Although AOL Time Warner, Inc. signed a $200 million agreement with Legend Group Ltd., China’s No. 1 computer maker, to sell online services in the world’s most populous nation in 2001, Bloomberg News Service reports that they do not have one paying customer out of the 59 million Internet uses in the country.  Foreign media companies such as AOL Time Warner, News Corp. and Viacom Inc. are still on the sidelines in China, even after the nation entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. The Communist government refuses to loosen its control over the flow of information, but the Internet isn’t the only area where AOL Time Warner faces difficulty. Their Mandarin-language TV network reaches just 2 million of China’s 1.1 billion viewers. Time magazine has been banned from Chinese newsstands for more than two years.

 

Its been almost a decade since they were allowed to introduce satellite-TV services in China, but to this day they only have limited access to the country’s households in one area of southern Guangdong province. In the rest of the country, they can offer satellite TV channels only in foreign residential compounds, some hotels and office buildings housing overseas companies.

 

Chinese officials say these restrictions on foreign media is government policy and necessary for the good of the people. However, the downside of this is that the Chinese people were unaware of the SARS outbreak (severe acute respiratory syndrome), for several weeks after the outbreak of the disease. Whenever CNN news reported on the subject, screens went dark until the SARS reports were over.

 

WINDOW ON CHINA editor calls on Christians everywhere to pray for China at this time and for the new president. The fear of losing control motivates these actions, but it leads to many other problems for the country and the church. It also effects human rights in the country, and this definitely affects the church and freedom of speech.