In an excellent post in the Company Town blog over at The Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Landreth describes News Corporation’s announcement that it is purchasing just under 20% of Beijing-based Bona Film Group. (“News Corp. buys stake in Chinese film studio”)

The deal is interesting for several reasons. First, it marks a strategic departure for News Corp., which has in the past preferred to own larger stakes in its China ventures. It is also the first major investment News Corp. has made in traditional media since 2006, when CEO Rupert Murdoch told a meeting of industry executives in New York that he’d hit “a brick wall” in China.

Second, it is interesting because News Corp. is now leading from behind in China, preferring to play a fast second rather than trying to beat the rest of the industry. Similar linkages between Legendary Pictures and Orange Sky Golden Harvest, DreamWorks Animation and Shanghai Media Group, and Walt Disney and the Ministry of Culture/Tencent have been announced over the last year.

Despite some secrecy around specifics of the deal and Murdoch’s real intentions behind it, the move represents a wiser China strategy than News Corp.’s previous, dingo-in-the-butcher-shop approach. The history of foreign business in China has been dominated by a preference for speed over calculation: if we don’t get in early/first/biggest, the thinking went, we have no chance of success. It now seems that Murdoch has learned from costly experience the fallacy of such thinking, and now that Legendary, DreamWorks, and Disney have paved the way, he has followed.

Neither News Corp. nor its CEO have been idle these past six years, either. A quiet charm offensive has apparently been underway for at least the past two years, a period during which I think News Corp. has done a lot of listening and learning, understanding what is possible and permissible for a foreign media company here, and calibrating its ambitions accordingly. Many whom have dealt with the News kraken or one of its tentacles can attest that this is an uncharacteristic approach: normally it is News that defines what is possible in a given market.

I suspect, therefore, that this is a first step for News with Bona, and that we can expect the relationship to mature and expand based on the signals that come from the Party and the market in the next several years.

This is without doubt a deal to watch.

Related articles

• On News Corp’s Bona Film Group Purchase (wolfgroupasia.com)
• News Corp. buys stake in Chinese film studio (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• News Corp to acquire 20 percent of Chinese film distributor (chinadailymail.com)
• News Corp. invests in China’s Bona Film Group (variety.com)

Deng Xiaoping bust in the Zhuhai High-Tech Zone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

China’s path to reform | Martin Jacques | Comment is free | The Guardian.

In this well-written editorial, Martin Jacques captures why the Party’s next generation of leaders needs to engage in a rethink. The key graf:

First, the era of cheap labour and low value-added production is coming to an end as the economy becomes increasingly sophisticated: a major shift in economic strategy is under way. Second, China has acquired a panoply of global interests that require its foreign policy, presently based on keeping itself to itself, to be rethought. Third, the enormous growth in social inequality, combined with mounting corruption, has fostered a sense of grievance that, if unchecked, could threaten the country’s stability. And fourth, major political reform must be instituted.

The important takeaway here: this is not a matter of a change in a single dimension of national power, but a change in all of them. The fundamentals of the policy legacy left by Deng Xiaoping are now in question.

Consultation Document on the Methods for Selecting the Chief Executive and for Forming the LegCo in 2012 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Leaving aside any ideological preferences one might have, The Economist makes a realist’s case for elections in Hong Kong.

In this case, though, there are practical reasons for China allowing a proper election, with non-acceptable candidates running too. It would bolster the mainland’s pitch to Taiwan: that “one country, two systems” means what it says. Full democracy may also be the safest option in Hong Kong. The uneasy coalition of Beijing’s supporters on the island—tycoons, party hacks, trade-unionists—could fracture under the weight of another ludicrous selection process. As for everyone else in Hong Kong, they showed in 2003 that when denied electoral outlets for their frustrations, they will take to the streets.

via Hong Kong’s chief-executive “election”: The worst system, including all the others | The Economist.

I can add two more: it would offer the world an opportunity to see the Party administering a high-profile local election, thus adding a much-needed bit of buoyancy to China’s bid for global soft power; and it would provide a laboratory for the Party in its own efforts to evolve.

Related articles

• Cherry Picking in Hong Kong (nationalinterest.org)

Reblogged from strategicaffairswa:

Pictures like this make clear that China is the country most threatened by North Korean missiles, and thus have the most to lose if North Korea goes rogue. China is undoubtedly doing something to keep this from happening, but what?

A fascinating look into the organized – and likely government-supported – world of Russian Hacking. Apart from the fact that it was a surprise to read an article on cybersecurity that didn’t even mention China, it provides a glimpse at how Putin seems to be building his own cyber militia. While that capability is aimed internally in this story, how hard would it be for the Russian government to switch targets to overseas servers?

Probably not very.

As tempting as it is to make China the world’s cyber-boogeyman, as this NPR article does, security experts like Jeffrey Carr take a more balanced view. Hacking and cyberwar is a global problem with multiple sources. We should not dismiss the role China plays, but we should not allow focus to shift totally onto China. Doing so only gives comfort to hackers in other countries while making us look both weak and blind to other sources of serious threats.

Related articles

• Cyber Warfare: Is Russia a Rogue State? (ibtimes.com)
• Russian ‘Silicon Valley’ Aims to be Global Science Park – Wall Street Journal (blogs.wsj.com)

Image via Wikipedia

In a brilliant essay in The Atlantic by Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, the venerable China scholar captures a spontaneous moment in a performance in Beijing by Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma and turns it into the best deconstruction of Chinese international relations that I have read in a very long time.

Every paragraph in the essay is a gem, but my favorite by far is this one, which elegantly encapsulates the conundrum of international relations in the 21st century:

From here on, as China’s wealth and power increases, its national challenge will be to start letting itself feel sufficiently reinstated in the congress of great nations that it does not need to wallow in narratives of victimization, or be so militant about grasping symbolic demonstrations of its equality or superiority. The highest stage of evolution for any truly great power is to reach that point where it is possible to transcend the notion of both inferior and superior, the better to cultivate a self-confidence that leads to modesty. This is a lot to ask of China, or any country. Even the United States, the strongest nation on the globe today, has only rarely demonstrated such national maturity.

Without descending too deeply into moral equivalence, Schell has taken both China and the U.S. to task for their failings in international relations: America, the global power made insecure by the Cassandras of national decline; and China, the emerging global power made insecure by its own, lovingly nurtured national inferiority complex. In one paragraph, Schell tells both countries to get over it, to accept their station, and to begin behaving like mature adults.

The Meryl Streep/Yo-Yo Ma performance that Schell refers to was intended as a piece of privately-funded public diplomacy organized by the Asia Society and the Aspen Center. It succeeded better than its organizers could have hoped, and captured the potential for public diplomacy to accomplish a very great deal. In a single moment, two artists offered proof that if China and America would just grow up, that new-found maturity would go over as well at home as abroad.

Related articles

• Group of American Cultural Figures to Visit China (nytimes.com)

If you are in the Midwest this week and have an interest in China’s education system, you may want to stop by the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University – Bloomington. The Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business is continuing their colloquium series with a talk by Dr. Susan Blum on the Massification of China’s Higher Education System: The Consequences for China’s Youth. Dr. Blum, who serves as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has spent some time over here and has put together a talk that will inform the debates around “Tiger Moms” and over the future of higher education in both China and the U.S.

From the event’s flyer:

From a low of approximately 3% just two decades ago to almost 25% in 2006, higher education is no longer an elite and rare good, but is increasingly “massified.” Such independent pursuit of limited opportunities has consequences for the nature of youth and the very meaning of childhood. Though the number of youth has been stabilizing because of China’s birth policies, the competition for entry into the expanding programs of higher education remains fierce. Debates about education often reveal debates about human and social ideals. As Mao and others showed, the very nature of education has the effect of changing society. Chinese intellectuals knew this a century ago, as New Youth drove reform; the current situation is both similar and different in instructive ways. We find enduring centralization and increasing privatization; social and individual goals; and focus on international competition.

The event is free and open to the public, so if you are up that way, please stop by. I’m hoping she comes out to Beijing to give her talk.

(Full disclosure – I’m on the advisory board of the RCCPB.)

State Administration of Radio, Film & Television offices in Beijing (Photo credit: Toby Simkin)

In the Hutong
Black Lung Control
1047 hrs.

In the Valentine’s Day edition of The New York Times, Andrew Jacobs describes the new regulations issued yesterday by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), most specifically including two key restrictions: the prohibition of foreign programming during prime time, and the limitation of foreign programming to no more than 25% of the total air time on a channel.

There is some new content in the regulations issued yesterday, but contrary to the NYT headline, the major issues addressed vis-a-vis foreign content are not new: indeed, they harken back to regulations that have been in force since 1995. From the unpublished manuscript of a guidebook on Chinese television that I co-authored with William Soileau and Jeane-Marie Gescher in 1998, according to regulations then in force:

Foreign programming must not be distributed between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., although actual enforcement varies according to the broadcaster.

and

Foreign programming must not take up more than 25% of total broadcasting time on a station basis.  In reality, while the rule is nominally honoured, many networks apply the quota on a channel by channel basis. Unofficial figures indicate that foreign programming may account for as much as 50% of programming.

The rules governing television are not increasing, as the Times suggests. What seems to be increasing is the degree to which they are openly flaunted by broadcasters. Let me explain.

China has had a wide range of laws and regulations restricting media (and many other industries) in place for a long time. What varies is not the regulations, but the degree to which they are enforced. Laws and regulations, as such, are not de facto restrictions of behavior so much as they are tools for the government to use when political conditions demand it. For that reason, what SARFT does on a fairly regular basis is issue notices designed to remind broadcasters that the regulations exist, and signal to them that enforcement looms. Usually, such initiatives come either when things get too far out of hand (i.e., 25% becoming 50%, as suggested above), or when something happens to make it an issue (Chinese producers complaining about access to TV time, or, say, a  leadership change.)

This is not dissimilar to the way I get my ten-year old to clean his room: I let him know an inspection is coming, and by the time I get there, behold! A clean room! The requirement to keep his room clean always existed. What was lax was the enforcement. What caused me to issue the edict to my son was either the room was getting too messy, or guests are coming over.

Jacobs quoted one Chinese citizen posting his disgust with the regulations on Weibo:  “They should really put Sarft in charge of food safety and have the State Food and Drug Administration regulate TV shows — that way we’ll have safe food and good entertainment.”

I would wager the person posting this was either very young or unborn when the regulations were actually issued. The issue that has provoked SARFT (an underfunded, undermanned, out-gunned agency if there ever was one) is the same that caused the food problem: China is ruled less by policy than law, and political expedience trumps enforcement – until the political expedients change.

UPDATE: Please read the comments conversation between Li Yuanyuan and myself. He raises some excellent points to rebut my point of view. He disagrees that enforcement was ever lax, suggests that it was always tight, and he explains why. We do not share the same memory of events, but he does point out that the prime time ban on foreign programming and the restriction of quantity of content was not in the 1995 Regulation #549.

Related articles

• China set to reduce number of foreign TV shows (passionsjustlikemine.wordpress.com)
• China to curb TV entertainment (telegraph.co.uk)
• China clamps down on foreign telly on its channels (go.theregister.com)

“The Hunger Games” is apparently scheduled to show in China, according to this piece (h/t to Jacqueline in HK, aka @lantaumama for this.)

This movie, based on the first book of a trilogy telling the tale of a hardy young woman who inspires a rural uprising against a brutal repressive urban dictatorship, will either be pulled at the last minute when the censors actually WATCH the darn thing, or it will be the most subversive piece of democratic propaganda ever to sneak onto Chinese screens.

Or, as occasionally happens, the Chinese audience will take something entirely different from the experience than we would.

Image via Wikipedia

Either way, it will be fun to watch what happens.

Related articles

• Learn How to Create Katniss’s Iconic Hunger Games Braid (bellasugar.com)

Right before Chinese New Year

, Ed Lococo interviewed me for this story, asking me how much I thought iPhone sales would be affected by the company’s decision to sell the newest version of its handset via online channels only. The quote in the story is a good one, but there is more to what I told Ed.

First, I do not expect Apple unit sales to suffer severely from this shift in distribution. When the Chinese people want a product that is difficult to get, they tend to find ways to get it, as evinced by the huge gray market in iPhones that existed long before they were introduced in China. The Chinese consumers who can afford these devices are net-savvy, and the online store will not present a major obstacle, and they should continue to be available through China Unicom’s retail outlets.

I also expect Apple will see a jump in iPhone sales through Apple’s channels in Hong Kong and other major Chinese New Year travel destinations for outbound PRC tourists. However, I noted:

A large portion of Chinese New Year sales are about having the gifts in hand right now, so I expect that Motorola, HTC, and Samsung, all of whom offer Android devices competitive with the iPhone, will benefit among buyers who are ambivalent about the brand of their device or who were on the fence about Android.

Ed also asked me whether I thought Apple would use this as a justification to expand its distribution in China, adding carriers or retail outlets. I imagine Apple will continue to expand its stores, albeit slowly, but I also think they walk a fine line between stoking demand and burning its mojo.

Apple owes much of its profitability in China to the perception that its devices are highly desirable yet difficult to obtain. The company is likely loath to tamper with that aura by significantly broadening its distribution, and that doesn’t even address the engineering challenges of creating an iPhone that will work on China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network. Apple’s problem is that once two or more carriers offer the device and the phone seems to become ubiquitous, the mystique falls away and Chinese consumers will look elsewhere for their desirable device.

Make no mistake: most of Apple’s recent converts in China are much less emotionally vested in the Apple ecosystem than their counterparts in Japan or the United States. Apple is making a valiant effort to change that, but it needs more time, perhaps years, to develop in China the devoted following it enjoys elsewhere. Until then, it needs to remain in the business of making pretty, hard-to-get devices for prosperous people.