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I was chatting with a friend recently about what the West in general, and Americans in particular, seem to get right (and wrong) about China. The NBC Olympic coverage provides a good starting point for this conversation. You recall the initial concern from the network and many Western news outlets was that the government would pull the television plug if there was some off-putting protest during the Games. That never happened. And then there was concern about filming from touchy locations, such as Tiananmen Square. That also proved not to be a problem.
If you want a fairly balanced view of what’s going on China, particularly media, advertising and urban life, visit www.danwei.org/media. A recent post by Ann Condi notes that “Those outside of China often imagine hordes of internet-savvy Chinese web surfers scouring the internet for cracks in the Great Firewall, avidly downloading precious snippets of information blocked by the government to disseminate among the circle of politically-aware Chinese cybernauts. The hope is that the internet is having a transformative effect on China allowing the Truth—or least some essential truth—to seep into this tightly controlled information environment. And surely (the assumption goes) the vanguard in this process of ‘peaceful evolution’ would be young, English-speaking urban professionals”.
As Ms. Condi notes, there are ways around Chinese Internet blockage, such as www.Anonymous.org and www.Proxee.com. But her informal research suggests that the above demographic group doesn’t care much about government censorship. “Most of the responses I got” she wrote, “could be characterized as ‘Polite Apathy’. Whatever internet activism there may be in China, it is not coming from the upwardly-mobile Chinese white collar workers. One sometimes wonders why the government bothers to censor the internet at all”. So the hue and cry about internet censorship during the Games was coming largely from Western journalists; the Chinese don’t seem to care very much. That point seems a fundamental cultural “truth,” at least among the professional population along the Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou axis.
Just what do the Chinese think about their Olympics? Synovate in China interviewed about 500 urban Chinese and published some top-line information. About 90% thought service had improved because of the event. There was no nationalism in the response to best Olympic moments: Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt led the list for sports achievement. In terms of what was the real crowd-pleaser in Beijing, basketball was the clear winner, ahead of diving. Interestingly, 89% of those surveyed said they watched sports they did not normally follow. And 81% said they had been inspired to play more sports (For more information about this survey or online research in China, please contact Kelvin Gin at kelvin.gin@synovate.com.
Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA and Real Media and now Chairman of Tennis, is one of the most astute observers of the media scene in the U.S. and abroad. In a MediaPost article Morgan wrote from China that the “government issue hangs over everything in the market. Without question, nothing happens in China that the government doesn’t want to happen. At the moment it appears that the government very much wants a robust internet and technology industry—and is doing everything it can to promote it”. He notes that non-Chinese companies will never be on the same footing as domestic companies—“just look at the load times for Google in the U.S. versus China. But aside from that issue, the government is giving internet companies much more latitude than many ever thought they would, and the internet is certainly helping liberalize society.”
On a recent visit to China I talked to a female executive (and new mother) at Trends Publishing in Beijing about parenting and baby magazines. She acknowledged China had lots of these titles but none that seemed to address dealing with the psychological and social issues associated with growing up in one-child families. She spends her evenings on Yahoo groups learning what parents are doing in the U.S.
I think Dave Morgan is right in that the internet is helping to liberalize society, not in the sense of causing political upheaval but in the way the web can help. For example, parents deal with a social, child-rearing and family structure that has been profoundly changed during the last twenty years. Technology and the Internet have served as a leveler in China and has been the engine in creating a middle class population of 400 million. Frank Braaeken, Uniliver’s chairman for Greater China in Shanghai, is quoted in Advertising Age that, in the current economic turmoil “the impact on China’s growing middle class, the target market for most package-goods marketers, will be limited, because this segment continues to grow in size and wealth every year”.
The Synovate research found that 60% of those surveyed thought the most important legacy of Beijing 2008 was that the rest of the world has learned about China.
That narrative is just beginning.
Charles McCullagh
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