Media is not helping most business readers

Opinion / You Nuo

 Media is not helping most business readers
By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-19 05:27

Two things I came across last week remind me of the inadequacies of the
Chinese economic press. It is still filled with vague slogans and general
figures, and does not contain much information that is useful for those
who do business in this country.

Every Monday morning, managers would return to their offices to find
their desks covered by many thick copies of newspapers and magazines
claiming to be about the hot subject of the Chinese economy. Some you
subscribe to and others are sent to you for free for obviously
promotional purposes. But how many of them do you read seriously? You
know. I know.

One of the things that I encountered was being asked to help a younger
colleague in my office. He had been assigned to write a report about the
likely prospects for the urban consumer market. But after he searched
extensively on the Internet and borrowed several tomes of statistical
yearbooks from the library, he was dismayed to find not much help.

In those statistical books, data about urban household spending is listed
in a province by province order. But few divisions are contained in the
urban sector of a province, which means the consumer power of the
provincial capital city, or the most important regional business hub,
gets levelled down by that of many small, and some still largely
agrarian, county towns.

On the national level, the spending data is only available for a handful
of cities answering directly to the central government just Beijing,
Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing.

So it would be difficult, for instance, to compare the urban spending
data of Shanghai with Shenzhen, a close neighbour of Hong Kong in South
China's Pearl River Delta and supposedly the city with the highest income
on the Chinese mainland, and with that of Xi'an and Lanzhou, two large
cities in western China.

More absurd, my colleague told me that in the category of urban spending,
the amount of money used on private housing purchases is not included.
"Only the average rental is included," he told me.

So if my company comes to plan its sales campaign from Shanghai to
Shenzhen, or to some provincial cities, particularly for a product
related with housing ownership, we would have no easy way to analyze the
local consumer spending structure and to set an appropriate pricing
policy.

The second thing that I encountered was a survey by an overseas company
about China, not a very extensive one but one with a very specific and
interesting focus.

It is about electronic engineers, showing that on average, Chinese
electronic engineers were making US$7,700 in annual salary, with 75 per
cent of them reporting recent pay increases averaging 11 per cent, and
nearly 60 per cent reporting they have received performance-based bonuses
averaging more than US$1,700.

The survey also reveals that in evaluating employment opportunities,
Chinese engineers rate learning new skills only less important than cash
income, and above factors like promotion, benefits, employer's
reputation, and location.

None of this was reported in the Chinese press, at least I couldn't find
its Chinese-language version from the news search of baidu.com. But this
is useful in many ways for business people to evaluate their investment
opportunities, for sales managers to measure the consumer power of the
technology elite in large cities, for parents to help their children
choose their careers, and for employers to plan their hires.

The survey also helps demystify the so-called China threat, or the way in
which China is supposedly destabilizing the world market. It largely
comes from two factors working in combination, namely its engineers' low
income as compared with the developed countries, and their urge to learn.

However, China's own economic press doesn't usually carry such surveys.
Those domestically published economic newspapers are good at raising
slogans, editorializing on general topics, throwing up general reports to
touch a bit of everything, and listing dry sectoral figures usually
without comparable information. These are a poor service for foreign
investors trying to understand China, and for China to explain itself to
the world.

At this point, it may also be useful to quote from what a leading British
newspaper recently pointed out, that nowadays, many individuals in the
West may not realize that their lives are being shaped in part by the
rise of China "a nation of this size, at this speed." Many Chinese, at
least those who are responsible for spreading its economic information,
may not realize it either.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/19/2005 page4)

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