China business media

I wouldn't normally direct you to one of the many blogs written in China by students studying Chinese (most of them, it seems, American). They tend to be wide-eyed, naïve and of limited value to those doing business.

However, one Princeton student blogging as Cha Shao Bao (OK, "barbequed pork dumpling" may not be the most sophisticated title but bear with me), recently posted notes on a briefing on business media from China Economic Review editor Art Kroeber who is usually worth listening to. The piece is titled "The Nature of China's Business Media" and talks particularly about Caijing (财经).

It ends with the following "problems":

1) One thing that has become a big issue recently extortion and bribery between businesses and the business press. In the 90s businesses would bribe journalists to write laudatory stories. Now, however, the press has such an influence on businesses stock prices that there’s the problem where journalists are extorting money from businesses. Reporters threaten to release exposure stories or even false stories unless they receive money.

2) The prices in the stock market have no relation to the quality of the companies. The business press could help find out a company’s real worth by looking into its figures, but China has such huge regulatory problems and poor accounting standards that there’s very little we (the business press) can do. The business press acts as a filter, guiding the public to look at what’s important about a company’s numbers, but if there’s no regulatory structure that forces the companies to put what is important into the public domain, the press can’t do much.

UPDATE: Caijing magazine’s latest issue was delayed by several days because the Chinese government ordered that two of its stories be pulled shortly before it went to press. See Why Caijing Was Late and Privatization is Prickly by Jonathan Ansfield.