By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Juying Qin
The Wall Street Journal
Friday, April 7, 2006; D05
HONG KONG -- China has placed a moratorium on new foreign magazines on topics other than science and technology, dealing a blow to international media companies looking to tap the nation's booming advertising market.
One casualty of the policy, adopted by China's top publishing regulator, is the Chinese edition of the rock and youth culture magazine Rolling Stone. The magazine had published its first edition last month, but the General Administration of Press and Publications said it will forbid it from publishing again. The magazine falls in the restricted category, GAPP said, and its publishers never applied for the appropriate permission to publish.
China has imposed restrictions on investors before and then eased them or overlooked exceptions. But this rule is a big setback for publishers of lifestyle magazines, which had been one area in which foreign media could expand even as Beijing cracked down on television broadcasts.
"From now on, based on the GAPP policy, we might adjust to where it is possible to have approval," said Victor Visot, chief executive for China, Southeast Asia and Australia at Hachette Filipacchi Media, which licenses seven titles in China.
Already-approved titles can continue publishing normally, said a person familiar with the policy, which was confirmed by several officials of GAPP. The policy has been in place for about a year but was never published.
China doesn't grant foreign companies licenses to publish magazines or newspapers; instead, it allows dozens of "copyright cooperation" agreements between state-owned publishers and foreign partners. In these, an existing government-owned magazine essentially rents its license to a foreign partner, which remakes the magazine into a Chinese edition of Vogue, Elle or Rolling Stone.
The revised approval policy could damp a recent renaissance in Chinese magazines. In recent years, China's media market has become the world's third largest by advertising expenditure. Nielsen Media Research says marketers spent about 23 percent more, or a total of about $770 million, on magazine advertising in China last year than in 2004, based on published rate-card figures.
China's government has recently sought to rein in dissent and strengthen protections for domestic media companies by tightly regulating Chinese newspapers, television stations and Web sites. For example, after opening the TV industry to limited foreign broadcasts and some production joint ventures in 2003 and 2004, Chinese regulators last year said they wouldn't approve any new foreign TV channels in the foreseeable future.