“The China Syndrome” refers to a possible extreme result of a nuclear meltdown. In the 1979 film, the terminology referred to a concept that if an American nuclear reactor melts down, it would melt through the earth until it reached China.
Twenty-eight years later, the China Syndrome has a different meaning. Chinese tainted foodstuffs and defective consumer products that have been imported to the United States have been the subject of numerous stories in both the popular and legal press. (Google lists 887,000 hits for “Chinese tainted products.”)
