Opinion: More Capitalist Than Trump, Yet Still Censorious

The LAT delegation dined on Wednesday with three impressive female entrepreneurs in a hip restaurant that once served as an imperial ice house. I sat next to Wang Lifen, a producer whose show “Win in China” debuted this week on state TV. The hit sensation is the People’s Republic version of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” which of course means it is far more capitalistic. Here the winning five contestants -- who undergo business trials and interviews and will have been picked from an original 20,000 applicants who learned about the show from the Internet -- will not end up with a salaried job working for an egomaniac developer. They will each end up with their own company so they can become their own egomaniac. Foreign venture capitalists have ponied up millions of dollars for the new companies and they will end up with a stake in them. Because hey, you never know.... But wait, there’s more. The truly brilliant twist -- I think I said “wow, that’s amazingly clever” to Ms. Wang like six times over dinner, though she understood me the first time -- is that viewers, in addition to getting to vote in the winnowing proces, get a chance to win shares in the company too! A few hundred viewers who text-message the show will be chosen to share a 15% stake in the company. I think the winner has about a 20% stake. And of course, the state TV company will end up with a stake, too. Because hey, you never know.... As I often say back home: What a country! Actually, the next morning brought me back down to earth, or at least to the odd PRC version of it. I bought The Economist magazine at the hotel lobby, only to discover a couple of hours later that a page had been torn out of it. How rude is that?! It took about five seconds for my mind to process that this wasn’t some ordinary consumer gripe, but ludicrously low-tech censorship. Judging by the small bottom corner of the page that had survived the tearing, the article had something to do with Sino-Japanese relations. Later in the newsstand I picked up another copy of the magazine, which had a cleaner tear, no corners left. Thursday night, at a cocktail party at the China Club, I met David Brooks, the country manager for Coca-Cola. China is now the company’s fourth biggest market, volume-wise. What’s fascinating is that countries like Mexico and the U.S. (Coke’s two strongest markets) consume more than 400 annual Coke servings per capita. China is only up to 17. Again, like Hollywood and other industries -- and missionaries before them -- Coke can engage in some pretty mind-boggling number-crunching: “If we can get Chinese to consume a quarter as much Coke as Mexicans consumers, then....” What I wouldn’t have given to have had a Coke readily available the last time I was in China, 21 years ago. I spent the summer of 1985 studying here in Beijing, and lived on the campus of Normal University. The only place to have a Coke during that brutally hot, sticky summer was in one of the hotels around town, which we ventured to a couple of times. One of the high points of that summer was a July 4th party at the U.S. embassy because -- I will never forget this -- they flew in McDonald’s from Hong Kong. Now, of course, the golden arches are ubiquitous here, but who needs them amid all the good restaurants? In terms of how much the city has changed, I feel like my previous visit here had been in 1758. I did wander around Tiananmen Square this afternoon, and that hasn’t changed much, except for the large number of undercover cops making sure no one congregates. It is hard to stand there and not feel nauseous, and, well, ashamed. The 1989 massacre, truth be told, helped accelerate much of the prosperity-creating economic reforms, even as the government clamped down further on the political side. And yes, the party’s gamble seems to be paying off, and we (me personally, my country, the Olympic movement, my favorite beverage company, you name it) are all complicit in this devil’s bargain. And yet I am not sure there is a better alternative -- in terms of our options, that is. A historian here told me that a class at Beijing University was recently shown the iconic Tiananmen picture of the lone student halting the progress of tanks, but today’s students were unable to identify the context of the photo. The tearing of pages can be taken to frightening degrees....