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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (4736)	4/18/2005 8:13:58 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

[This is good news!Jiang is bad for China and so does Murcoch!]--"[Tom Plate] Fret Over China's Future" By Tom Plate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles Director of Asia Pacific Media Network LOS ANGELES - Figure it this way: If the famous, rich and not-often-wrong Rupert Murdoch is worried, then we should all be a bit worried too, right? Murdoch's rather surprising fret these days is about the future of China, perhaps ever-so slightly clouded now - at least to the extent this Western investor is starting to feel a chill. The master media empire-builder - until recently totally gung-ho on Western investment in China _ expressed his suddenly slightly pessimistic view to an elite audience of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, to which the news came as a bit of a stunner. To be sure, Murdoch did have a lot to say to the U.S. editors about lots of things. The editors listened intently to the media mogul as he berated them for falling asleep on the job while younger generations of potential newspaper readers defected in droves to the Internet. "The trends are against us," he declared. "Unless we awaken to these changes which are quite different than those five or six years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans." The Australian-born, U.S. citizen who owns News Corp., the parent corporation of the New York Post and other print outlets, also told the editors: "We've been slow to react. We've sat by and watched." But Murdoch, who has been anything but slow to react when it has come to investing in China, had something else to say that was startling. For years he has been the virtual Western poster-boy for mainland projects. His ambitious satellite news and entertainment business was gearing up for China long before most U.S. business people even knew the meaning of Guanxi (Chinese for "connections"). But when editors asked him about the business climate in China these days, Murdoch was shockingly and uncharacteristically downbeat. "There are indications that it's closing up more than opening up," he said, adding that organizing and running enterprises these days in China is "very hard work." Even so, China remains the big prize in everyone's eye, including, still, Murdoch's. The size of the market alone makes the average entrepreneur salivate more readily than Pavlov's dog. But business leaders who have put their hard-earned money into China know that in return what you get is anything but an automatic money-machine. It can take years before the scary red ink is overwhelmed by the luscious green of profitability. During that enervating period of uncertainty, one's faith in China as a putative investment heaven can be sorely tested by the great walls of inconsistent regulations, ever-present bureaucracy and, from time to time, the many officials with palms extended outward with obvious intent. The Murdoch corrective - To wit: Of course China remains hugely important, but still I am worried … _ comes at a very interesting time in Asia. For starters, both China and Japan, who had been cohabiting in Asia relatively quietly and sanely, and whose have been trading with each other at an increasingly torrid pace, are all of a sudden at each other's throats. On the mainland right now, anti-Japanese protests (presumably with Beijing's okay) are almost as commonplace as Mao posters; and in Japan, the government appears to have adopted a heck-with-you-it's-ours attitude on most disputed island and exploration-rights issues with its neighbors. These suddenly starchy _ even pugnacious _ attitudes in both Beijing and Tokyo strike one as odd, to say the least. Tokyo needs all the support it can get as it seeks out its permanent U.N. Security Council seat, not to mention all the economic cooperation it can engineer to lift is desultory economy further upwards. China has been a big part in its economic maintenance. For its part, Beijing needs - above all - to keep its economy rolling merrily along. Any serious stoppage or even stall or sputter could prove disastrous, igniting not only economic downturn but perhaps even political instability. Oh, is it time to say? _ Bring back the good old days of Jiang Zemin, the past president, when China's policy rarely lost its focus on the economic to dabble in the frivolously political. Perhaps it's some change in attitude at the Beijing top that is unsettling Murdoch. Or perhaps it's just fatigue with all the uphill push that any serious-minded entrepreneur generally needs to make a go of it on the mainland. Or maybe the media mogul just had a dour off-day and tomorrow the praises of China will be sung anew. But Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not smart. Something is eating him, precisely because something is happening in China. The full story is yet to be revealed, or played out. But Rupert apparently is somewhat worried, and therefore, so - among others _ am I. 04-18-2005 16:58 times.hankooki.com