Thursday, May 24, 2007

Chinese media opening up game



What makes my day is when one of China's censorship organizations talks about the country's media opening up, especially when addressing a room full of drooling Western media people, eager to enter China. Of course there are the dazzling 1.3 billion consumers that caused more Western executives to lose their marbles.
Earlier in the month we caught Liu Binjie of GAPP - who censors the printed media, telling China would open up for foreign periodicals. Today Asia Media reports from a Asia Society meeting in Southern California how the censor of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT), represented by Yong Huang, talked for an eager audience about China's opening up for the media. "Be patient," he said and those were probably the two most important words of his speech.
Last week I met one of the executives of one of the few foreign TV-stations that obtained permission to broadcast in China. Of course I wanted to know how his business was going. "Simply not sustainable," he said. "We got a permission to lose money."
Why are these Western executives then listening to all those censors, expecting they are the ones who might be able to make money in China? I guess it is lack of experience. In most of the other industries in the 1990s there was a similar tendency of taking too much the relevant authorities would say for granted. Foreign companies have learned it the hard way, after they got into the market and some are actually doing quite ok.
Media companies will not get into this blessed state for a long time. GAPP and SARFT are here to stay and the implication in the long run is that they will destroy their media industries by banning anything that might be of interest to their audiences. In the big cities you seeing a tidal wave of change in media behavior. That is a change that might also get to the rest of the 90 percent who has no real alternatives like the internet. Only when the destruction of the traditional media has reached a more substantial section of the population, change might be possible.
Up to then, we might have to listen to those meaningless speeches by the censoring government bodies.

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