Viewers across China were supposed to see Asian superstar Jackie Chan and others get engraved crystal balls on the evening of May 7. Instead, they watched non-stop coverage of bodies being pulled from the wreckage of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, bombed by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation warplanes just hours before the awards show was scheduled to run. The anti-Western backlash that followed knocked MTV off most Chinese cable systems for as long as five weeks, highlighting the vulnerability in occasionally xenophobic China of any commerce that's too culturally associated with the West.

But MTV came back in China and Chinese viewers will be none the wiser when the awards show airs: Viacom expects more than 42 million households across the sprawling country to tune in. "We've succeeded not by bringing American culture to other shores, but by encouraging the development of home-grown musical talent," boasted Viacom's chairman, Sumner Redstone, earlier this month in Shanghai. And he's right: Despite its vulnerability to the winds of Chinese nationalism, the network is increasingly viewed as a local brand here.

More than 70 per cent of the music carried by the network's Mandarin-language channel comes from mainland Chinese, Hong Kong or Taiwanese artists. And much of the programming viewed in China is produced on the mainland by Viacom's three co-production ventures with Chinese partners. The programmes are taped in Shanghai and Beijing, sent to Singapore and beamed by satellite back into China where they are taped by cable-system operators. The programmes are screened by government officials before they are aired on local networks.

Occasionally, a bit is cut out--when Taiwan's flag inadvertently appears in the background of a music video, for example. But the programming is increasingly left alone. "We have on-going discussions about what China objects to and each side is learning where the boundaries lie," says Tom Freston, chairman of MTV Networks.

That means money for MTV. While audiences are difficult to verify in China, MTV's Asian advertising revenue--of which sales directed at the Chinese market are the fastest-growing part--have already surpassed the figure booked for all of 1998. Redstone expects MTV's Asian advertising revenue to grow around 40 per cent this year--at a time when overall advertising spending in the region is down. More than 60 per cent of those ads are local, up from just a third two years ago.

And Redstone figures the growth has only begun. Two-thirds of Asia's population is under the age of 35, adding up to almost two billion people in MTV's target market. He says the music television network will break even in China within two or three years.

Viacom launched MTV Asia in 1995 with 25 customised channels broadcasting in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Korean. Today, at least an hour a day of the Mandarin channel reaches 60 per cent of China's cable-wired households in 38 cities, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey.

Asia is even more important when compared with the US market, which represents only about four per cent of the world's `eyeballs.' Already, MTV can be seen in 300 million households across 83 territories and a third of those households are in Asia. Within six or seven years, MTV's Freston says the network's international revenue could surpass US revenue, now about $1 billion a year.

Next up for Viacom's distribution channel is Nickelodeon, the company's entertainment network for kids. Redstone says Nickelodeon's international operations were "profitable from day one," because of the universality of the programming. "A kid in New York has more in common with kid in Tokyo than either does with their own parents," he said. Redstone said he is in talks with China about broadcasting Nickelodeon here.

(The Asian Wall Street Journal)