Global media corporations and the People’s Republic of China

‘All global media houses have ambitions in China, and I believe the market will be fully opened up in two to three years.’
(Zhang Li, Xibu Film Corp. executive, quoted in Luk 2004c).

‘To reiterate, the central force in bringing about the development of the Chinese economic giant is foreign companies.’
(Watanabe Toshio, Dean, Faculty of International Development, Takushoku University).1

The research literature on globalization, culture and media began exploding a decade or more ago (e.g. Schiller 1991, 1993; Robertson 1992; Featherstone 1995; Appadurai 1996; Castells 1996-98). At this point in time, it has turned into a flood that shows little sign of abating. This is all right, on one level: as Robertson proposed in his 1992 book, taking nation-states or societies as the basic unit of social analysis is a contestable decision, and the more we engage with global processes, the better we shall be able to grasp the vectors governing our lives. That argument appears to be won by now, and there is little doubt that everyday experiences of media and telecommunications have both directly and indirectly validated Robertson’s plea.

The problem as I see it is that the argument may have been won too quickly, in the sense that globalization has become the ‘new new thing’, and that consequently everyone and his or her dog has leapt into action with something to say, or bark, on the subject. We then get treated to endless half-baked global commentary, often concocted by individuals whose dogs really may have more sense of the rest of the world than their owners. So we get endless disquisitions on the generalities of ‘the death of distance’, ‘time-space compression’, ‘cultural annihilation’, ‘digitized media convergence’, all of which are worth discussing, but only if the hot-air balloons they are floating in are yanked down to earth and securely tethered.

What is therefore proposed in this article is the urgency at this point of disaggregating our analyses in globalization research, and here will try to do so in relation to global media industries relation to contemporary China. Hopefully in the near future, if we all do this well, it will be time to construct more carefully qualified and differentiated conceptual constructs to address globalization processes. But in my view, that task has been prematurely and too often purely speculatively attacked. This does not mean that in disaggregating, we have to act as though different communication industries and the roles of different nations and regions were divorced from each other, or as though nominalism were in and conceptually based analysis were out, or as though politics did not matter. It only means that the disutility of sweeping assertions about the globalization process - except for this one - is now terminal.

Therefore, we propose that we make a habit of differentiating between different communication and media industries operating on the global stage, for example between content providers and infrastructure providers, even in cases where a single corporation may operate in multiple fields. A perfect recent example is Viacom, which within a period of four months wound up its Blockbuster video-stores in the PRC and announced a co-production contract with the Shanghai Media Group, the first since the new rules for foreign partnerships went into effect. That this was no index of panic or disorganization is probably indicated by the fact that Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone also recently made his sixth annual major business visit to the PRC. A different example, though not from China, is the TimeWarner story, with its largely failed AOL merger, which may be taken as an instance of the victory of multiple vectors over the frequently simplistic unifying logic of corporate mergers.

We also propose that we engage with both the regional and country dynamics that affect global communication industries, and cease relying so heavily on U.S.-based trade magazine sources of information which inevitably tend to explore what they know best, and so often overstate the U.S. role to the exclusion of the Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean roles in particular. Watanabe has pointed out that while trade and investment inside the East Asian region constituted 23% of the region’s economy in 1980, by the year 2000 this figure had risen to 40%. He also claims that some 70% of foreign direct investment in China in the period 1992-2000 appears to have come from Chinese sources in South East Asia, especially Taiwan, Singapore and until 1997, Hong Kong. He further claims that some 70% of China’s telecommunication equipment production is financed by Taiwanese capital (2002: 12). We shall see in a moment how important South Korea may soon be in China’s telecoms and Internet development. On the other hand, although there were waves of Japanese investment in China in the mid-80s and early 90s, its overall level is quite low (Shin-ya & Masaki 2002).

Furthermore, we have rather little expertise concerning the contemporary PRC economy’s dynamics, but it would in my view be a serious mistake to see global corporations as poised to ride roughshod over the PRC. US Senator William Beveridge’s call to ‘batter down’ China’s doors in order to open it to U.S. firms is a century old now, and while there may be a continuity of ultimate purpose linking his cry to current corporations’ strategies to wrest access to China’s market and labour-force, the terms have drastically shifted.

Notably they have shifted in the last two years since China’s WTO accession, with numerous accommodations in company law, especially to attract foreign investment in high tech industries (Kuzmik & Tan 2004)2 – including therefore several media industries – and to begin to develop a much larger body of more highly trained managers. A key difference, however, between developing, let us say, investment banking, and developing media industries is the question of media content, an issue we shall see illustrated in several respects in what follows.

The media industries spectrum
David Hesmondhalgh, in his very useful book The Cultural Industries (2002: 12-14), lists the following as core cultural industries: advertising and marketing, broadcasting, cinema, ISPs, the music industries, publishing, and video games. He also lists a further set, which he defines as ‘borderline’ cultural industries: sport, consumer media electronics, software, and fashion. Fundamentally, his definition seeks to differentiate between those industries or sectors of industries that create meaning, and those that do not.

While his is a perfectly reasonable way of dividing up the terrain, for the exercise we are engaged in it seems a little (stereotypically) Weberian, and perhaps insufficiently Marxist. Without needing to hare off into the theology of base and superstructure, it does nonetheless make more sense, at least for the present purposes, to include infrastructure in the consideration of media industries, notably the telecommunications, consumer media electronics and software industries, because of their direct implications for the content industries’ avenues for distributing their products. (As indicated, that does not mean we should conflate their specific dynamics.)

Three examples from East Asia, but also farther a field, may help to underpin our argument on this point. One is the very considerable growth and more particularly potential of multi-media messaging UMTS and W-CDMA phone technologies (Taipei Times 2004); a second is the growing use of personal computers to watch films (Kim Tae-jong 2004); and a third is the rapid expansion of advanced broadband technology envisaged by Chinese sources for the growth of online video-gaming in China (Yoo & Kim 2004). We might throw in a fourth, namely the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, themselves highly dependent on the quality and extent of the network (Collier 2004).

Nonetheless, the basic thrust of Hesmondhalgh’s argument, as of others who use the cultural industries framework, is helpful insofar as it underscores the varying dynamics that obtain in different sectors of the media industries, while acknowledging their sometimes complex interrelations. It does not disaggregate, in other words, in a simply nominalist direction.

The ownership of global media
Before diving into some specifics, one more general observation is in order. It is hardly news that Disney, TimeWarner, Sony, Bertelsmann, News Corp., Samsung and a few others are among a relatively small number of media giants straddling the planet. It should not be news, but for some critics of globalization seems to be that the road to this measure of dominance is often very rocky and confused rather than serene and omnipotent. The examples of Vivendi and the unhappy aol/Time Warner Inc. merger indicate this in different ways, as does the collapse of Kirch Media, and the long pilgrimage of Rupert Murdoch to establish his footprint securely in the PRC.

In her analysis of media ownership in Europe, Gillian Doyle (2002: 66-82) has proposed three broad types of merger: vertical and horizontal, which are rather familiar terms, and ‘diagonal,’ signifying a merger between different types of media enterprise, say television and the daily press. Empirically, as she is careful to note (ibid. 79), such mergers may happen for a variety of motivations, such as spreading risk or gaining efficiency or aggrandizing managerial compensation, and with a variety of effects, such as happier shareholders or more significant choices for the public. Indeed, studies of British media companies with television and press holdings indicate that to date few or no ‘synergies’ appear to have been generated from the joint operation (ibid. 118).

Doyle also notes the prevalence of the policy argument in certain countries – always from interested parties! - that the transition to a local media oligopoly or near-monopoly is justified in the name of having the resources to compete in the brutal global market. (Markets we are normally told are benign and brilliant allocators of goods for which we should be humbly grateful, but apparently when they leave home and go global they can shed all that and turn quite vicious - presumably because foreigners are involved). Short-term evidence for the rationality of this argument for oligopoly as in the national interest is still lacking, and the corporations themselves have never, to my knowledge, produced a yardstick against which to measure their assertion. Doyle (ibid., 119) cites one corporate media planning source in support of the argument that in practice it is often smaller, poorly funded media corporations which are the innovators and risk-takers, rather than the mega-corporations which have the resources but often, seemingly, not the needed institutional energy.

These considerations and uncertainties are important as we proceed to consider global corporate media interests in China. We need to move away from any overly unified or purely ratiocinative assumptions about why these corporations currently behave in the ways they do. We will therefore address the current global corporate media scenario in relation to the PRC in the following sequence: telecommunications and Internet infrastructure; film, television and video games; the print industry; advertising; and public relations. This is a vast undertaking, and our intention here is simply to pinpoint as well as we can some of the basic dimensions of the industries in question. A key dimension to hold in mind is not simply current financial returns, but potential future returns. Clearly, this latter prospect is what drives corporate media investors’ interests in the PRC - and just as clearly, some of these ventures will fall by the wayside, even though the prediction as to which is a hazardous venture.

Telecommunications and Internet infrastructure
This sector is the key one at the present time for any analysis of global corporate media interests in the PRC, reflecting the advanced growth side of the Chinese economy, for which telecommunications/internet options are essential for both domestic and international purposes, and for export as well as domestic use. China is the most rapidly growing online market in the world. Its number of Internet subscribers reached 80 million in 2003, second only to 140 million in the United States (Yoo & Kim 2004). The mainland has 68 million web surfers. They are expected to number 142 million by 2007 (Logan & Luk 2004). In 2002, five of the top ten foreign funded taxpayers in the PRC were mobile phone companies (the other five were car manufacturers). Foreign investment in Chinese telecommunications equipment shot up nearly one hundred percent (92.89%, or $US10+ billion to $US20+ billion) in 2002 over the previous year.

There are many examples of telecoms and Internet developments with very considerable future potential. The Chinese leadership has announced that a priority to be achieved if possible by 2015 is a national digital cable network (Young 2004). China’s oil industry leader and the proposed West China Qinghai-Tibet railroad project are Nortel customers.3 The demand does not only come from industry leaders. There is a very large demand from about ten million small and medium mainland firms and 300,000 Hong Kong SME’s as well.4 KT, Korea's biggest telecommunications company completed linking up an international Ethernet network with Hong Kong's Hutchison Global Communications, the territory’s second-largest fixed-line phone operator, which has provided computers in home offices and small businesses with faster network and internet connections (Korea Herald 2004).

Nor is the market simply a business user affair. South Korea’s Internet portal group NHN Corp. signed a cooperative agreement in 2004 with China's largest game portal, SeaRainbow Holding Corp., investing $US100 million to advance into China, the biggest overseas investment ever by a South Korean internet or venture firm. The partners plan to penetrate not only China, but also neighbouring countries, by exchanging technical advances and market experience.

There is also a significant lesson from this story in terms of the dynamics of global media corporation expansion, because this move had a great deal to do with the competitive rivalry between NHN and South Korea’s Plenus Inc., operator of the popular online game portal netmarble.net. Plenus, determined that NHN was not going to colonize the entire East Asian market, signed an agreement with China's largest Internet portal, Sina, to take effect in July 2004. It also signed agreements with South Korea’s food and entertainment giant CJ Group, which now has a controlling stake in Plenus as a result. Meanwhile NHN was announcing its plans to become a major global Internet corporation based in South Korea, China and Japan. This case nicely illustrates how a domestic competitive dynamic may often be at work in pushing these corporations to invest globally (Yoo & Kim 2004).

Multi-media messaging, which enables mobile users to send colour pictures, animation, recorded sound and video 40 times faster than second-generation systems, had only 8 million PRC subscribers in 2003, but experts believe it will expand to an industry worth US$22 billion by 2008 (Taipei Times 2004). Sohu.com Inc., one of China's three large NASDAQ-listed portals, was in hot competition with its leading rivals Sina.com and Netease.com on this front. Sina.com Corp., China's biggest listed Internet media firm, has indicated it will try to become a major MMS presence, even though it is currently said to have only some thousands of MMS users. The future of the MMS industry, however, hinges on how fast the government sets up the needed infrastructure.5

An interesting dimension to the Chinese situation which amply bears out our emphasis earlier on the East Asian region as an active force, is the success of South Korea’s information technology sector6 in getting its high-speed portable internet (HPi) technology adopted in 2004 as the global standard. The U.S. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, while still scheduled to announce so formally, has decided to adopt it as its 802.16e standard, which effectively entails global adoption.7 From the foregoing, the PRC would self-evidently be a major continuing market.

Still focusing on the Internet, it was not only South Korean information technology firms that were eyeing China with great interest. Both Google and Yahoo! were actively involved in trying to gain a foothold in the PRC (Logan & Luk 2004; Collier 2004). Google was aiming for a mainland presence after completing its US$2.71 billion initial public offering, hoping to convert its popularity in China into advertising income. It accounted for 30% of all mainland search inquiries, with the leading local ISP, Baidu.com, pulling in 48%, according to data from Shanghai-based iResearch. It is a very clear example of a firm engaging in a short-term loss strategy in the interests of long-term gain, for Google derived a mere $US1.2 million in revenue from the mainland in 2003, primarily by providing search engine technology to Sina.com. Advertising - which accounted for 95% of the company's US$961.87 million in revenue last year - contributed zero from the PRC.

Yahoo! made two significant deals in China in early 2004. In January, the company teamed up with Sina.com to offer an auction service to Chinese consumers, putting it squarely in competition with EachNet.com, an online auction company backed by eBay. In March, the company paid $US112 million for 3721, the largest of China’s Internet search engines at the time. However, Yahoo! acknowledged that all three of its businesses - online auctions, searches and Internet services - faced significant challenges. China needs rapidly to improve its payment systems, including credit cards and bank transfers, to make the online auction system work as in the West. Moreover, for Internet services such as e-mail and wireless data, the best applications would require large amounts of wireless bandwidth, which as already noted in our discussion of MMS technology, is a key condition for forward movement in this area.

There are of course hazards in foreign investment in Internet expansion. The contradictory position is very well recognized in which the PRC regime is caught, namely between the necessity of expanding Internet connectivity and its absolute priority of trying to maintain political control. It has been clear ever since Murdoch yanked the BBC signal from his satellite service, that there were certain well-defined no-go areas in media and telecommunications, and Google is said already to have had some problems of this kind over which it readily conceded to the Chinese government. Leow (2004a) cites observers as commenting that ‘foreign media companies are so eager not to run foul of the Chinese authorities that they will play strictly by establishment rules and steer clear from any suggestion that they are out to reshape the political landscape.’
In conclusion on the telecommunications/internet sector, this is clearly not an industry where for the most part geo-linguistic areas are a key barrier or support to trade. One of the interesting questions is how far that issue is operative in film and television in the PRC at this point in time.

Film and television
The existence of geo-cultural markets (Sinclair et al., 1996) is a reality, but certainly has not prevented vast circulation of Hollywood films. The story everyone knows on this front is the intellectual property one (Miller et al. 2001: 110-145), with endless but true stories of buying DVDs of new films in Beijing a day or two after release or even before, for a dollar or two (Meredith 2003). Blockbuster’s exit in January 2004 may have been due more to the decline of the video/DVD rental market globally than copyright issues, but they were certainly cited as the reason for the move (Cheng et al., 2004). Videogames are part of this story too: the International Intellectual Property Alliance estimates $US1 billion were lost in China and South Korea alone in 2001 in this sector (Hunt 2002). The MPAA estimates piracy at around 91%, although after WTO accession and with the growth of a domestic industrial interest, this level is said to have been dropping due to new regulatory controls (Chung 2003; Cunningham 2003).

Entry to Chinese airwaves has long been highly problematic. With a few exceptions in Guangdong (MTV, CETV and News Corp.’s Xing Kong Weishi), foreign cable channels were only permitted in 3-star and above hotel rooms. The big change was in December 2003, when SARFT opened up the possibility of joint-venture production firms with 51+% Chinese ownership. The regulation only envisages major global media players as the partners. Pay TV channels can be among such ventures, in order to help fund pay TV and digital TV services. Broadcast foreign films can now be up to one third of the total. Foreign broadcasting as such will continue to operate under current controls, and news programs are off-limits (Straits Times 2004).

Fairly soon afterwards, in March 2004, Viacom announced a partnership, yet to be ratified by the central authorities (which could take up to a year), with the Shanghai Media Group to co-produce television shows for distribution to Shanghai Media's eight million viewers and to other cable networks in China. Viacom also signed a second agreement with CCTV to air two Nickelodeon shows and co-produce Nickelodeon's Kids Choice Awards. Redstone said the two investments were a major step towards the company's eventual plan to distribute MTV throughout China. But nothing is for nothing: Viacom has promised to up its distribution of CCTV's English Channel 9 from the 13,000 U.S. hotel rooms it currently supplies. Furthermore, this is another example of very long-term strategy, for in the short term this investment is hardly a profit-maker: ads bring in currently only some millions of dollars from the PRC, as opposed to hundreds of millions these channels earn in the USA (Collier 2004a). Around the same time U.S.-based Sony Entertainment was engaged in similar talks with CCTV, the Beijing Media Group and the Shanghai Media Group (Luk 2004b), as were the Discovery Channel, Time Warner and Disney (Luk 2004c).

But the action was not all one way (Luk 2004a): the Shanghai Media Group8 was planning a national distribution of pay-television, programming and broadband internet, as well as a business newspaper in conjunction with Guangzhou Daily and Beijing Youth Daily, and offer financial indexes and ratings. The Xibu Film Corp., which produced many of the 5th Generation’s best-known films, had been permitted by SARFT to list its shares on the Shanghai A-list, and was waiting for permission to list its subsidiary, Xiying, on the New York Stock Exchange.

This shift, according to Leow (2004), was not, in many cases, for reasons of investment need. In part it was because of the rather low interest of much domestic TV, and the need to spruce it up to compete with popular foreign products. But crucially, it was because Chinese media companies needed training in how to operate on a much bigger scale and eventually market themselves globally. ‘None of them really knows how a global-minded conglomerate should behave or make money - 'drive profitability', in finance-speak - said Mr Vivek Couto, executive director of Hong Kong-based Media Partners Asia’ (cited in Leow, ibid.). In assessing the dynamics of the global media situation, it is constantly important to acknowledge how long-term strategies and interests may coincide (as well as clash).

Print, advertising and public relations
Here the global corporate interest is as weak as it is strong in telecommunications, Internet, film and television (Leow 2004b; Straits Times 2004). The Chinese daily press has no government subsidies any longer, and hence is stuffed with advertising and advertorials (Taipei Times 2004b). The SEEC Group is planning to expand magazine production vigorously, since capital costs are low, and will search out possible foreign partners in this endeavour, but that is about as far as this sector seems to go in terms of growth at present (Hui Yuk-min 2004). Journalists are seen as corrupt by a great many of their readers, so all in all at this point in time, the print news industry is both barred to foreign investment and unattractive financially anyway.

For some reason, although Hesmondhalgh (2002) includes advertising and marketing in his list of cultural industries, he does not mention public relations. In general, our knowledge of these two industries is much less developed than it needs to be. Not much more can be said at this point other than to flag this fact. We can note that the following advertising firms were present in China already as of 1998, in order of prominence: Saatchi & Saatchi; Ogilvy & Mather; Bates; Leo Burnett; J. Walter Thompson; Grey; Euro RSCG Partnership; D’Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles; FCB Megacom; and DDN.9 In Hong Kong they were Ogilvy & Mather; J. Walter Thompson; DDB Needham; Leo Burnett; McCann Erickson; Guongiang; Bates; Bozzell; Euro RSCG; and Dentsu, Young & Rubicam. Hong Kong evidently has served as a key launch pad, except that its corporate culture and the PRC’s are still very different.

We have been unable to find a similar list of global public relations firms in China, but certainly they have been active, for example Britain’s Bell Pottinger and the U.S. firm Weber Shandwick Worldwide, which played a crucial role in selling Beijing as the site for the 2008 Olympics (Page 2001). Burson-Marsteller, Fleishman-Hillard, Edelman Public Relations are some of the major global players with an active presence in China.

Yang (2002) has produced a very interesting case-study of PetroChina’s relationship with Hill & Knowlton in this regard. Summarizing her study, she emphasizes how previously public relations had essentially meant cultivating good relations with key State and Party officials, and maintaining a steady barrage of the official lines of the day to the workforce. The new business climate entailed communicating with a much larger range of publics, namely investors, shareholders, analysts, business partners, government, media, employees and community. At the same time, up to the period in which she concluded her study, she noted that the communication patterns continued to be more top-down than in the West, still much more concerned (predictably) with cultivating relations with government officials, and more inclined to use personal influence and guanxi as a route to achieving corporate goals. The conclusion to be drawn from her study for present purposes is that for global public relations firms, the PRC will probably continue to offer both considerable opportunities and unusual challenges for some time to come.

Concluding questions
Basically we have three. One is spurred by the argument by Chi Hung Kwan (2002) that China is currently more attractive as a production base than as a market, echoed by Watanabe (2002: 10) who notes that low labour costs in China are precisely the reason why so many IT and telecoms equipment firms have located their midstream activities in China, while keeping the much more profitable upstream and downstream activities at home. The issue here therefore is whether in the broader media zone, low effective demand and therefore advertising revenues will sufficiently support major foreign investment in advertising-based media. Admittedly, advertising budgets in general have been soaring: CCTV’s auction of its best slots brought in 26% more cash in 2002 than the previous year (Jones 2003), so perhaps this question is moot. But incomes are still very low in the Chinese mass market.

The second is the degree of present and future competition from PRC firms in the media industries sector. Nortel, Avaya and Cisco Systems are facing increased competition from large mainland vendors such as Huawei Technologies and ZTE (Perez 2004a). These are equipment manufacturers, not content producers, but the really fascinating question is whether China can in some loose sense, at least, follow on the tremendous global success of the 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong film industry, either in the audiovisual sector, or in some other one.

The third is the fundamental political question raised by Watanabe (op.cit.) concerning China’s stability, given the number of collapsing state firms, unemployment levels, lack of welfare protection, sharp regional disparities, rural poverty, massive urban migration and severe environmental problems. This is a highly volatile situation by any standard, one in which foreign media investment may play a variety of roles – and as we have seen, the PRC regime is acutely aware of, some might even say paranoid about, some of them.

Paper presented at the Symposium on Media and Transition in China, Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy, 17-21 2004.

Notes
1. Watanabe 2002: 10.
2. This and other citations in this paper from English-language media in East Asia were accessed at http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu
3. A sales branch of Hong Kong and New York-listed China Petroleum and Chemical Corp (Sinopec), the mainland's largest oil producer, has deployed key Nortel enterprise networking equipment. Shenzhen Oil Products Company installed Nortel's Contivity gear to implement a broadband IP-VPN that can handle all voice, data and video traffic at its branch offices and petrol stations. Examples of new developments include the testing of Nortel’s railroad GSM technology by the Ministry of Railways in preparation for the proposed Qinghai-Tibet railway (Perez, B. 2004a).
4. Consultants Frost & Sullivan’s figures show that Avaya had 35% of this market, followed by Cisco Systems (23%), Alcatel (13%), Siemens (9%) and Mitel (5%) (Perez, B. 2004b).
5. ‘The rising MMS business ushers in a new wireless Internet era,’ said an industry expert. ‘It doesn't simply mean a reordering of Internet portals. It will redefine the market (Taipei Times 2004).’
6. The South Korean IT industry has been growing at an annual rate of 16 percent over the past five years, producing an output of 209 trillion won and sending out $57 billion in exports last year. The sector now accounts for 15 percent of GDP and 30 percent of total exports, whereas just seven years ago the sector accounted for just 7% of GDP. The government also plans to lay down the world's fasted broadband Internet network, a technology called broadband convergence network, that provides connection speeds of 50-100 Mbps, by 2012. The planned network runs 50 times faster than the currently used 1.5-2 Mbps connections. ‘The most notable efforts come in the form of satellite-based mobile broadcasting, planned to start commercial services in July. The satellite DMB system embodies one of the most advanced receiver technologies of today, with a satellite beaming video and audio signals to handheld receiver devices in vehicles moving at speeds up to 150 kilometers an hour. If the DMB services start out as scheduled, industry insiders believe that the services will garner 6 million subscribers by 2009.’
7. Kim, Tae-gyu 2004.
8. ‘The media conglomerate has three television companies, two radio stations, a newspaper, an internet portal, six sports teams and 12 prominent buildings in Shanghai. To reduce dependence on advertising sales, SMG in late 2002 began offering pay-TV services and has signed up 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers to its 50-channel line-up. The media group also develops content which is distributed to 200 TV stations across the country, a business that is growing 100 to 200 per cent a year, according to Mr Li.’ (Luk 2004a).
9. Article

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Yong Cao is a Doctoral student in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University