Fortune Global Forum Offers the Highest Stage to (Some) Foreign Media Leaders
SHANGHAI --- Global media executives rubbed shoulders at the three-day Fortune Global Forum held in Shanghai at the end of September hoping to make inroads to the world's largest TV market. CMM-I's Shanghai Correspondent watched them perform.
The 5th Fortune Global Forum was sponsored by Fortune Magazine owned by Time Warner Inc., with its own multiple aspirations for the Chinese market. Time Warner Inc. President and CEO Gerald M. Levin and Vice President Ted Turner both attended.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin (who controls 100% of media holdings in China), was aiming to spur dwindling foreign investment and delivered the key speech at the opening banquet attended by more than 800 representatives, including chairs, presidents and chief executive officers from 300 multinational companies and 200 Chinese entrepreneurs.
While Turner told the audience he has become "the richest person who ever worked for someone else", Sumner M. Redstone, chairman and CEO of Viacom International Inc., noted that its MTV brand was now being watched by over 40 million families in China.
Luckily, neither were arrested. In China "to get rich is glorious" and MTV's programs currently reach those households through limited windows in fringe time, not as a bone fide channel.
Meanwhile, Mr. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, shared the secrets of how to become a millionaire, saying the success of a company depends on its capability of opening up new businesses before competitors do the same. For most of the Chinese entrepreneurs present (chuckling to themselves), this was taken to mean that success comes to those who open up new businesses before the government can regulate them.
While and after all this was going on, Jiang Zemin met separately with Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Gerald M. Levin, president and CEO of Time Warner Inc, as well as entrepreneurs from various other multinational companies.
Time Warner also managed a meeting with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji tempting some wags to comment that Time Warner was playing the kowtow game.
Seeking to refute such claims on his way to Beijing to take part in festivities to mark China's 50th year of communist rule, Ted Turner took a swipe at rival media titan Rupert Murdoch describing him as someone who "brown-nosed" and "kowtows" to mainland officials. At least they can make a comparison now.
In fact, it is impossible to avoid accusations of "kissing the horses bottom" when involved in such events. For example, was Viacom's later announcement that it is to fund a scholarship at the Chinese Music Academy a practical initiative designed for musicians or a naïve endorsement of socialist youth art and culture policy under the CPC.
For observers of western media players in China, the forum was as notable for the absence of News Corporation as for the prominent attendance of the above US players. Not that it matters much, since other luminaries in the Chinese hierarchy were preparing for President Jiang's visit to UK with a much extended session as News' guests in London.
With uncertainty facing the internet business and no official signs that foreign participants are close to strategic breakthroughs in highly regulated media industries, the event was, above all, a fine example of the contradictions of the China market as we head into unchartered territory again.