Speaking of Stanford

May 8, 2009

I was in China for Scientific American in 2001 when an American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet, killing the Chinese pilot. In regard to Sino-U.S. relations, the ramifications were huge. The Chinese government has shown that it is more than willing to call out armies of protestors when it wants to make a point, as it did a few years ago when Japanese officials visited that infamous war shrine in Tokyo.  During the 2001 incident, there were certainly protests against the U.S.  Business was profoundly affected. I remember that meetings were cancelled; emails and phone calls stopped.  The chill would last about a year.  The incident still smarts for China and with good reason.

While I understood the global politics at work, I considered this typical behavior on the part of an offended power.  I spent four years in the U.S Navy in Asia and part of that time was in patrolling the South China Sea, snooping on other ships and engaging in the usual mischief.  Ironically, with the shift of power in Asia, the Chinese Navy is now snooping on the U.S.

In 2001 I figured the incident would blow over and that would be it.  Not Jessica Chen Weiss, a Stanford student studying in Beijing during the incident and concerned about the rising tensions and conflicting narratives about the spy plane.  Instead of waiting for the incident to fade, she founded the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES).  The proposition is this: university students make ideal ambassadors in that they are educated and open-minded.  Conferences have been held at Peking and Stanford Universities, among others.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to American and Chinese students in the FACES program about similarities and differences between magazine publishing in China and the U.S.  And based on what I heard from the assembled students, media in China is coming up on a generational change.  Perhaps it was all the “twittering” in the room, but I left with a firm sense that magazines in China are well on their way to a post-industrial phase.

To talk about how print media developed in the People’s Republic of China is like going back through space and time, even if we are talking about just sixty years of history.  From the standpoint of governance and consolidation of power it made absolute sense that the government would divvy up newspaper, magazine and book publishing among the provinces and territories, with an understandable nod to the Communist Party.  And this approach worked reasonably well for half a century.  But when international publishers came in, the calculus changed and domestic publishers faced some stiff competition.

As I reported at Stanford China, apparently learning from the Russian experiment—too much openness and too much restructuring overnight, took a more modest approach. With the help of more than 100,000 joint ventures of one kind or the other, China has profoundly restructured its industrial base.  This success makes the Industrial Revolution look like child’s play.  But with media, China has been more cautious, restricting media businesses that can enter China. Though this requirement is not as blatant as it appears, China does not permit a foreign entity to control content.  On the other hand, China has been very open to foreign investments in printing, production, and advertising.  This approach has not found many takers.

There is something faintly surreal talking to the next generation of China’s leaders - who are very savvy and mobile-ready - about a media structure that is bound to fall at some time under its own weight.  Time is compressed in all walks of life in China.  Magazine publishing in the U.S. has grown and matured over the last 100 years.  There was time to get the metrics right and to learn how best to respond to the threats from radio, television and even the early stage Internet.  In China much of this has happened in a generation and for its accomplishments the country should receive considerable credit.  Compared to twenty years ago China seems a vast, open marketplace where one can buy almost any media product, either legal or pirated.

Of course, there’s that Great Wall of China that restricts access to URLs and other destinations the government doesn’t approve of (Free Tibet and the like). James Fallow, correspondent for the Atlantic Magazine has written extensively on how you can get around Internet censors by using proxy servers or a virtual private network.  The latter is a necessary tool for international businesses in China.

The government can’t monitor everything and even with up to 100,000 Internet police, doesn’t really try to.  As others have noted, the presence of censorship encourages self-censorship and that is the government’s most powerful tool.

I mentioned to students at Stanford that China has some advantages.  China has 500 million mobile phones, impressive 3G and 4G, global leadership in Internet usage, and a consumer willingness to pay for mobile content.  Where technology has leveled the marketplace, China has an advantage.  On the other hand, the nation is at a severe disadvantage with its thousands of unprofitable consumer magazines, many still subsidized by the government in one way or the other.

On March 31, 2009 the State Administration of Radio, Film, and TV in China issued rules for online video content.  There are about twenty regulations, some harking back to earlier laws, some impressively medieval, and all showing how nervous the government is about the onslaught of online video that is viral, ubiquitous and hard to control.  I’ll cite just one: “Promotion of unhealthy content, including extramarital affairs, love triangles, one-night stands, sexual abuse and wife-swapping.”  And, just in case you didn’t get the message, any “Content that violates the spirit of the law and regulations” is also prohibited.

China has a very steamy book trade where, as I understand it, all the above vices and more are dealt with in the most refreshing detail.  But these scenes are not in the middle of the public eye and are of less concern to censors.

A recent article in the NYT (“U.S. Media See a Path to India in China’s Snub,” May 4, 2009) suggests that international media companies are tiring of China’s unpredictable regulation of media.  Time Warner is pulling back from opening 200 retail stores in China.  Warner Brothers didn’t even bother to put “The Dark Night” in front of censors because they knew it wouldn’t pass muster.  On the other hand SpongeBob SquarePants is all the rage.

In the above piece Tim Arago writes that “for media companies, frustrations have been growing. For several years China has capped the number of foreign films that can be shown in theaters at 20.”

But China’s loss is India’s gain. The Motion Picture Association of America just opened an office in Mumbai.  Viacom made a large investment in India in 2008 with Colors “which has become the top-rated entertainment network.”

Perhaps the shift to India is a necessary corrective.  China’s media have held out a lot of false promises over the years even to the well-connected like Rupert Murdoch.  When last in Beijing I spoke to Chinese friends about the movie Kung Fu Panda.  They asked, somewhat perplexed: “Why wasn’t this move made in China?  My friends are now asking: “when will China make its own “Slumdog Millionaire?”

I’ll leave that answer to the students at Stanford.

Charles McCullagh