AOL's and News Corp's China Deals are 'Hollow with Strings Attached'
BEIJING --- Hailed as a landmark agreement in the West and in China, the deal US media giants AOL Time Warner and News Corp struck earlier this month with the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) is, at a closer look, far from being revolutionary. Rather, it represents both sides partially successful manipulation of the news media to suit their very different communist and capitalist agendas.
In the wake of the agreement, journalists from New York to London were enthusiastically predicting that US cultural symbols such as the Simpsons, Friends and Seinfeld would soon be available to many Chinese households, paving the way for similar agreements for other Western media corporations.
Given the lack of interest in such shows among Chinese audiences, the hype surrounding the deal proves that with its 1.3 billion inhabitants, China has, more than any other market in the world, captured the mind and dreams of international media corporations, dazzled by the profit prospects such a large population offers.
International players in the TV industry have, for the most part, acknowledged China as one of the main markets of the 21st century, despite the fact that broadcasting of foreign programs has, until today, been stringently regulated by the Chinese authorities and submitted to various quotas.
In reality, southern parts of China such as Guangdong province have had access in recent years to foreign-backed channels. Notably, News Corp’s Phoenix Satellite Television and Star TV and AOL Time Warner’s CETV have made their entry into regular Chinese homes due to the proximity of Hong Kong, and the distance that separates the southern regions from Beijing.
Given the above, what is really new in the recent deal between the western media mammoths and the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV that regulates the industry?
Practically, Beijing is offering News Corp and AOL Time Warner the rights to broadcast to regional cable television viewers in parts of Guangdong. As described, far from representing a breakthrough, AOL’s Hong-Kong based CETV, as well as News-backed Phoenix TV, obtained, de facto ‘grey area” permission to be seen in Guangdong following the Hong Kong hand over in 1997.
The recent deal only formalises a situation that was until now tacitly accepted by SARFT in Beijing. For such a huge “concession” the Chinese government is asking the two media corporations to ensure wide access in the US for CCTV-9, the English-language channel of China’s main state television network and the Chinese Communist Party's main international propaganda weapon.
According to a spokesman for SARFT: “ We have agreed that they can broadcast in parts of Guangdong, but not all the province. There are limits. We hope that that the two companies will help us get CCTV-9, the English channel, into the United States”. This fits in well with the Chinese government’s PR effort vis-a-vis the US public and serves the domestic political agenda as there has been no concession in terms of western penetration into China at all while offering WTO-related hopes of concessions internationally.
A spokesman for SARFT was quoted as saying that “many Chinese understand the United States, but Americans don’t know much about China. This is not good for understanding between our countries.”
A cynic might point out that the assertion that the Chinese know or understand the US is questionable at best. If efforts to promote China’s image in the US and increase the understanding between the two countries are laudable, the degree of interest US viewers will show for an English-language Chinese channel offering a mixture of cookery classes, language lessons and state-sponsored propaganda is open for debate. Meanwhile, the huge Chinese community living in the US are already being served by the Chinese language international channel, CCTV-4.
If the concessions the Chinese government made to the two US companies have entailed little work on its part and virtually no real weakening of its control on television programming, the US companies are facing a different dilemma.
News Corp. in particular is in a tricky situation, since Star TV does not operate a cable television network in the US, so faces problems in fulfilling the Chinese requirement to broadcast CCTV-9 in the US. This problem would be solved by News Corp's proposed acquisition of American satellite television operator DirectTV.
While the deal between the US giants and SARFT is not "a landmark agreement" and one that hugely favors China, the hype behind it maybe partly justified. After all, such an agreement was unthinkable when it first happened a few years ago and might set a precedent for similar deals to be upgraded to "open status" in the future.
Never before in the history of Chinese television, which Beijing considers as an integral part of its propaganda apparatus, have foreign TV channels been allowed to be aired in the mainland to regular Chinese homes. Until now, foreign-owned channels such as BBC World, CNN, NBC and their like were restricted to mainly luxury hotels and foreign compounds, as remote as possible from the reach of the Chinese public.
The Hongkong-based deal AOL & News Corp struck with SARFT represents, although maybe only symbolically, a qualitative step in the history of TV reforms in China. China is changing, albeit slowly and cautiously when it comes to media, but it is changing.