A Dose of Reality

All rise. The judge enters the court in a black robe. She's 25, loquacious and the cutest justice the show's producers could find. With a rap of her gavel, the first case begins. Standing before her is the defendant, a Beijing resident who keeps a pet donkey in his apartment. The outraged plaintiff argues that farm animals aren't allowed in city homes. The defendant retorts that his donkey has never lived on a farm so it isn't a farm animal. Well, says the plaintiff, Beijing residents aren't allowed to keep dogs bigger than a Pekinese. A donkey isn't a dog, answers the defendant. After 10 minutes of legal repartee, it's time for the judge to decide.

China's 340 million television households have never watched anything quite like this. The show, called TV Court, is a knockoff of America's popular reality courtroom series Judge Judyand it's brought to you by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It's all part of the media titan's grand plan to captivate the world's biggest audience. News Corp. thinks it knows what must-see TV means to the Chinese people, and it's not the bland melodramas, giddy variety shows and propaganda classics broadcast on some 50 cable channels run mostly by the country's central and provincial governments. Nor is it the warmed-over Western cartoons and overseas dramas that are dubbed into Mandarin and recycled on the mainland by News Corp.'s main foreign competitor, AOL Time Warner (owner of TIME).

No, what China may want is locally produced cheese like TV CourtChinese people starring in the kind of voyeuristic reality-show fare that has made News Corp. the planet's reigning king of schlocky but wildly watchable shows. "We wanted programming like they'd never seen," says Jamie Davis, president of News Corp. China. "We wanted that international format and energybut you have to go local to succeed."

The delivery vehicle is a new Mandarin-language TV channel called Xing Kong Wei Shi (Starry Sky). Rolled out last year by News Corp.'s Asian subsidiary, Hong Kong-based Star Group Ltd., the new channel has already produced 700 hours of programming based on Western concepts. There's a real-life police show reenacting grisly mainland murders (Wanted! In China), China's first televised male beauty contest (Women in Control), a talk show with a wisecracking host la David Letterman (Late Night Talk), and soon there will be Sang Lan, the gymnast who won hearts after a paralyzing fall at the Goodwill Games in 1999, who will host a sports-interview show.

Elsewhere, such fare has been gold for News Corp. In the U.S., Murdoch's Fox network owns several runaway hits including Joe Millionaire and American Idol. In India, the company's Star Plus is the leading cable channel, thanks largely to the popularity of a Hindi-language version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The success of Star Plus helped the Star Group, which is run by Murdoch's son James and reaches 53 countries, turn its first profitable quarter last year, after losing an estimated $1 billion in its previous 10 years of operation.

Murdoch's programming in China "is the same sort of strategy that our team took in India," says Davis. And the payoff is potentially huge, given that the mainland's TV ad market was a hefty $2.4 billion last year. Yet the chances of China contributing to Star Group's bottom line any time soon seem faint. That's because China's authoritarian government, fearing that foreign-produced entertainment will usurp domestic competitors and that racy shows will corrupt the citizenry, severely limits the distribution of Western programming.

A year ago, the government relaxed a bit when it let Starry Sky and AOL Time Warner (through its China Entertainment Television, or CETV) become the first foreign broadcasters to deliver Mandarin-language entertainment channels legally over cable. That gave them access to ordinary Chinese viewers. But the government restricted them to China's toughest TV market: Guangdong province in southern China, where viewers prefer Cantonese-language programs available from Hong Kong. In January, Starry Sky also gained approval for satellite transmission to luxury hotels and expatriates' apartments nationwidethe same deal enjoyed by about 30 foreign-language channels. Even with the new distribution deal, Starry Sky's total national audience probably doesn't top 3 million, says Vivek Couto of Media Partners Asia.

Unless Starry Sky secures broader distribution rights, "there's no way it has enough viewers to make money in China," says Couto. Although Beijing is easing restrictions on foreign companies in many industries due to China's entry into the World Trade Organization, it's under no obligation to open up the broadcasting sector. "The government has no time line for granting more access," says a Western TV executive who often meets with Chinese broadcast officials.

Hoping to leapfrog this roadblock, Murdoch has been currying favor with Beijing ever since his Star satellite network, which runs nine channels in China, got a foothold on the mainland. The relationship got off to a rocky start in 1993, after Murdoch offended authorities by declaring that satellite broadcasting threatens "totalitarian regimes everywhere." Since then, Murdoch has chosen not to irritate the Communist Party. In 1999 he ordered HarperCollins, News Corp.'s publishing arm, to drop a book by former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten because it was critical of Beijing and, shortly after, dismissed the Dalai Lama as an old monk "shuffling around in Gucci shoes."