China.com?

• Author: Wolff, Diane P.
• Position: China's policy towards media and Western telecommunications companies

It has become clear in recent years that one of the most nerve-racking dilemmas that Chinese government officials face is reconciling the need for openness in the media with the inherent dangers such openness portends for party control. This is an especially vexing problem when it comes to dealing with Western telecommunications companies.

When media baron Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp. faced steep losses in its Asian satellite television business, it fashioned a joint venture between News Corp.'s Hong Kong-based Star TV (Satellite Television Asian Region) and Chinese state-owned companies, including China's sole national broadcaster, China Central Television. The Chinese government, however, did not want Murdoch beaming programming into China from Hong Kong without official supervision. In order to gain access to China's lucrative advertising market, Murdoch agreed to drop the BBC's World Service Television News from Star's broadcasts into China. According to the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly (February 5, 1996), the change in programming occurred after Beijing "expressed unhappiness" with the BBC service.

The recent flap over Kundun, the new Disney film about Tibet directed by Martin Scorsese, ended rather differently. Beijing attempted publicly to chastise the American entertainment company, hoping to use Disney's goal to build a theme park in China as leverage against the release of the film. But when a group of Hollywood's creative elite held a widely covered press conference at which they released a public letter of protest to Chinese Ambassador Li Daoyu - and which Reuters then published on the Internet - the Chinese backed down.

Doubtless there will be more contests over such matters, not least because Time Warner, CNBC, Discovery Communications Inc., and U.S. Children's Television Workshop (which will produce a local version of "Sesame Street" in Shanghai) have recently entered into joint ventures with the Chinese government. So has Microsoft, whose Windows 95 will become the standard platform in China (32-bit processing is necessary for computing in Chinese characters). NBC, CNN, and Dow Jones, too, will sell programming to the Chinese without entering into joint ventures with China's state-owned companies. All face the threat of censorship in one guise or another, and how they react could well have an important influence on official Chinese media policy writ large.

Nowhere is the dilemma posed by new media technology more...