are launching a boycott against the Inner Mongolia-based company. More than 50,000 Weibo users have sent around a message stating that they vow not to buy Mengniu products, newspapers containing the company’s advertising, or watch television shows that are supported by Mengniu. “Don’t tell people they are brain damaged, just tell them they grew up drinking Mengniu,” the message says.

–Laurie Burkitt. Follower her on Twitter @lburkitt.

That’s what bloggers and at least one Chinese news outlet have been saying. According to their reports, which couldn’t be confirmed, China Central Television’s web site was hacked Monday night—purportedly by viewers displeased with its annual Lunar New Year extravaganza two days earlier—causing users trying to access the site to be greeted with a picture of a scantily clad woman rather than CCTV’s usual content (in Chinese here). One Web site that ran the story also included what it said was a screen shot of the attack.

China’s official media have remained silent on the supposed attack. CCTV officials couldn’t be reached for comment on Tuesday (China is in the middle of a weeklong holiday).

CCTV’s annual gala on New Year’s eve—one of the most watched programs in the world’s biggest TV market—has become a lightening rod for dissatisfaction with the broadcaster. Critics say the show is uninspired and boring. Even other parts of the state media have piled on: the English-language China Daily newspaper on Friday, a day before the show, said the nearly 30-year-old tradition “is now outdated, or at best, a nostalgia trip.”

But such criticism was mild compared with what was to follow. Internet bulletin boards lit up over the last couple of days as people complained about the large number of product placements throughout Saturday’s performance, prompting the director to publicly defend his programming decisions. The media report about the supposed hacking of CCTV suggested that discontent over the ads was a likely motive.

All this comes as CCTV is still reeling from the PR effects of the fire that gutted a tower in its glitzy new headquarters complex in Beijing a year ago. The fire was caused by an unauthorized fireworks show put on by CCTV officials. The government said last week that 44 people faced criminal charges for their involvement in that fire while 27 others will receive administrative penalties.

China has been the focal point for debate over internet security in recent months after Google and other western firms said they were victims of a sophisticated cyber attacks that appeared to originate in China. China’s government has denied those allegations, and argued that China itself is the biggest global victim of hacking. According to a report released last year by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China, hackers in China caused losses of 7.6 billion yuan in 2009.

Most recently Baidu, Google’s main Chinese competitor, had its domain name, which is administered by a U.S. company, disabled for several hours by a cyber attack. Many Internet users cited signs that an Iranian group was behind the attack. Users in China reported seeing a banner for the “Iranian Cyber Army,” complete with an Iranian flag and a shattered Star of David, when they tried to access Baidu’s home page.

If CCTV’s site was hacked, the scale and sophistication falls far short of those against Google or Baidu, with the CCTV outage basically a temporary inconvenience for people looking for updates on the Winter Olympics.

Still, such an attack against CCTV would represent an unusually bold expression of the widespread public disaffection with the centerpiece of China’s propaganda apparatus.

–Dinny McMahon