MediaG3 (MDGC)

[tradernation]

Technical advances in the field of communications are undercutting the PRC Government efforts to control media content and are likely to play an even-greater role in the future. In the PRC and other developing countries, even fairly basic technologies present a challenge to autocratic governments intent on controlling the information their citizens can receive. For example, importing fax machines—which are frequently used to spread copies of politically incorrect material from overseas news sources, internal party domestic publications, and more obscure domestic media—is strictly illegal in mainland China, but corruption in the form of payoffs and favors to officials hinders efforts to control such imports.

Residents of the Chinese mainland now receive more than 20 outside television channels by satellite, including Chinese-language services of CNN, Star TV, and the United States Information Agency. In the southern province of Guangdong, 97 percent of the households have television sets, and all—except those in a few parts of the city of Guangzhou, where reception is poor—have access to Hong Kong television through cable networks. Some local stations even intercept the signals and insert their own commercials. Beijing is unable to effectively monitor, let alone control, the illicit cable operators who have sprung up since the early 1990s. As of 1995, about 1,000 of the 3,000 cable stations in mainland China, linked to perhaps 50 million homes, were unlicensed.

Satellite dishes in mainland China that pull in programs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places are regulated[citation needed], but government entities such as the Ministry of Machinery Industry and the military services produce such dishes outside allowable quotas and guidelines and then sell them illicitly to eager customers. Efforts by the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television to halt this practice have been ineffective, mostly because of the large profits involved—up to 50% per dish. Indeed, the government has backtracked in its efforts to stop these practices—moving from an outright ban on satellite dishes to specifying allowable programs and viewing hours