LI MEI is slim, with hair that falls almost to her waist, and pretty enough to draw looks in the street. But her husband refuses to come near her, and, in any case, her breasts are too painful to be touched.

She is one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese women who wanted bigger breasts and spent several hundred pounds at beauty salons for injections of Ao Mei Ding — or Amazing Gel. But in Mrs Li’s case, such as countless others, the operation went wrong.

On April 30, nine years after the product in its earliest form first won government approval, the State Food and Drug Supervision Administration decided to ban Amazing Gel. Chen Huanren, a senior physician at the plastic surgery hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, said: “This should not be used on humans. The Government violated procedures to approve it. They took bribes and some officials are now under investigation.”

For Mrs Li, the ban on polyacrylamide hydrogel has come too late. The gel has formed hard lumps in her breasts, caused infections and migrated around her body.

She originally paid £570 to a Beijing beauty salon in 2003 for the implant of 300ml of Amazing Gel. Last year she paid £700 at the Beijing Union Hospital to have it removed.

“The gel had solidified and stuck to my breasts. The doctor had to scrape it out with a spoon. It was white when it was injected and blue-black when they took it out,” she said.

But the doctors will never be able to remove it all and have recommended a full body scan to try to trace the rest of the material. However, Mrs Li is luckier than many.

Qiao Qun, head of plastic surgery at Beijing Union Hospital, says she performs a dozen operations a week on women whose implants of Amazing Gel have gone wrong. Many women have had their breasts removed. Mrs Qiao rails at a system that could have allowed Amazing Gel to be approved, sold and injected by beauticians with no medical training.

She said: “In no other country in the world is there a problem like this on such a scale. The numbers of people who may have medical problems are simply enormous.”

One-party rule in China means systems of checks and balances are weak. The country’s leaders have battled corruption for years, but the success of economic reform has brought more opportunities for those with money to influence those with power and to profit from the ignorance of those who lack education.

Cao Mengjun, the inventor of Amazing Gel, said two years ago that more than 300,000 people in China had been injected with his “miracle gel”. Doctors fear that even 500,000 is a conservative estimate. But many patients are reluctant to come forward because they are ashamed — and the nature of the injection is too personal. The product has been used not only on the face and in breasts, but also for penis enlargement and to narrow the vagina.

Mr Cao’s invention was based on a product imported from Ukraine. However, when Ukrainian suppliers halted sales in the late 1990s, amid concerns over how the material was being used in China, Mr Cao devised his own version.

Approval for his product from the food and drug supervision authorities came after only seven months of testing, instead of the required two years, and without any animal experiments.

Mrs Li said: “Instead of white mice, the company used us.”

The liquid was made by Fu Hua Pharmaceuticals in northeastern Jilin province. When big hospitals refused to use it, the company sold the gel to beauty salons, many of which operate illegally. The company plans to appeal against the ban.

Doctors say that no one knows how many procedures have gone wrong — or even exactly what damage the gel can do. Mrs Qiao said: “We just have to wait and see.”

Mr Chen said he believed that profit was the prime motive behind the scandal. “The saddest thing is that the liquid will move to other parts of the body. It can never be totally removed and it will stay with the woman throughout her life.”

www.timesonline.co.uk/weblogs

Read Jane Macartney’s weblog

Times Recommends

• Heed the great stabiliser’s words
• How a voice for everyone led to stalemate
• Bakara market becomes a slaughterhouse