Not a Happy Camper

For

eign media titans aren't the only programmers that have creative differences with China's television regulators. Consider the fate of Hunan Media Group, once China's funkiest broadcaster. In the 1990s this studio in central Hunan province took advantage of a rule allowing provincial broadcasters to deliver one channel nationally across cable networks. Not content to just retransmit the local crop report, Hunan came up with a slate of all-new programs geared to popular (read: low-brow) tastes. Its leading show, Happy Camper, let celebrities and ordinary folk embarrass themselves by, for instance, dangling from 20-meter cords while tossing basketballs at a hoop. Hunan grew so successful that in 1998 it became the first TV studio to list on a Chinese stock market.

Alas, Hunan hasn't been able to build on these victories. The government won't allow it. Last year, the group planned to devote its flagship satellite channel to movies—no tired epics on the revolution, just blockbusters. But that would have meant competing with the central government's own movie channel, so Beijing barred the change. Hunan then planned to produce a drama about the machinations of a Manchu Emperor's court. Central television, which was planning a similar series, red-lighted that, as well. A 60 Minutes-style program on corruption? With ongoing changes in the Communist Party leadership, that topic was deemed too explosive. "The whole industry is under political control," laments a Hunan Media Group official. "That's the biggest limit on our development."

Beijing's regulation of the TV business is evolving, although it isn't necessarily liberalizing. For more than a year, the country has been on a drive to consolidate China's irrationally diverse media properties, previously operated by local, provincial and national authorities, into a handful of big, powerful players. For example, Shanghai Media and Entertainment Group (SMEG), run by former actor Ye Zhikang, is a state-owned conglomerate with 50 subsidiaries, among them two TV stations, film studios, newspapers, a pair of symphony orchestras and a puppet troupe. All existed separately until 2001, when Beijing ordered them grouped into a company that now holds a virtual monopoly on the Shanghai media market.

To bring order and control to the rest of the country—China as of two years ago had more than 4,000 TV stations—Beijing is creating entities similar to SMEG nationwide. Beginning in 2001, the government forced cable networks to merge with terrestrial networks and smaller stations at county levels to merge with bigger entities. At the national level, it has grouped China's most valuable media assets, including China Central Television (CCTV) and the country's cable-backbone network, into the mammoth China Radio Film and Television Group and put senior party propaganda officials in charge. The goal, according to William Soileau, a lawyer at Baker MacKenzie who follows China's media, is to build "a small number of state-run media groups engaging in managed competition."

Might the party be willing to gradually cede control of China's mass communications to the private sector, as it has allowed entrepreneurs to acquire factories and other tools of production? Not likely. Although a few private studios exist and censors have loosened up, "We can't have a private TV channel in Shanghai," Ye explains, "because the media must help the Communist Party lead the people."