First saw this news from Shanghaiist, which has kept up with excellent, timely news updates on the situation in Sichuan:

It’s early Monday morning and the China twitterati are abuzz with the news that all major Chinese web sites have been ordered to shutdown for the three days of national mourning which begins today. Here is an announcement sent out by the government in Hefei, Anhui, followed by Shanghaiist’s translation. Good reason to believe similar announcements have been sent in other provinces and municipalities:

The news has also popped up on the newswires. From AP:

Chinese news portal sina.com said the government had ordered all visitors to online entertainment and game pages to be redirected to Web sites dedicated to commemorating earthquake victims.

Reuters:

The national flag in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing flew at half mast after a ceremony at dawn. The Olympic torch relay, currently on its domestic leg ahead of the August 8 opening in Beijing, will likewise be suspended for three days.

But there was an interesting quote from that Reuters story.

“It’s a good idea but maybe it’s a bit early,” said Zhou Wanli of the national state of mourning, sitting in the back of a truck heading into Beichuan.

“All we can care about for the time being is finding our relatives. We don’t want to memorialize them if we don’t even know if they’re alive or dead,” he said

Indeed - why so soon? Rescue efforts are still underway, after all. Video-sharing sites will be affected by this directive. One could imagine that it’s an attempt to rein in videos and pictures of the quake taken by bystanders, which are spreading virally across the net. If so, it’s a really clever move by the government - folding a propaganda directive into an unassailable moment of national bonding.

Update: Just checked out Tudou and Youku, the top video sites. They’re only showing quake videos on their front pages, including user-generated, non-CCTV vids. Other videos are all still online, you need only search for them. Guess that puts paid to my little theory.

A survey on foreign print media brands in China by Interfax came via the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club’s mailing list the other day. Its key finding was this: 83% of Chinese college students prefer foreign media brands.

Fons Tuinstra at China Herald quickly blogged his objections, intimating that the people at the Russian news agency had been inhaling psychotropic substances:

it is a pity we do not know who they have been asking the questions, since that often defines what kind of answers you get.

Fons may have been too busy to read the press release’s third paragraph, which said: “To further explore this inherent brand advantage our sector analysts conducted a focused exploratory survey amongst Chinese college students.”

Then he says media has never been part of the WTO process. But the Hong Kong Trade Development Council seems to suggest the contrary (see also this article in China Daily, though admittedly it’s not the most reliable source of information).

Fons is right, though, when he says advertising revenues have dropped in the print media. This Asia Sentinel article by a media consultant says newspapers like Beijing Youth Daily are losing revenue to online classifieds and outdoor advertising, although the overall growth in the industry is still strong.

He refers to a 2005 survey [download it at China Herald here] by Guo Liang, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on Chinese internet user behavior. He says the survey found that only 3% of the surveyed users said they look at online foreign content. The actual survey, however, says this:

Language: Internet users spend 85% of their time [emphasis mine] on mainland Chinese content, 8% of their time on overseas Chinese content, 4% of their time on mainland foreign-language content, and 3% of their time on overseas foreign-language content.

3% of time spent on overseas-produced (hosted?) foreign-language content is quite different from 3% of users having any interest in foreign content. Additionally, Guo Liang’s survey says this about perceptions of foreign media:

Generally, people trust the domestic news more than the foreign news, and they trust television, newspapers and the radio more than online news. Among the respondents, 88.6% trust domestic television, 79% trust domestic newspapers, 74.9% trust domestic radio, 58.9% trust foreign television, 45% trust the foreign radio, 43.9% trust domestic online news, and 29.6% trust foreign online news.

So about half the people surveyed said they trusted mainstream foreign media, and about a third trust foreign online news. The spread between that and the number of people who trust local media is not huge.

So if local internet users trust foreign media only slightly less for their news, which is a broader set of people, then is it plausible that in the narrower set of college students, that they merely have a preference for foreign media brands? It’s difficult to say but at least it puts Interfax’s 83% figure in context. And Fons, put your smokes away!

I’ve cut and pasted the Interfax press release after the cut (minus the little graph that came with it) (more…)

We carried a bit of news today in the daily briefs about a major victory in the global intellectual property rights battle. Karaoke lounge owners are - perhaps reluctantly! - coming to the rescue of the beleaguered record companies. KTV lounges will have to pay a karaoke copyright fee starting some time later this year. Boybands that have been buried by the sands of time - I’m talking to you, Michael Learns To Rock - rejoice!

Another Wall Street Journal-related post. There’s been a lot of talk lately about Murdoch lifting the Online Journal’s paywall. In an August 8 conference call with analysts and investors, he was asked whether he had been thinking about it. His reply: “Yes, we are currently debating that, both within Dow Jones and in News Corporation and we’ve certainly come to no decision yet. It would be a very, I think be an expensive thing to do in the short-term. In the long-term, it may be a wonderful thing to do. But we’re looking at it closely.”

A free Journal would certainly be a boon to those of us interested in China, because the Journal, and Dow Jones newswires, has some of the best English-language coverage of the business and political scene here. If you read our daily briefs, you might have clicked on a few links to Journal stories, only to be stopped in your tracks by their paywall. Let’s hope Murdoch wins the argument and lets the Journal go free. Along with increased traffic, and the argument goes, increased ad revenue, a free-to-read Journal also means increased influence, which is something Murdoch has never been quick to turn down.

Here are some related links exploring the argument of a paid versus free Journal. Murdoch’s decision on this could well affect the way all media think about paywalls, since the Times’ walled-off section, Times Select, is reportedly faltering now as well.

Businessweek: The Case for Freeing the WSJ Online - According to this article, the Journal could make more than the Times in online ad revenues because it’s more targeted.

Silicon Alley Insider: Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers Are Screwed - Henry Blodget, a man who knows a little about fiddling with numbers, runs a thought experiment using the New York Times.

Seeking Alpha: Murdoch, Free The Wall Street Journal Online - Blogvangelist Jeff Jarvis highlights the attractiveness of the influence argument on Murdoch’s decision.

During the News Corp-Dow Jones takeover period, the Journal published an article on its parent company’s history that was both entertaining and contained a bit that was relevant to reporting on China today. Here’s the passage:

In those days, a financial journalist was a combination private detective, stenographer and gossip columnist.”Gathering news was a bare-knuckle business,” wrote Oliver Gingold, who joined Dow Jones in 1900 and stayed for six decades. “Many companies refused to issue annual reports even to their own stockholders.” Reporters spent long hours “waiting outside directors’ rooms or corporate offices for a chance at buttonholing an ‘insider.’” Messengers shadowing the reporters ran the news back to the office where scribes made carbon copies — as many as 24 at a time — that were hand delivered to subscribers.

Remember NYT business journalist David Barboza’s detention in a toy factory (his story on that was headlined ‘My Time as a Hostage, And I’m a Business Reporter’)? And he’s a foreign correspondent with relative freedom to report. Local journalists who want to dig deep must surely be even more ‘bare-knuckle’ in their approach.

Highlights from the last week of China business news: The Olympics countdown begins, and spin doctors get out their toolkits; the central bank warns of more rate hikes to keep inflation in check, even as trading accounts proliferate.

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The Financial Times had a good story last week by Mure Dickie and former China Economic Review editor Jamil Anderlini on the institutionalized payoffs for journalists at media events in China – euphemistically known as “travel money” or “hongbao” after the red packets of lucky money children receive at Chinese New Year. This quote made me chuckle, though:

“It’s awful. It’s an embarrassment for Chinese journalism . . . and it’s corruption,” says Ying Chan, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. “It’s not that journalists endorse this – people live with it knowing it is wrong.”

(more…)

We’ve been fans of Danwei FM, the sporadically produced web radio program on Danwei.org, for some time. The format is pretty minimal - one-on-one interviews with people who do business in China on their views and experiences - and it plain works.

Now, thanks to iTV-Asia, which in its about section calls itself “Asia’s first internet television network for business executives,” there is a fairly regular, similarly no-frills video webcast of business interviews. The company was originally Japan-based and -focused, but relaunched its website last month with an initial focus on China. There are already a number of interviews on file, with more to come. Here JWT China CEO and CER columnist Tom Doctoroff interviews Donald Chan of Leo Burnett China, and here Edward Gwinn of DE Global interviews Philip Branham of B&L Group. Check it out.

I didn’t read the South China Morning Post on Saturday. Fortunately, Imagethief did… and turned up this:

It is a work by artist Liu Yuyi and his daughter, Liu Haomei, painted to mark the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Measuring 7.1 meters by 2.8 meters, Halcyon Days Pearl is Hong Kong’s largest painting.

It depicts President Hu Jintao surrounded by a selection of Hong Kong’s great and good with Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang quite literally standing there as Hu’s right hand man. If SAR critics are looking for more “Beijing’s poodle” material to lob at Tsang, this could be it.

Liu said he wanted to include people of different political views, which explains the appearance of Cardinal Joseph Zen, Bishop of Hong Kong, Anson Chan, former chief secretary to the SAR, and Alan Leong, the Civic Party candidate who lost out to Tsang in March’s controlled election. Tycoons such as Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho earn spots much closer to Hu.

According to the SCMP article, the background of the painting includes Mount Everest (presumably without a road running up the side) as a symbol of mainland China’s support for Hong Kong.

Imagethief makes two interesting comparisons: one to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the other to Mao-era propaganda art.

Parallels are drawn between the positioning of Hu amongst the Hong Kong’s elite and Mao in his classic poses surrounded by the proletariat. Similarities can also been seen in the use of positive imagery.

My first thought was that this kind of iconography might be intended as ironic. Apparently not, it seems.

Imagethief’s closing remark is to ask what Hong Kong people might think of it (or where to hang it). I’d also be interested to find out what Beijing’s take on it is. When the official message for the handover anniversary is likely to be along the lines of social and cultural inclusiveness combined with mutual economic gain, it can’t be good PR to have someone drag up images that remind many Hong Kong people of what made them leave the mainland in the first place.

Lately we’ve begun including news stories from Chinese-language sources in our daily briefs. Today, one of those briefs was on the 17-hour episode from the weekend in which seven Chinese citizens in Islamabad, Pakistan were kidnapped by Islamic radicals. An interesting discrepancy turns up when reading Chinese and foreign media on the incident: International reports say that the hostages were abducted from the massage parlor where they worked, which the kidnappers, accusing them of “immoral activities”, believed doubled as a brothel. Chinese media reports of the incident, however, either don’t mention what they were doing (saying they were taken from their homes) or say they worked at a “clinic” (诊所).