Media business

Xinhua relents: Financial news sector open

xin_0121105052111703277439.jpg
Xinhua, now faster and more attractive

Mure Dickie and Kathrin Hille in The Financial Times report:

China has opened its market to financial information providers, ending an attempt to give the official Xinhua news agency tight control over its foreign competitors and resolving a trade dispute with the US, the European Union and Canada.

Under a deal signed by the four parties in Geneva on Thursday, China agreed to transfer Xinhua’s role in overseeing foreign financial information suppliers to an independent regulator and to allow such suppliers to set up commercial operations.

The agreement, reached after seven months of World Trade Organisation consultations, removes a big operational risk for financial information providers such as Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. It also represents a victory for advocates of market reforms over the interests of Xinhua, which sparked the dispute by issuing tough new rules on the foreign agencies in September 2006.

China has required foreign news agencies to distribute to media clients only through Xinhua for more than 50 years. The agencies do not challenge these restrictions, which help the Chinese government ensure news does not reach the ­public uncensored...

...Xinhua denied it was in competition with foreign agencies. “This issue does not exist anymore,” said Liu Jiang, the agency’s deputy editor-in-chief, before the deal’s announcement. “We don’t want to restrict foreign news agencies: that would be backward behaviour.”

Mr Liu said the agency was going through a “strategic transformation” that should make it faster and its content more attractive.

Faster and more attractive? That is something to watch for.

This is also hopefully the end to a struggle that has been going on for decades: Xinhua both regulating and competing with the foreign wire services offering financial news in China. The first round of the fight between Reuters and Dow Jones et al. was won by the barbarians; James McGregor's book about business in China One Billion Customers contains a insider tale of the fight.

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There are currently 5 Comments for Xinhua relents: Financial news sector open.

Comments on Xinhua relents: Financial news sector open

easy task for xinhua, since financial information can hardly subvert the state.

political news however is going to remain under control.

While this looks to be good news, we have surely not seen the last of this fight. Xinhua has not lost its ambition to become a global financial news service a la Bloomberg, and its support in government has not waned.

What will be telling is the composition and underlying goals of the independent regulator the government will establish to regulate the industry.

government is industry is xinhua is the independent regulator. until these are separated and the distinctions are transparent xinhua will always be a joke outside of china

maybe Xinhua is planning to buy Reuters? That should make life easier.

In regards to the caption...

The white woman in the middle has an attractive face but the woman on the left looks rather creepy. All of them need to eat a few more Philly cheesesteaks or jiaozi so they can put some meat on them bones before I, Joe the Danwei Commenter, finds them appealing.

Since we are being honest here, I would comment on the article itself but its sad to say that I haven't read it.

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