"It's really stringent now," said Ren Lianzhi, who works at a milk station in Shelawusu, part of one of China's main dairy regions.

"If there's even a little something that's not up to standard, they get rid of everything, no matter what the losses are for milk stations or farmers."

But as the cows entered the dairy with their owners in tow to be milked, government inspectors -- whom villagers had said lived in the station after the scandal erupted last month -- could not be found.

The crisis erupted in September when the industrial chemical melamine -- normally used to make plastic -- was found in milk products.

Officials say a total of four children have died and 53,000 have been sickened in China by drinking contaminated milk powder, with the first reports of something wrong having emerged as early as December last year.

Countries around the world have now banned or restricted milk products from China and the government has announced a series of measures to try to contain the scandal, including dispatching inspectors.

The country's food safety watchdog said more than 5,000 inspectors had been deployed to dairy factories, according to the official Xinhua news agency, and locals told AFP government inspectors were present at every milk station.

"They live in the milk stations," Wang Huwei, a 41-year-old farmer who owns one cow, told AFP in Shelawusu, 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Hohhot, the capital of the northern Inner Mongolia region.

"Inspectors from Mengniu (one of the big dairy companies) also live there every day."

Melamine was found in products made by Mengniu and Yili, the two near dairy monopolies in the region, after the scandal first emerged from rival Sanlu, based in neighbouring Hebei province.

At the village milk station, however, the government inspector was noticeably absent during the milking he was supposed to watch over.

"I don't know where he is," said Zhao Yanzhao, 28, dispatched by Mengniu to make sure the farmers who milked their cows in the dark building did so in a hygienic way.

"There aren't so many people from the government now."

At another station on the other side of the village, locals pointed to Jiao Youquan, the 50-year-old village head who was milking a cow, when asked where the government inspector was.

"He represents the government," they said alongside a boy aged 18 dispatched by Yili to supervise the premises.

"If there's a problem, he will give them a call."

But despite the lack of government inspectors in the village that day, those questioned in the area said that since the milk scandal erupted, safety measures had indeed been tightened.

Bao Guoku, a Mengniu inspector at a neighbouring farm with 1,200 cows, said there was now one person responsible for safety checks on one farm compared with previous guidelines where one monitored three or four establishments.

Twenty kilometres down the road, an employee at a Mengniu factory, who did not want to be named, said milk was checked before it entered the factory and agsin before it was distributed to shops as a final product.

"This has always been the case, but now checks are much stricter and include checks for melamine," she said.

Another employee, who also refused to be named, said government inspectors now turned up at their factories unannounced whereas before they would come at predetermined regular intervals.

Trips from farms or milk stations to processing factories owned by Mengniu or Yili were timed, and any lateness would be investigated, according to the employee.

The companies' inspectors were also ordered to make sure all milk vats were completely sealed before they were driven away to the factories.

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