Broadcasters Open the Door for Distributors, SARFT Closes it and Takes the Key, Rest of the World Talks WTO Opening

BEIJING & CHENGDU --- The last major TV event in China this century, the SCTVF held in Chengdu in late October is also the last in a decade of trade events which have characterized Chinese TV's uneasy relationship with their foreign counterparts.

Without a program competition for the second time, the SCTVF is certainly geared towards business with its Program Market and Equipment Exhibition, but it is a business which is evolving all the time and may not exist in this form in two years time. As suggested in the previous issue of China Media Monitor, this year the main Chinese buyers at the SCTVF program market were Program Centers and independent distributors. The decline in direct sales to TV stations is a result of the stations' "sale" of their import quota licenses to independent companies as they continue to implement the central policy of dividing production from broadcast.

However, the growing incidence of these "grey area" transfers of import licenses has not escaped the attention of the government regulator SARFT which had previously looked leniently on the joint collection and sale of quota licenses by groups representing regional TV stations.

CMM-I sources in Beijing report that SARFT has decided that it will take back the censorship role which precedes issuing of an import license, which was partly ceded to the regional RFT Bureaux, and once again act as the national censor for imported films and TV dramas. By taking back control, SARFT is in effect admitting that its latest attempt to de-centralize import regulations have failed and that it has no realistic alternative to centralized control.

For distributors, many of which are not officially licensed as distributors (but with a friendly station's license, who needs to be?), the move is likely to come as very bad news indeed.

Meanwhile, for the broadcasters who have just started becoming used to jobs as commissioners and schedulers, the re-centralization of censorship procedures means once again filling their days with bureaucratic activities and frequent trips to Beijing.

For SARFT itself, the added responsibility and workload is hardly welcome. Indeed, what must now be described as "the frequent failed attempts" to devolve control to the provinces have largely been based on the overwhelming need to resolve the bottleneck that currently exists at national level.

So, it may all be back to Square One. Which, despite the buoyant activities of foreign distributors signing agreements in Chengdu with companies that had not heard about SARFT's actions, was the strange feeling that pervaded the whole Festival. Is it really a decade since the first SCTVF? And what has really changed?

The main change, of course, is hardly covered at all within the scope of the SCTVF and that would seem to be the problem with the TV industry in general. The Internet is the hottest sector worldwide and recent WTO announcements seem to suggest that China may behave more reasonably towards foreign investment in this area.

But queuing for the escalators in Chengdu behind 12 year old delegates studying copies of Television Asia, it suddenly struck this delegate that maybe all the international media players waiting to get into China have missed the boat, and the plot, altogether.

Maybe, international history will pass by the Chinese TV industry leaving only footnotes to the companies that have invested the last ten years doing everything they can to break down barriers. Maybe, the most powerful medium of the 20th century was just not powerful enough.