Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday urged Chinese entrepreneurs to be more ethical and not to harm the interest of the public while pursuing personal gains.

He also pledged that producers of counterfeit or substandard products would be punished with no tolerance and lenience.

Responding to concerns over product quality during an online chat with netizens on Saturday afternoon, Wen said, "We must not go soft (on those companies), in order to protect the overall interest of the Chinese nation."

"It would be pathetic to forsake good for the sake of gold and pursue personal gains on the basis of suffering or even life of other people," he said. "Chinese laws and regulations won't allow it, either."

Wen's remarks followed reports of a number of melamine contaminated milk products being found in Shanghai as well as Liaoning, Shandong, and Shaanxi provinces in recent months.

Milk laced with melamine led to the deaths of six babies and sickened 300,000 others in 2008, who had been fed with baby formula made from tainted milk. The scandal sparked public anger over inferior quality control systems and questions of business ethics.

In 2008 Wen said, "Within the body of every businessman should flow the blood of morality."

On Saturday, he again urged Chinese entrepreneurs to have "moral blood",and not to cross the bottom line to hurt the interests of the entire society for their own instant interests.

"Ethics and honesty is already a pressing problem that needs to be addressed in modern society," Wen said.

He asked entrepreneurs to learn to love the people and to be compassionate for others.

He said China had spent more than 2 billion yuan (about 293 million U.S. dollars) in providing medical checks to more than 30 million children affected in the 2008 melamine scandal, and had paid insurance for those sickened.

"We paid a hefty price for the Sanlu milk powder (at the center of melamine contamination scandal). The lesson is a hard one, ... and the entire nation should learn from it," he said.