Oriada

In a truely bizarre turn of events, the company at the centre of the iSweatshop scandal reported worldwide some weeks ago, has taken legal action against 2 journalists from a Chinese business newspaper.  The company, Foxconn, is looking for 30 million yuan in compensation and it has been revealed that it successfully applied to a Shenzhen court to have all the assets of the two journalists, including their cars and apartments, frozen.

This all stems from the apparently ultimately fraudulent stories a few weeks back that workers in factories in China were churning out Apple iPods under incredibly tough conditions, working non-stop for 12 hours a day for only 1,000 yuan a month.  The allegations were first published in the Daily Mail in Britain but were subsequently picked up by mainland media outlets, along with hundreds of other publications around the world.

The story was reported in dozens of newspapers on the mainland, so why has Foxconn gone after these two journalists in such a particularly vicious manner?  And why has it taken the journalists themselves to court and not the newspaper who printed the accusations.   The Non-violent Resistance blog claims that Foxconn scoured the mainland media looking for soft targets and picked these two journalists in particular because they did not have formal full time contracts with the China Business Daily.  They were therefore considered stringers for the newspaper who can be held personally liable for what they write under Chinese law.  The implication, then, is that Foxconn decided to make their campaign as brutal and personal as possible, using their undoubted financial might and dodgy legal tactics to send a message to the rest of the mainland media.

Foxconn apparently has a history of this kind of behaviour, having gone after a Taiwanese journalist in 2004, demanding NT$30million in compensation for a negative story. They eventually withdrew the claim after the Association of Taiwanese Journalists gathered a petition of more than 10,000 signatures (using the slogan: don’t think the next little shrimp won’t be you!")

This story is bound to run and run.  Taiwanese companies do tend to have a quite negative reputation on the mainland, and this affront to national pride is unlikely to be well received.  Chinese netizens are already expressing their ire at both Foxconn and the court in Shenzhen that agreed to freeze the assets of the journalists.  Non-violent Resistance Blog points out that the journalists involved have started a blog, with one post alone receiving 1670 comments as of today.

Everybody from famous Irish "economist" Eddie Hobbs to this blogger’s mother, seems convinced that China is the place to buy property these days.  Disregarding, for the moment, the bubble market fears, on the surface this idea does seem to make sense.  The economy is thriving and house prices across the country rose by double digits every year for the last several years.   In some cities, prices are growing by as much as 20% p/a.  But what very few prospective buyers are aware of, though, is that the vagaries of China’s pseudo-socialist legal system dictate that if you do choose to buy a new pad in the Orient, you won’t actually own it at all.  Incredibly, despite all the economic advances of the past two decades, private property is still not recognised under Chinese law.  So rather than owning your house, you’ll merely be renting it from the state.  Hu Jintao and the bigwigs in Zhongnanhai will, in essence, be your landords. 

This paradox dates back, of course, to when Mao and the communists came to power in 1949. One of the most sweeping, and initially most popular, of their early moves was to nationalise all property.  Grasping landlords were turfed off their estates, and the land apportioned out to the peasants.   Owners of large houses had their title deeds seized by government authorities and soon found themselves sharing their residences with several other poorer families.

But the concept of nationalized property ran aground in a quick and devastating fashion, its inherent failures cruelly exposed by the famines of the 1950s.  It was gradually phased out as a working concept as the centrally-planned economic system was abandoned during the Deng Xiaoping era.  From that time on, quasi-property ownership began to be recognised, with owners given long-term leases on their property.   

But until now, private property as a legal concept still does not exist in the country.  This is obviously an untenable situation and one the authorities have long been keen to rectify.  The law on private property has been in the pipeline for almost a decade, with work on the draft beginning 9 years ago.  It was finally published, with great fanfare, in the summer of 2005.  In a rare step, members of the public were invited to participate in a process of public consultation.  The leadership evidently wanted to gauge the public’s mood on the proposal and get some basic feedback. 

What they did not expect was a vicious and sustained backlash against the proposal from within their own ranks.  For months on end, the draft was savaged by the unreconstituted Marxist wing of the party, laying bare, albeit briefly, ideological rifts that have gradually developed within the party over the past two decades.   One disgusted leftwing scholar accused the party’s leaders of apeing wholesale the ‘capitalist’ laws of the USA.  Another dismissed the law as offering protection only for "the rich man’s limousine and the poor man’s stick", assuring the safety of the fortunes of the wealthy while the poor continued to suffer.

The Communist old schoolers, long silent partners in the party’s drive towards modernisation, seized on the draft as a symbol of all that they believed was rotten with the party in the modern era, and they rose up to voice their disapproval.  Many were unhappy that the law would reduce the government’s direct role in economic development, and increase the already very large gap between the rich and poor.  Their howls resulted in the draft being withdrawn from the last session of the NPC in March, shortly before the governing body was due to vote on it, an embarrassing climbdown for the party leadership after they had spent so long developing the proposal.

Last week, however, the bill was suddenly resurrected and now seems set to be passed at the next meeting of the NPC in the spring.  There have been, we are told, significant revisions that have appeased the leftwing factions, but as yet nobody has revealed exactly what has been changed.  Xinhua stated only that the changes would "clarify the scope and ownership of state assets" and that under the new law "private property will be afforded the same protection as public property".  It would seem that the principle amendments affect the ownership of state-owned companies, as many party members had been concerned that the previous version afforded too much protection to corrupt officials who were getting rich by selling off state assets in crooked deals.  Whether this new law will put an end to the regular reports of of farmers being turfed off their lands by corrupt local officials remains to be seen.

There is still some debate worthy of note about other aspects of this law.  One interesting point being raised by some legislators is whether the law should allow urbanites to buy houses in the countryside.  Private holiday homes are almost unheard of here, as is the phenomenon - common in Ireland and other western countries - of middle class urbanites moving to the countryside in search of fresh air and a cheaper, more peaceful life.  A change in the law, however, could change all that, with fairly major social consequences.  This would also be a potential moneyspinner for rural-dwellers, who could sell their land for housing.  Legislators are also debating whether people in rural areas should be allowed to mortgage their houses and land. 

Xinhua reports today that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is predicting problems ahead, after 30 years of the one-child policy.  An ever-increasing number of old people will rely on an ever-decreasing number of young people, a lob-sided equation that bodes ill for long term economic development.

 By 2020, CASS estimates that 17% of the population will be aged 65 or older. Other reports have extrapolated that, by 2050, over-65s will constitute 31% of the population.  What’s more, CASS says that the size of the labour force will peak at just under 1 billion in 2016 and decrease steadily from then on.  The country’s competitive advantage currently rests in the abundant availability of cheap workers, but within less than a decade this supply will start to dry up.

Coupled with the economic problems of the one child policy addressed in this article, a number of equally worrying social issues are emerging.  For one thing, the male-female birth ratio is well above the international average and increasing all the time. In the 1980s the ratio stood at a relativelly normal 108.5 boys born for every 100 girls.  But current estimates place the present figure at close to 120 boys for every 100 girls, and it is believed to be far higher  in certain parts of the country. As this mismatched generation comes of age, the already quite serious problems of bride-trafficking and female kidnapping will likely become increasingly common, with the potential for many other problems to emerge as large numbers of single male migrant workers descend on China’s urban centres.

Things are looking quite rosy for the Chinese banking sector these days, certainly a lot rosier than they did 8 years ago when the whole system was on the brink of collapse.

The Washington Post reports that non-performing loans now constitute only 7.5 percent of total lending.  That may sound like a lot, and it is by local standards, but at the turn of the century the figure was estimated by certain observers to be as high as 40%.  Only a massive multi-billion dollar government bailout kept the Big Four (BOC, ICBC, BOC and AgriBank) afloat.

Meanwhile, the IHT highlights the improved profit performance of the country’s major lenders, another indicator of the health of the system.  The increased profit has, of course, been fuelled by a lending boom over the last 12 months, a boom that the government is now trying to rein in. This will obviously have an effect on profits but nevertheless, shares in BOC have risen 16.6% since their opening in Hong Kong in May, and 6% on the mainland since the start of July.

Hopefully, this means that the banks can now refocus their attention on reforming basic customer services.  If they don’t, they will surely be put under intense pressure by the more efficient and better organised foreign banks who will enter the market at the end of this year, in accordance with WTO agreements.

(This blogger spent 1 and a half hours today [that’s 90 long and tedious minutes, 5,400 hair-greying seconds] in a not-busy Beijing branch of BOC attempting the fairly straightforward task of opening a simple savings account.  Five minutes were spent filling out the necessary paper.  Your corresspondent then spent the next 85 minutes watching in amazement as 3 cashiers dealt with a combined total of 15 customers while disregarding the pontential new client who was edging ever closer to the door and suppressing a very strong desire to stage a hostile coup of the bank and install himself as leader of a management junta.)

The problem of false reporting of statistics is now so serious in China that the National Bureau of Statistics has established a new department to deal with it.   

Just today, China’s Environment minister blamed worsening air quality on falsified statistics, claiming that local authorities repeatedly lie about pollution emissions and falsify environmental data to secure approval for construction projectss.  "It is clear the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection is coming to a head,"  he was quoted as saying.

The NBS themselves drew attention to the figures for national GDP growth rate for the past year, and the discrepancy between the NBS’s own calculations and the numbers supplied by local governments.  The NBS puts the national GDP growth rate at 10.9%, yet the local authorities of 23 of China’s 31 provinces estimate their growth rates at 12% or more.  Inner Mongolia, for example, claims GDP grew at 18.2%, while Jiangsu puts its growth at 15.4% (link). 

The reason for this discrepancy between NBS’s overall growth rate and that of the individual provinces is that the NBS assumes that the local governments are cooking the books and adjusts its figures accordingly. 

Last year, China was forced to revise its GDP growth rate for 2004 by more than 10%, from 6 percent to 16 percent, after an audit revealed that the statistics gathered around the country were wildly inaccurate.  From property vacancy rates to the numbers of people killed in natural disasters, the only reliable thing about official statistics in China is their inaccuracy. 

The new moves by the NBS to combat the problem are laudable, but will likely be completely ineffective.  They will have no effect because they do nothing to combat the root of the problem, which is that the civil service system as it current stands actively promotes fraud and corruption.  

Cadres don’t rise through the official ranks on merit or abilty (though doubtless there are those who absolutely deserve on merit to be where they are).  Rather, promotions are apportioned according to a complicated points system.  Officials are given a  set of  often very  detailed targets  that they must meet, e.g. they must attract a certain amount of inward investment or ensure a specified GDP growth rate.  If they hit the target, they are awarded points. If they  amass enough points they can move up to the next level, with a higher salary and more responsibility.  So there is an inbuilt motivation for lowly officials to falsify stats and submit exaggerated reports.  At the same time, the officials further up the line who should be checking these stats, are just as interested in gaining promotions, so they are just as motivated to ignore or even encourage false reporting from their subordinates.  Doing so makes them look good and earns them more points, perpetuating the failure of the system.

SARFT clearly had their Weetabix last week.  Not content with banning fun imposing strict new broadcasting regulations on foreign cartoons on Monday, on Wednesday they announced new rules requiring all videos broadcast on the internet to get prior approval from the government.  The ruling seems to spell the end in China for peer-sharing video sites like Youtube and Toodou.

After initial incredulity, some possible explanations for this bizarre behaviour have begun to emerge.

1. A turf war.  Initial speculation centred on the theory that SARFT was making something akin to a land-grab, staking its claim as the legal arbiter of media on internet in China.  This, it seems, is something of a grey area in government policy, as several different departments have responsibilities for various aspects of internet policing, so it is not clear who actually oversees online media output.

2. Pressure from state-owned traditional media.  Younger generations are deserting in droves the (state-owned) traditional media - tv, radio and newspapers - in favour of diverse and very-much not-state-owned entertainment options on the net.  That, in itself, is not surprising, since the political interference, tiny budgets and lousy production values prevalent in most media outlets mean that most of their output is pretty poor.  But with ad revenues falling, the media moguls are starting to fret.  In yet another recent ruling (these guys really don’t mess around) SARFT did away with infomercials for fake health products, which had been a big moneyspinner for provinvicial TV stations. So the thinking goes, that SARFT reckons by clamping down on other entertainment sources it can convince people to go back to watching TV.  (We never said these were going to be good reasons)  This would be in line with another SARFT ruling earlier this year which insisted that websites like Sina.com carry only government-approved news rather than generating their own stories, thus ensuring that state-owned newspapers wouldn’t lose readers to net outlets with fresher content.

 

3. Displeasure from high levels at the mockery of ‘national heroes’.  One particular type of online video content has been getting under the skin of the authorities for some time, the peculiar style of satirical spoofs known in Chinese as E gao.  Party posterboy Lei Feng and hero of 1970s military propaganda flick Sparkling Red Star, Pan Dongzi, are just two of the political icons to have been pilloried in online video parodies in recent months.   But in general in Chinese culture the pantheon of Communist heroes, from dear leaders to war heroes and even, until recently, Lei Feng, are revered with po-faced seriousness at all times.  They have been long considered beyond criticism; to poke fun at them is akin to insulting the motherland itself. 

So it must be something of a shock for the authorities to see Pan Dongzi not fighting against the Japanese, as he does in Sparkling Red Star, but rather following his dream to win the Supergirls reality TV show, as he does in the wildly popular online spoof

With the booming popularity of these kinds of spoof videos (among China’s post-89 generation X in particular), it’s understandable that officials fear that this kind of iconaclism could reach a tipping point, at which stage any and all of the once-sacred cows might be up for mockery.  If such a stage were reached, a criticism free-for-all could conceivably break out and spread far beyond the relatively isolated realm of internet spoofs.

Official annoyance at the blossoming Egao culture was registered several weeks ago at a pompous  "conference of experts" in Beijing, which issued a "Down-with-this-sort-of-thing" declaration and called for more "solemn" and "earnest" net videos instead.  So this ruling may be an attempt by the authorities to nip this troublesome artform in the bud.

Regardless of the reasons for the new law, it remains to be seen whether it will actually have any effect. Danwei has a translation of a newspaper article questioning its legality and effectiveness.

Venezuelan President and modern-day Guevara/leftist fruitcake (depending on your point of view) Hugo Chavez will be coming to China next week for what promises to be an intriguing interaction between two very different strands of socialism.  Chavez has already kicked off his by-now familiar "dip-stick-plomacy" routine, promising to ride into town on a wave of cheapo oil.  Venezuela announced yesterday that it will increase oil exports to China by 1/3 before the end of the year. 

The most interesting aspect of this trip will be seeing how close Chavez will try to the Chinese leadership, and how close actually they want to get to him.  Chavez has been busy this past year building some kind of ‘Chavismo’ alliance with several world leaders, forging close ties with such fellow "men of the people" as his precursor Fidel Castro and his ‘brother’ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  It is as yet unclear whether he intends to get equally pally-wally with Hu Jintao or Wen Jiabao, or even whether he will be allowed.

Of course, China has blatantly obvious strategic reasons for deepening their connections with Chavez and the Latin American alliance of which he is a figurehead. But they will also be aware that such is Chavez’s political vision that he tends not to forge mere business partnerships, but rather diplomatic alliances laden down with anti-US antagonist baggage.   Nor does Chavez like to be the minor partner in any relationship, a situation that may not be so conducive to the development of deeper Sino-Venezuelan ties.

The Globe and Mail ran a story last week on the frosty diplomatic relationship between Canada and China, focusing on China’s refusal to allow Cananda to market itself as a tourist destination.  It is a sobering parable of the price of doing business in China, and the  compromises that have to be made in order to succeed.

The Canadian authorities ran afoul of Beijing in 1999 when they refused to extradite China’s "most wanted man" Lai Changxing, a billionaire businessman who had fled China as the investigative net closed on his supersized smuggling operations.  That Lai has major questions to answer in China about how he accumulated his vast fortune is not in question, but Canadian authorities turned down requests for his repatriation because they believed that he would be executed for his crimes were he sent back to China, and therefore sending him back would be in violation of Canada’s human rights laws. 

Chinese authorities gave assurances that they would not seek the death penalty in this case, but since several other associates of Lai were executed for lesser crimes than those of which Lai is accused, Canadian authorities turned down China’s requests.  For this slight (and also ,in part, for cosying up to the Dalai Lama by giving him honorary citizenship) Canada was denied the right to advertise itself in China as a tourism destination , an almighty snub that has had continued and far- reaching effects on the Canadian tourist industry (and by extention the Canadian economy). This article claims that Canada is losing out on 700,000 tourists annually, each of whom would spend an average $1,800.

There is, the story says, a Canadian tourist office in Beijing but it receives only a dozen or so vistors a week since they can’t publicize their country or their services.  What’s more, despite being one of the first countries to apply for the priviledge, Canada has yet to receive Approved Destination Status, the ‘golden ticket’ that will allow cash-rich Chinese tour groups to visit the country.

So for doing something that, by Canadian legal standards at least, would be seen as "the proper thing to do", the Canadian government has cost itself incalculably large amounts of revenue from free spending Chinese tourists.  Not only that, as long as they are denied ADS, they will continue to lose ground to other countries competing for a share of the Chinese tourist market.

Things don’t show much sign of improving, either, with the incumbent Canadian conservative government taking about 5 minutes to get on the bad side of the Chinese government, with "Reds-under-the- beds"-style scaremongering about Sino-sponsored espionage. 

The fact is, though, that Canada will have to eventually make its peace with Beijing. It simply cannot afford not to, such is China’s economic and diplomatic sway. The question is how far they are willing to go, and how far they will have to go, to regain Beijing’s friendship.

This is a question that has cropped up again and again in relation to foreign companies and countries doing business with China.  From Yahoo aiding the conviction of investigative journalists to Google’s Party-friendly google.cn, to certain EU member-states lobbying to lift the EU arms embargo, observers have wondered whether the moral cost of doing business in China can be offset by the material gains, both for the companies involved and the Chinese people themselves.

Last week, Human Rights Watch put out a report criticizing foriegn Internet companies for their compliance in censorship and other nefarious activities in China. Entitled A Race to the Bottom, it called for foreign companies in China to start making "ethical choices" about the way they do business here and advises them to lobby the Chinese government to end censorship, refuse to hand over data to the authorities, refuse to censor any material and encrypt all emails.

But, noble as Human Rights Watch’s goals no doubt are, the very obvious reality is that their proposals are extremely unrealistic and there is likely not a single major multinational company willing to adopt any of them, for the simple reason that to do so would mean being turfed out of the China market (as articulately explained by the Peking Review blog).

We are sure to see this issue arise again and again in the coming months and years, particularly with IT and Media companies coming into the market here.   As foreign media penetration increases in China, for example, officials are striving to gain even greater control over it, an untenable antagonism that will only end when one or both sides agree to compromise (as, Google did).

But this game of ethical chicken is being played on an uneven field. For its part, the Chinese government can offer to any foreign companies willing to forego their ethical standards access to the "China Dream": 1.3 billion customers and an emerging class of nouveaux riches eager to splurge.  The foreign media and IT companies, on the other hand, unless they play by Beijng’s rules, can only offer Chinese authorities a world of headaches, by providing the public with greater access to uncensored foreign news and other material detrimental to the long-term health of the government.

In these circumstances,  it’s clear to see who the winner will be.

Dell has taken a savage beating from Chinese netizens over the last few weeks, after it was perceived to have ignored complaints by Chinese customers.  It is a cautionary tale of the dangers of ignoring just how influential the internet is in China.

Dell’s problems began at the end of June, when a customer named Zhang Min bought a Dell laptop online, only to find that the machine Dell delivered to him had slightly different specifications to the one he had ordered.  Zhang’s laptop had a T2300e chip, but he thought he was getting one with the T2300 chip.  Apart from the letter ‘e’, the only differerence between the two chips is that the T2300 supports visualisation (i.e. running two operating systems at once), a feature usually only required by hardcore tech-heads or server computers.  Dell says there is no difference in performance. 

Nevertheless, Zhang wasn’t happy and he contacted Dell to complain.  The company (foolishly) decided to stick to its guns, apologising for the confusion but refusing to  change the chip or offer a refund.  So a very unimpressed Zhang went online to publicize his dissatisfaction with Dell and their service at a techie forum.  Before long he had rounded up several other disgruntled Dell customers who had also been given the wrong chip.  Throw in an enterprising lawyer, Ma Jianrong, and a smidgen of wounded national pride, and before you could say "We’re sorry, here’s a full refund," Dell had been served with a class action suit, and its name was being dragged through the mud on the Chinese blogosphere. 

Despite the intensely negative publicity, Dell ploughed on with their initial strategy, gamely trying to face down the net mob.  But this Friday they finally caved and offered to refund all affected customers. 

(A detailed timeline and more exellent analysis of the situation can be found on the China Word of Mouth blog.)

Although this particular story has drawn a lot of international attention to the power of Chinese netizens, this is by no means the first time they have flexed their collective muscle.   There have been countless other examples over the last year or so of the speed and fury with which Chinese net mobs fixate on and pursue their targets, from the unmasking of the Cat Killer of Hangzhou (star of an infamous kitty snuff movie, who was tracked down and named online, even though the enterprising web-sleuths initially had almost nothing to go on) to the periodic outbreaks of sometimes plain hysterical anti-japanese fervour (e.g. the thousands-strong virtual mobs that gathered to protest the use of a supposed ‘Japanese flag’ in a virtual office in the Fantasy Journey to the West online game) 

[At the Eastwestsouthnorth blog, there is a great overview of the methodology employed by the net detectives in the pursuit of their targets.  This is in relation to the hunt for alleged child pornographers in Zhengzhou city.]

This is a pattern that has been repeated again and again.  It seems that these BBS vigilante movements are filling a social void, providing an outlet for frustrations and personal opinions that rapid economic development has created, but for which the politically backward system doesn’t provide any vent. Independent monitors, for example an Independent Consumers Watchdog, don’t exist; or if they do, they do so in name only, and are likely to be under the thumb of one of the government ministries.  So with no official body to turn to, people go online and take matters into their own hands.   At which point, as ESWN points out, Chinese surfing habits influence the way these movements coalesce: "These events are mobilized on the large Chinese BBS forums with tens of thousands of comments per hour.  By contrast, Americans tend to visit personal blogs which are less connected, coordinated and cohesive.  Thus the scale and ferocity of the Chinese manhunts are unmatched anywhere else."

An example of this web activism:  Confidence in the professional standards of domestic scientific and academic research and academia is currently at rock-bottom, with a number of high-profile scandals (like the Hanxin Chip scandal) and the halls of academia widely acknowledged to be riddled with plagarism.  The government hasn’t done much to tackle it - probably because this would require a root-and-branch overhaul of the education system - so netizens have taken it upon themselves to police this field.  A website called New Threads was set up by Fang Zhouzi, a former biochemist, with the aim of exposing instances of academic fraud. 

But this is not necessarily a positive development.  No official oversight means no accountability, which means that there are few concrete regulations and things can get ugly. A few weeks ago Fang lost a libel case brought by one of the scientists he "exposed" on the website. And last month, a Nanjing professor won a case against popular blogging site blogcn.com.   One of the professor’s students had a blog on the site which, the professor alleged, containted derogatory material about him. 

The (almost too) obvious question, though, is why this net activism doesn’t spill over into the political realm?  When we hear of so many protests every year, why don’t we hear about any similar activity on the net ?  Well, at least until now, it would seem that our e-police buddies Chacha and Jingjing, and those other 30,000 online police monitors we’ve heard so much about, have been earning their keep.  By monitoring chatrooms and forums,  they have been well-positioned to clamp down on anything remotely threatening.   An example of this was the rapid rise and subsequent smothering of an online campaign protesting rocketing house prices in Shenzhen earlier this year. 

In this case, a Shenzhen-based business man, Zou Tao, organised an online petition calling on the city’s residents not to purchase houses until the government took action to combat soaring prices.  (House prices in Shenzhen had risen 20% in the previous 12 months).  More than 30,000 fellow citizens signed up in support.  But so successful did the campaign become become that the obviously worried local authorities stepped in and put the nix on Zou’s nascent social movement (along with his website, blog, mobile phone and personal email) just as he was preparing to travel to Beijing to take his campaign national. 

We may, however, have witnessed a turning point in this attitude this week, as netizens succeeded in rolling back a decision by the Forestry Ministry to auction off hunting rights for endangered animals.  (Although, it must be said that this regulation was so monumentally daft that it was surely bound to fail, regardless of the outrage brewing on the internet.) 

So, the moral of all this net activity is that companies such as Dell will have to tread carefully and pay close attention to the mood-swings of Chinese netizens.  KFC and Volkswagen are just two of the companies who have learned this lesson the hard way in recent months.  Chinese smartmobs are often sensitive, always tenacious and relentlessly unforgiving.  And such is the nature of the Chinese web-surfing experience that little problems can very quickly become amplified and turn into PR disasters.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has banned the screening of foreign cartoons during the so-called "Golden Hours" from 5 to 8pm, prime cartoon-viewing time for Chinese children.  The regulation will primarily affect Japanese cartoons like 网球王子(Tennis Prince) and 灌蓝高手(Slamdunk) which are extremely popular with young people. 

SARFT apparently thinks move will benefit the domestic cartoon industry by "clearing up the sky", while also bringing some unspecified benefits to Chinese kids ( Note the first sentence of this article which informs us that "Chinese children will be able to watch domestic cartoons during 5 to 8 every day".  And then note the paragraph later that says 80% of surveyed kids like the foreign cartoons, while "a certain number" - whatever that might mean - expressed dislike for the domestically produced ones.)   

This all sounds eerily similar to, and just as bizarre as the decision to pull The Da Vinci Code from cinemas at the height of its popularity, under the pretext of protecting and promoting the domestic film industry.  

However, this Xinhua report also includes criticism of the new regulation from the Southern Metropolitan News, which described the new regulation as a deprival of consuming rights of the public" and blamed the poor state of the domestic industry on the quality of the products being produced. 

It is also possible that this may be another case of authorities applying a bandaid to the repercussions of shoddy economic planning.  According to the article, the government decided in 2004 that 60% of all cartoons shown in each quarter should be domestically produced ones.  This led to a rapid increase in investment in the industry, and the number of cartoons being produced soared.  But since, as noted above, these cartoons don’t seem to be very popular with "the yoof", and with new cartoons being produced all the time, a lot of people must have been losing a lot of money. 

So is this new rule that "clears the skys" for domestic producers another example of ass-backwards, reactionary economic planning? (Much like the ban on electric bikes introduced in Zhuhai, Guanzhou and several other cities, which was designed to force people to buy cars and thereby reduce the massive overcapacity in the domestic auto industry.)

In related news, the much hyped Chinese animated feature film Thru The Moebius Strip, the most expensive animated film in Chinese history, has apparently tanked at the domestic box office, pulling in just 100,000 yuan in it’s first week of release.  

 

UPDATE:

Foreign media outlets have picked up this story and are really going to town on it.  Dozens of agencies from the BBC to CNN have drawn attention to this new regulation by highlighting that the Simpsons can now not be shown on Chinese TV.  (CNN headline: D’oh! China Primetime Ban For Homer)

The problem is that this blog has never once seen an episode of the Simpsons on Chinese TV, nor does it know anyone else who has.  As mentioned above, the new regulation primarily affects Japanese cartoons, as most Western cartoons (with the exception of Tom &  Jerry and some other classics) have never been shown here and aren’t popular..  Yet another example of lazy foreign reporting.