media - Phoenix TV(2): still underfunded

Luqiu Luwei

We are still greatly underfunded, said Luqiu Luwei, "especially compared to the Western media." While able to build on an experience of half an decade, their operations are both short of equipment and the people are poorly trained.
"We had one satellite phone in Indonesia, that broke down after two days," she says. "We have equipment we cannot use and have not real training." Investing in these operations will in the end reflect on the quality, Luqiu says.

media - Phoenix TV: a better prepared operation

Luqiu Luwei of Phoenix TV reported on the efforts of her company to report on disasters and wars. The ambition is to become the CNN for the Chinese speaking world and direct reports from flashpoints is an obvious task.
Reporting started with the floodings in the Yangtze Delta, when the reporters still had to borrow equipment. The war in Iraq was the first major event for other mainland journalists to report about a conflict in large numbers, followed by the tsunami in December last year.
"We missed an opportunity to go with the Chinese rescue team," said Luqiu. "And still on December 28/29 we were discussing whether we should go or not, since not that many foreigners or Chinese were involved. But when the number reached 400,000 deaths, we decided to go."
Phoenix was much better prepared than many of its Chinese colleagues. "Total coordination was much better," said Luqiu. "In Afghanistan we already discovered it was not enough to have food, drugs and how to protects ourselves. Lack of preparation can only be your own fault." First thing she did in Indonesia was to secure she could report also her stories on in a timely way. "Otherwise it is a huge loss of resources."

media - Tsunami Conference heads off

An international groups of journalists and other experts are gathering at the Shantou University to discuss the Chinese experiences after the tsunami. The first Chinese journalists are sharing their experiences and paint an rather honest picture of a group of people being very much lost. Armed with only Renminbi, losing a pass port and only able to talk to people in Russian. Still much of the human and professional traumas are being dealt with.
Now talking is Chen Shi, reporter of the Southern Metropolitan Daily.

media - Oops, wrong picture



It is good to have some readers who can correct my many mistakes. This was no picture of the tsunami, but a tidal wave in Hangzhou bay. Thanks for the corrections.

media - Attending Tsunami conference

Tsunami

Tomorrow I will attend for one day the Tsunami Conference at the Shantou University together with about thirty of the more distinguished Chinese journalists. Since I will be covering, together with Andrew Lih, in the afternoon the issue of the changing technology and its effect on the media, I might as well do some blogging in the morning. So stayed tuned.
First, Chinese journalists will report about their trip to the disaster areas, and during lunch the tsunami coverage will be analysed. In the afternoon Zoher Abdoolcarim of Time magazine will tell how their decision making process during the crisis developed.
Saturday I will return, possible on time to attend the social event of the week: Charlotte's party.

media - A censured Wen Jiabao

Wen Jiabao

The story in the New York Times on how the press conference of premier Wen Jiabao was slightly modified in the China media has triggered off a bit of interest.

Erased from the official record were parts of Mr. Wen's comments about Tung
Chee-hwa, the Hong Kong chief executive who retired last week - some say got
orders to retire - two years before the expiration of his second term.
Mr. Wen told assembled journalists that "history will render a fair verdict" on Mr.
Tung's contributions. The phrase, which is often used in Chinese to suggest the
possibility of rehabilitation for officials who make mistakes, was deleted.
"Compatriots from the Hong Kong special administrative region will not forget
[Mr. Tung]" was allowed to stand.

Maybe I'm too long here but I could not find it that surprising. I had almost ten years ago a talk with a Xinhua reporter who was covering the diplomatic beat and he was very open on how the systems works. "Even our highest leaders can make mistakes when they talk to foreign guests, even when they read a prepared speech," he said. "Mostly such a mistake is already corrected by the translators and since most of the foreign guests do no speak Chinese, they will not notice the difference. When also the translators do not notice the mistake, the media will bring a correct editions of what our leader should have said."
Sounds like a pretty solid system.

media - Post-tsunami training for journalists

Shantou University
Just booked my tickets for a short trip to Shantou this Friday, where I will be joining a training for thirty Chinese journalists at the Shantou University. Together with Andrew Lih of the Hong Kong University we will focus on the effects of technology on the media, and how that could have an impact on reporting abroad.
Again, a timely subjects, as a group of media prepares for new trips abroad, this time to India and Pakistan, where premier Wen Jiabao will be for a state visit. Main problem for my more independent colleagues: Wen only invites Xinhua and CCTV to join his delegation, unlike the common practise of many other countries. So, many Chinese colleagues will be roaming around, looking for good stories to cover, without being able to get even access to their own premier.

media - Online papers still miss the point

Simon World comes with solid arguments to illustrate that sites of most traditional papers, especially the South China Morning Post, are still missing the point of what is happening on the internet. I agree with Simon World that the SCMP is of course the worst example among them all:

The articles on the website are only accessible to subscribers, despite a proliferation of annoying flash advertisements all over the screen. But print subscribers cannot access the site - you have to pay an extra fee for the access. In other words you pay twice for access to the same content. The articles are unlinkable, meaning the SCMP misses out on potential traffic driven to their site by bloggers and others. There are few updates each day - today I can count exactly two new articles on the main page. Worse the page is not updated at all on sunday and only infrequently on Saturday. Even if you subscribe to the site, not all of the newspaper articles are put online..

But also Simon World gets only halfway in his analysis of the media revolution that is taking place. A media revolution that is greatly ignored, as sources at the SCMP quote their chief editor, "we are to busy to give it too much attention". In the US media gurus have figured out that newspapers will lose their last reader around 2040, when the current decline goes on, and they might be gone already a decade of so earlier, since one reader might not be enough. The SCMP is ready to be horse meat long before that.

media - Has the BBC been cheated?

Last week was a China week for the BBC and the famous discussion program "Question Time" in what was supposed to be an independent audience, that could participate in the discussion. Doubts is rising whether the audience was really that independent.
"The translators of our mayor have been making overtime," jokes one of my well-connected friends, who saw the tape. "There were many familiar faces in the audience. I think the BBC has been cheated."

internet - iPod hits the streets in Shanghai


Since a few weeks the ipod, the world's latest fashionable toy, has hit the street of Shanghai. Suddenly I noticed larger numbers of people wearing the characteristic white earphones. Mostly for the music. Podcasting might be the next thing, as people want to do more than only listening to music, but downloading podcasts has been rather troublesome because of the poor connection speed.

internet - At last an RSS-feed that works



It took a while, but it looks that I have been able to replay my faulty RSS-feed I got earlier. Just keep my fingers crossed and hope feedburner is doing the job better. Please click on the feed banner to subscribe to your RSS-reader.

internet - 5 Misconceptions in the Western media
Benjamen Walker

Holy cow, we had here a US journalist, even connected to the famous Berkman Centre for society and internet, for less than a week and he actually got it. He lists five misconceptions, here in a dispatch by World Changing (first discovered by Andrea):

Misconception 3: There are 30,000 to 50,000 "Internet police" who do nothing but
monitor people's email, web surfing, etc.
Truth: This is a number invented by officials for official propaganda missives, aimed at the national media, not Western reporters, who nonetheless take up information ministry press releases as legitimate and use them as source material.

Read on for more later at Ben's weblog. Guess you have to be a journalist to do the more obvious thing: go to a place and talk to people.

economy - A critical review of China Inc.

Just leave it up to John Pomfret, the former Beijing chief of the Washington Post, two write a devastating review of the much praized book China, Inc by Ted C. Fishman. While Pomfret joins initially the praise, his review slowly turns nasty.

But secure in his belief that China is going to become a hyperpower in the very near future, Fishman (a former commodities trader and now a writer) often ignores his research or switches the subject. In one section, for example, he explores China's serious demographic problems. In some parts of the country, the population -- using ultrasound equipment and infanticide -- is now having 137 boy babies for every 100 girls. But China, Inc. offers no discussion of the social effects this type of skewed demographics could have. Fishman comes to a dizzying stop, and we're off to a discussion of skyscrapers in Beijing.

Fishman is part of the current China-wave, ignoring the subtle complexities that brought foreign businesses so often before into hot water. While Fishman mostly writes about figures and economy, sidesteps into politics Pomfret evens finds more unreliable:

Fishman seems to be implying that granting "expressive freedom" would be an easy
thing for a Communist Party committed to a monopoly on power. Such lines, which
pop up often in the book, underscore a lack of understanding of how China's political system works.

China keeps on financing US debts – the WTO-column

(later also at their website they try to gather support, but even the US-administration is not supporting their efforts very actively, and economists – the last one was Dr. William Hickey – make fun of their arguments. “Never in world history has a country been asked to REVALUE its currency! Where was the U.S. when Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and China before 1990 DEVALUED their currency?”, writes Hickey.

A much more urgent question to answer is why China keeps on buying US dollars, even though that dollar has been losing much of its value, and keeps on its way south for the foreseeable future. The issue has been raised repeatedly in the Chinese media and also American research has pointed out how the US economy is benefiting from its economic relations with China, with the exception of an occasional toy maker.
Because US-company Wal-Mart is squeezing Chinese companies up to the point where they might default, has given the US consumers handsome returns, much higher than the tax break the Bush-administration is using to make the electorate happy.
There have been abundant rumors that China, together with other Asian central banks, was already secretly selling off its US dollar reserves, but apart from South-Korea most of the Asian Banks, including China seem to stick to their stack of American print material, that is fast loosing its value.
When I owe a bank 10,000 US dollar, I have a problem. When I owe the bank a 100 million US dollar, the bank has a problem.
The US is now close to having a debt with the rest of the world that is close to 30 percent of its GDP. But China keeps on supporting this sliding economy by maintaining its peg between the US dollar and the Renminbi. Countries that do not maintain such a peg, like those in Southern Africa, pay a high price. Letting the US dollar slide might indeed make China more expensive for the US market. China is paying the price, because if it would not, its millions of migrants might lose their jobs just like workers in Southern Africa.

So, the US is – apart from a small group of angry manufacturers – in a comfortable position, as China cannot afford to withdraw its support to the US economy, writes also Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson in a comparison of an indebted Britain in 1945 and the USA today in the New York Times. “Meanwhile, the United States may be discovering what the British found in their imperial heyday. If you are a truly powerful empire, you can borrow a lot of money at surprisingly reasonable rates…. It is only when your power wanes – as the British learned after 1945 – that owing a fortune in your own currency becomes a real problem. As opposed, that is, to someone else’s problem.”

An economic dilemma with profound political implications. Indirectly China has to finance the war in Iraq and the US social security system, and there seems very little political clout it gets out of its reservers.

Fons Tuinstra

Economy – Winners and losers of the globalization
Lesotho
It is pretty upsetting to read over and over again all those hypocrite arguments in the US, when they try to convince China to float its currency. It does not make sense economically and – as Dr. William Hickey pointed out here yesterday – it is rather ludicrous to ask China to act against its own interests.
But here they go again in the AP article:

U.S. manufacturers, unions and a growing number of lawmakers say a manipulation
to blame for the country's large trade deficit with China and the extremely low prices for products imported from China, from stepladders to bargain couches and candles.

There are places that have real problems to keep up the global competition, as in Lesotho, as this article in the New York Times shows. They have reason to be upset, but since they depend on the US customers, who only go for the prices. And with a falling dollar, they cannot compete.

American shoppers may register the dollar's fall, if at all, as an irritating uptick in the prices of imported goods. In tiny, dirt-poor Lesotho, it is more than an irritation; it is potentially fatal. Since December, 6 of the nation's 50 clothes factories have shut down, unable to match the prices of foreign competitors and still make a profit. That has eliminated 5,800 of the 50,000 garment-making jobs here. Layoffs have claimed at least 6,000 more.

Southern Africa as a whole seems to have much more to complain about.

media - The jungle called book publishing

A great story about the jungle called the book publishing business in China by Mike Meyer in the New York Times (pointed by Danwei). Since I have a few friends in this business, so the story is not new for me, but might be telling for others.
The market produced officially in 2003 190,000 new titles, only six percent translated works. Dominating are increasingly the private publishing houses who buy 'book numbers' or licences from the official publishing houses, making the playing field muddy and very competitive.

''Doing business here is like playing ice hockey without referees,'' says Toby Eady, a London-based literary agent who represents several authors who have written on China. They include Jung Chang, who wrote the popular novel ''Wild Swans''; Ma Jian, a dissident who wrote the political travelogue ''Red Dust''; and Tim Clissold, the author of the business memoir ''Mr. China.'' In China, Eady says, ''a contract is good until you step 10 centimeters out of the office.''

While great for the consumers, authors have a hard time making a living, as successful authors are pirated very fast or squeezed out by the publishers.

The story of Yang Erche Namu, a Beijing author and onetime popular singer, is also telling. Namu has published 12 books in Chinese, and her memoir, ''Leaving Mother Lake,'' was released in 2003 by Little, Brown. After an editor commissioned her first book, Namu was handed a bag with $10,000 in cash -- and no rights. She estimates the book sold two million copies, not counting pirated editions. In China, authors and editors rarely forge a lasting bond. For each of her successive 11 books, Namu has worked with a different publisher. Now they pay advances against royalties, but, given unreliable sales data and piracy, she says she still can't support herself from writing. Instead, she relies on income from guesthouses she owns in her native village. She has also started a lingerie line, for which she is seeking backers. ''I am famous, everyone knows me, but I have no money!'' she says with a laugh.