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CHINA
Beijing
clamps down on foreign television
China disclosed on Wednesday that it had frozen approvals for foreign
satellite broadcasters entering its market and would strengthen restrictions
on foreign television programs, books, newspapers and performances in an
effort to exercise tighter control over the country's cultural life.
"Import of cultural products contrary to regulations will be
punished according to the circumstances, and in serious cases the import
license will be revoked," the rules, which were issued on Tuesday,
stated. "In the near future, there will be no more approvals for
setting up cultural import agencies."
Viacom, the U.S. television and entertainment conglomerate that owns MTV
China, is one of three foreign broadcasters that have secured rights to
broadcast to selected Chinese audiences. The other two are Star TV, owned by
News Corp., and Phoenix Satellite Television, based in Hong Kong.
Other broadcasters, like CNN and BBC World, can broadcast into hotels and
residential compounds used by foreigners or have joint ventures with Chinese
state-run television stations.
Many multinational companies, including Time Warner and Sony, have sought
deals in China.
The new rules were announced by the Propaganda Department, the Ministry
of Culture and four other regulators and appeared in the Chinese press on
Wednesday. They will make it more difficult for foreign companies to bring
in foreign books, Internet and video games and performing acts at a time
many multinational companies are turning to China's burgeoning market for
growth.
Co-productions by Chinese and foreign film and television companies will
face stricter censorship, foreign magazines and newspapers can be sold only
through state-controlled agencies, and imported Internet games face
strengthened censorship.
"In principle, there will be no more domestic approvals for foreign
satellite television channels," the rules also state, "and we will
thoroughly strengthen administration of foreign broadcasters that have
already set down."
Analysts and broadcasters said the rules were part of a wider effort to
clamp down on foreign influence over mass culture in China.
"They're part of a broader trend in broadcasting and the cultural
industry," said David Wolf, a Beijing-based expert on China's media for
Burson-Marsteller, the public relations company. "They add greater
clarity and specificity to rules we already know but weren't as clear."
In early July, China issued a ban on Chinese broadcasters and foreign
investors' jointly operating television channels, and earlier in the year
the government froze Chinese-foreign co-productions of television shows.
Wolf said the new rules were part of a "cyclical" chill on
China's cultural industries, partly spurred by the promotion of a new boss
at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Wang Taihua, a
former provincial official more attuned to increasingly conservative
political winds than to industry interests. In 12 to 18 months, Chinese
officials may again begin to relax their controls, he said.
The regulations may also be part of an effort to repair what one Chinese
report recently called the "cultural trade deficit." In recent
years, China has authorized publication of more than 12,000 foreign books in
Chinese translations, but only 81 Chinese books have secured foreign
publishing rights, said the report, which appeared in China Comment, a
magazine run by the state-run Xinhua news agency.
Li Yifei, the China representative of Viacom, said the new rules were
"basically in line" with a trend toward more hands-on regulation
of broadcasters and television content. "Basically, it's trying to
define what ministries are responsible for what categories of media,"
she said. "They're trying to communicate what their expectations
are." - by Chris Buckley INTERNATIONAL
HERALD TRIBUNE 4 August 2005
What's on TV in China? More than
you think
Last year's World Press Freedom
report by the group Reporters without Borders ranks China 161st among 166
nations, somewhere between Iran and North Korea. But Chinese television fare
at least no longer consists of the prudish melodramas and clumsy
indoctrination programmes of the Maoist past. Casual observers of today's
freewheeling offerings of sex, crime, drugs, violence and banal game shows
might come away with the impression that most of the shackles have been
removed.
To be sure, this impression
disappears if one focuses on explicit political content. Viewpoints that
deviate in the slightest from the Communist Party doctrine are still absent.
But the sheer volume of programming makes maintaining control difficult.
China Central Television alone has 12 channels and employs about 3,000
people. It falls under the control of the Propaganda Department and the
Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television. Numerous provincial and municipal
TV stations are also required to carry some CCTV programming. This
combination represents a vast administrative undertaking. Given the amount
of programming, content monitoring must be implemented with maximum
efficiency.
Censorship has been made easier by
the government's decision in the 1990s to shift to a free-market strategy
for entertainment products. The new "sink or swim" approach forced
TV outlets to compete for advertising revenue, resulting in programming with
greater mass appeal. Thus, the government simply relinquished much control
over the moral component of TV content. Perhaps realising that an
entertained and distracted populace is less likely to complain about public
policy, the party has allowed entertainment programming to follow the
western model, lessening the need for micro-managed censorship.
The result is a de facto separation
between news and everything else. This conveniently allows the authorities
to control news programming with an iron hand while relegating the bulk of
programming to a less labour-intensive monitoring system.
The first surprise I encountered
while working for CCTV as a programme planner was how minimal this system
is. Top-down directives and outright censorship are rare. Few written
guidelines exist. Officials do not hover over each step of the process, and
virtually no cutting of completed products is carried out on party orders.
On the surface, writers, directors and performers seem free to plan and
produce their shows. So how does such a system block offending content?
First and foremost, the system is
largely reactive. The department heads and oversight committees seldom
dictate content, but merely pass their complaints and recommendations down
to programming heads. The top-down hierarchy is autocratic and arbitrary;
lower levels have little collaborative input and no right of appeal. In
effect, the system has become largely self-regulating.
Vague but pervasive intimidation is
the main factor keeping TV personnel in line. But another force serves the
party's interests as well: the deep-seated Chinese cultural inertia that
stresses collectivist, group-oriented behaviour. In such an atmosphere,
inclusion of politically incorrect content is not merely a risky move, but
constitutes a breach of social decorum.
The exceptions to this state of
affairs are when the party initiates a propaganda campaign, such as the one
associated with the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, or the more recent anti-Falun
Gong blitzkrieg. At such times, directives are issued to produce programming
with specific ideological content.
Many TV producers have internalised
these controls so well that they are an unconscious fact of life, and
audiences entertained by endless costume dramas and soap operas are not
clamouring for freer political content. Barring some catastrophic change,
this method of information control can be expected to continue well into the
21st century.
David Moser has taught translation and linguistics at the Beijing
Foreign Studies University, and is currently a programme adviser and English
consultant at CCTV in Beijing.
This article was published in the SOUTH
CHINA MORNING POST on 11 Aug 2004
Bored in Manhattan? Tune into TV
Guangdong
A Guangzhou-based TV station has ambitions to
become the first global broadcaster in Cantonese.
Its 24-hour satellite channel, launching this
year, will target the southern Chinese diaspora in Europe and North America
and, closer to home, in Southeast Asia.
Guangdong Southern Television will launch its
TVS-2 channel - a mix of drama, films and news - over an Asia Satellite
Telecommunication satellite in the second- half of the year.
"Our immediate aim is to serve all
Cantonese-speaking viewers in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas
markets in Asia. It is important for us to venture from Guangdong into
overseas Cantonese markets," a Southern Television spokesman said
yesterday.
Another industry source familiar with the plan
said the company intended to extend the channel's range to North America and
Western Europe, where it hoped it would be popular with Cantonese immigrants
and their children.
For decades, Guangdong broadcasters have fought a
rearguard action against Hong Kong's two terrestrial Cantonese-language
channels, ATV and TVB, whose broadcast "footprint" covers large
swathes of the province.
With no market on the mainland for Cantonese
programming outside Guangdong, Southern TV's bold overseas gambit is a
logical - but also unexpected - counterstrike.
It will also be self-funded. "Foreign
investment will not be considered under the current plan," said a
source at the Guangdong Administration of Radio, Film and Television.
Southern TV is a unit of the Guangdong provincial
government's recently established Southern Broadcasting Media Group.
- By Sidney Luk SOUTH
CHINA MORNING POST 13 Apr
2004
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