China Gets Tougher on Foreign Media
SHANGHAI — After presiding over the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland last week, Walt Disney Co. President Robert Iger headed straight to Beijing to meet Liu Yunshan, chief of the Communist Party's powerful Propaganda Department.
Disney declined to say what the two men discussed, but it's a good bet that Iger, who will become chief executive Oct. 1, renewed his case for the Disney Channel in China, and that once again he was told to wait. Disney has been waiting since 2003 for a broadcasting license from Beijing so it can air its programs to some of the 340 million homes with cable TV.
Last year, prospects looked good when China moved toward loosening rules on foreign media investments. But in recent months, Liu and other leaders of the Chinese government have clamped down on foreigners' participation in China's burgeoning media industry, declaring last month that they wouldn't allow more foreign television channels and would tighten their grip on the 31 satellite broadcasters in China.
Chinese officials say they want to "safeguard national cultural security." But some analysts believe that the restrictions are aimed at keeping advertising revenue in the hands of state-controlled and domestic media enterprises. Even as Beijing has moved to limit foreign companies, it has encouraged the development of private Chinese media firms.
Disney isn't the only company hindered by the new rules. Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon children's channel has been waiting for two years for a broadcasting license. One of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. ventures in China has been shut down. Time Warner Inc., Sony Corp. and others involved in co-production of movies in China now face greater censorship.
These media giants haven't said much about how the rules will affect their investment plans. For the most part, they're "sitting tight, not upsetting regulators and being more patient," said Vivek Couto, an executive director of Media Partners Asia in Hong Kong.
But frustrations are beginning to spill out.
Murdoch, who with his Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, has cultivated Beijing over the last decade to become the top Western television company in China, said at a conference Friday in New York that his company had "hit a brick wall" in the Middle Kingdom. In the last year, he said, China has backed away from opening up to foreign news organizations. He called Chinese authorities "quite paranoid about what gets through."
