The News From China

Time to start the coverage…..

The summer deluge of coverage of the Beijing Olympics is scheduled to start soon, and the networks are poised to spend tens of millions, if not more, on getting the China story into our homes. NBC, of course, has spent $3.5 billion just for the rights, but that, of course, is only the beginning. For more than year, the major networks have been preparing for a China-fest.

I was in Beijing last Christmas, and Tienanmen Square was dominated by a giant ‘countdown’ clock, ticking off the months. days, hours, minutes and seconds to the start of the event. And now, here we are… almost.

Yesterday, I got an email from Jocelyn Ford, a freelance public radio correspondent in China. (see correction in comments NPR v. APR v. PRI)

She wasthe bureau chief for American Public Media’s “Marketplace” bureau in Beijing, and before that, was Marketplace bureau chief in Tokyo. Fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese, she has covered Asia for more than 20 years.

A few months ago, Ford bought herself a small video camera and FCP. She had never, by her own admission, done video before, but she was intrigued. So she started reporting, for no one in particular, in video.

Now, every good radio journalist carries their own tape recorder and edits their own stuff. This goes without saying. And Public Radio reporters are among the best in the world. So I was curious as to what would happen when a great DELNPR radio reporter picked up a camera and started using it to report.

Ford gets great access. Working alone, she is able to uncover the kinds of stories that a massive network crew simply can’t get to. And of course, the cost of her coverage is… well, generally a bus ticket – or sometimes she rides her bicycle. Let’s compare that to what the networks spend for their coverage, shall we?

The most interesting part, of course, is the kind of stories she is able to get access to.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the printed press lately about television’s reluctance to show anything ‘amiss’ in China. They have a kind of unwritten agreement with the Chinese government that the skies will be blue every day.

Ted Koppel, who has just completed a documentary for Discovery on China was recently on TODAY talking about massive repression in China. When Matt Lauer commented that NBC would soon be bringing the Olympics to American homes (never miss a chance to pimp the net), Koppel commented that was quite sure it would be wall-to-wall positive coverage. Lauer was not amused and a look of annoyance crossed his face before he moved on to ‘other stuff’.

Reporters like Jocelyn Ford have no such problems, and as such, despite the fact that their cost of coverage is next to nothing, are likely to give a far better and far more accurate picture of life in China today. That is, if anyone cares to pick up her stuff.

She is making it available as a video stringer.

Here, I think, is a unique opportunity for both television stations and newspapers.

Take it.

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Mao and OJ

China is a place of some very weird contrasts and contradictions.

The place is clearly an explosion of capitalism.  High rise buildings dominate the skyline and even if you did not know that the economy is growing by a staggering 12 percent a year, you could not miss the fact that this is a booming country.  Where once there were no cars, they now fill the roads.  Sleek glass towers are not just in downtown Beijing, (which they are) but in every corner and suburb of this city of 15 million people.  It is all new, all modern, all sleek and all expensive. Many parts of Beijing make New York look old and rather tired.

We had dinner last night with Maureen Fan, the Beijing correspondent for The Washington Post.  (She has done a lot of video work here with Travis Fox, one of our favorite VJs).

We asked her how the Chinese can reconcile this unbridled economic growth and naked capitalism with their continuing Communist dogma.  And make no mistake, the dogma (and apparently the repressive mechanisms of a police state) are still very much in evidence.  Not speaking Chinese and wanting to go beyond the standard stare and look at the Forbidden Palace tourist, we hired a professional guide to take us inside Beijing for two days.

His grandfather had been a court physician to the last of the emperors, the Dowager Empress and then PuYi, the Last Emperor (if you saw the film).  He was very much the product of the Cultural Revolution and the Socialist Workers eduction, but this did not prevent him from charging us an arm and a leg for his services. (Aren’t we also ‘the people’?)

In any event, his praise of the Party, the genius of Chairman Mao and so on was effusive and endless.   What about the 50 million who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, I asked.

“It was due to too rapid an increase in the population.  The Chairman during that time had only a bowl of soup a day and drank his whole life only water from one single glass”.

Go figure.

Communism today in China is a bit like the OJ syndrome.  I mean, we know he is guitly but he isn’t guilty.

We know China isn’t communist, but it is still Communist.

Does this makes sense?

50 million to 2….

FUGGHEDABOUTIT!

“not a laughing matter”

Living in the middle of this rapidly exploding economy, it is sometimes easy to forget that it is also a very carefully controlled and repressive dictatorship. Whether or not the two can reconcile remains to be seen, but a sharp reminder of what it is like to live in a police state came home today.

The Chinese government has announced strict new regulations on the broadcasting of online videos – including those posted on video-sharing websites – restricting them to sites run by state-controlled companies.

The new rules also require service providers to report questionable content to the government and “abide by the moral code of socialism”.

It was not clear how the new rules would affect YouTube and other providers of internet video that host websites available in China but based in other countries.

“Those who provide internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism… and abide by the moral code of socialism”

Chinese internet regulations

The rules are aimed at stopping what the government calls “degenerate thinking” via the internet and maintaining a “healthy online environment”.

Pro-democracy websites are blocked, as are the sites of many international news organisations, and a force of about 30,000 internet police are thought to monitor the web for anything seen as undesirable content.

The government has also introduced strict regulations on bloggers, requiring them to register under their real names and allowing only a few providers to operate blogging sites.

The new video regulations, which take effect at the end of January, were approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the information ministry.

Permits needed

Sites that provide video programming or allow users to upload video will have to obtain government permits and applicants must be either state-owned or state-controlled companies.

According to the regulations: “Those who provide internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism… and abide by the moral code of socialism.”

With a population of over 1.3 billion, the Chinese certainly have enough people to monitor the Internet, and they seem to take this monitoring fairly seriously. We’re used to posting anything we want, any time, or getting access to same. That is not the way it is in China, and not the way it is going to be for some time, apparently.

The new regulations, similar to those in place for news services, will ban providers from broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography.

Providers will be required to delete and report such content to the authorities while major violators could see themselves banned for up to five years.

China has an estimated 150 million internet users and is expected to soon overtake the US as the world leader in online population.

THE CUL-DE-SAC OF CULTURE

Although we like to credit Gutenberg with the printing press, the concept of movable type actually originated here, in China.

During the Ch’ing-li period (1041-1048), an alchemist named Pi Sheng conceived of the notion of movable carved blocks for printing Chinese characters instead of painstakingly hand writing each one.

Of course, in Europe, the advent of movable type set off an intellectual revolution that we are still feeling the consequence of. In China, the very same technology had no such impact.

Although the Chinese were first with this new and radically powerful technology, they were also caught in a cul-de-sac of their own culture.

The Western alphabet is only 26 characters, so once transcribed to movable type blocks, it became a remarkably simple and fluid mechanism for the transmission of ideas. The Chinese alphabet, however, has more than 60,000 characters. The notion of manipulating 60,000 bits of block is simply overwhelming. Even in its most limited form, (I am told that you can communicate pretty well in Chinese with a knowledge of 3,000 – 5,000 characters), it is simply untenable. Imagine a typewriter with even 3,000 keys, let along 60,000.

Although the seeds of the intellectual revolution were first planted in China a good 500 yeas before Gutenberg, they failed to take root. They failed to take root because an even older cultural environment, deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, their alphabet, proved to be sterile soil for the revolution that movable type wrought in Europe.

It takes more than just the arrival of a new technology. It takes the right cultural conditions.

The arrival of the Internet (and the associated ‘video revolution’), I think is analogous to the arrival of movable type and the printing press. That is, it has the potential to change the very nature of society, if, (and this is a big if), the cultural soil is prepared for it.

Do we have an inherent flaw in our culture, similar to the Chinese alphabet that may prevent the web from making the impact it might?

It is early, but I begin to fear that our constant need to be entertained may do for us what 60,000 characters did for the Chineses – stop the thing cold.

We have created for ourselves a world in which everything must be entertaining – short, funny, gross, whatever. Read Neil Postman’s AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), as he explains this far better than I. But just go to Youtube and see what we have done with the remarkable power of this new medium. Not much.

The ‘rules’ we make for video, as we start to air ‘User Generated Content’ are: funny, punchy, or people eating scorpions.

We have no interest and no patience for information, content, quality. The same goes for TV shows we try and pitch. It’s always the same: people who eat gross things, the woman who weighs a thousand pounds, extreme sports, extreme anything. Content free.

The technology may be incredibly powerful.

But we may have within our genes the inability to exploit it.

NEW YEARS IN SHANGHAI

The Bund and the glittering heart of New Shanghai

Celebrated the arrival of 2008 in Shanghai last night with dinner at Laris, a very western restaurant overlooking the Bund, with a great view of New Shanghai.

This is a city of enormous contrasts, great wealth cheek by jowel with great poverty, the highest tech a few meters away from people tearing the heads off of chickens in the street.

A quick trip to the ‘digital market’ takes you to a world that makes B&H look like the corner mom and pop shop. The digital market is a 12 story building filled with endless booths selling the very latest in digital technology. It just goes on and on and on, connected by central escalators. It was more like attending NAB than going shopping. And they had everything, including iPhones (which you still can’t get in the UK). The one drawback is that proficiency in English is still pretty limited, so upon finding the iPhones, I asked if they were unlocked. The always anxious to please Chinese said Yes! I have already been here for a few days, so I then asked if the phones came with contracts and were locked. “Yes”! Still smiling and nodding. “Do you know what I mean by ‘locked’, I asked”
“Yes!”
“Can I use these with another carrier in America?”
pause….
“Sorry, no understand”.
Yes.

Pudong – just across the river from Downtown Shanghai – a decade ago this was all a mud flat. Now the world’s tallest building is going up here

Outside, a neighborhood that only a few years ago was filled with small houses and twisting lanes now bears a distinct resemblance to Orchard Road in Singapore – the very cutting edge of pure commercialism. Brand new glistening glass and marble palaces many floors high offer Armani, Gucci, Prada, Versace – just about anything and everything. Then, walk a few blocks away, and you are smack in the middle of the Hutangs, the local neighborhoods – small houses, dark alleys, people twising the heads off chickens and cleaning them in the streets. This is a country caught in an incredibly rapid transition.

Hutongs – the alleyways of the old China

The scope of the transformation was caught in yesterday’s Shanghai Daily, the english language local paper that they give out free at the hotel. The government had decided to eliminate income taxes from anyone making $250 a month or less. The paper, which seems to be extremely controlled, noted that this meant that now 70 percent of the population would pay no taxes. The other 30 percent seem to be doing great.

My friend Jeff Jarvis writes to ask about the Internet censorship, so I decided to try a few URLs of blogs to see what I could get and what I could not. Jeff’s Buzzmachine is readable here as is Steve Safran’s Lost Remote. Mel Taylor, on the other hand, is blocked. The blocking seems a bit haphazard but it is very real.

The day before yesterday, Google News announced the untimely death of the CFO of Baidu.com, the Chinese Google. Yet when I clicked to any of the links to that story, the follow ups were all blocked.

No mention of the Baidu story in the Shanghai Daily either.

More to come.