送交者: mangolasi 于 2006-3-14, 12:18:13:
might affect future economic growth. I don't know Mr.Lang hence no comments on his comment. But if the gov. limited the economists right of speech if he gave out unwelcomed comments, the policy making procedure is compomised and you might not get sensible economic policy. So fast initial growth may not be persistent.
Chat show economist forced off China TV
By Richard McGregor in Beijing
Published: March 14 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 14 2006 04:07
China has forced one of the country's controversial economic commentators off the air, closing his top-rating programme on the grounds that he did not meet the government's spoken language standards for national television.
Lang Xianping, who is also known as Larry Lang, recorded his last programme at the end of February after being told he did not have the licence issued by the government to all television comperes to certify they can speak standard Chinese.
The resort to such creative bureaucratic means to shut down the programme, Lang's Leisure Comments on Finance, is a measure of the authorities' current eagerness to rein in public debate about sensitive economic issues.
China uses such licences to ensure that standard Chinese, rather than the country's innumerable dialects, dominates the media and promotes national unity.
But such rules wouldnormally be irrelevant inthe case of Mr Lang, aTaiwanese-born professor of finance in Hong Kong, who is fluent in Chinese.
Mr Lang was an almost immediate hit after he launched his business chat show on cable TV in Shanghai in 2004.
But he generated controversy, unusually not by criticising the excessive state control of the economy, as many of China's pro-market economists have done, sometimes at risk to their careers.
Rather, Mr Lang made his name by attacking the sale of state assets at what he said were often fire-sale prices in under-the-table deals to private entrepreneurs.
Mr Lang's tirades against the sale of state assets struck a nerve in a country increasingly concerned about the corruption involved in the rapid accumulation of wealth by some entrepreneurs in recent years.
The government agency that oversees large state enterprises banned management buyouts in early 2005, largely as a result of the controversy generated by Mr Lang, and has only recently slightly eased the rules.
Many entrepreneurs attacked by Mr Lang have long attempted to have him reined in, but Shanghai television regulators had resisted such pressures until recently.
Although he claims he never solicited their support, many of China's so-called "new leftists" have enthusiastically backed Mr Lang's criticism of the sale of state assets.
Mr Lang could not be contacted last night, but his assistant and Shanghai-based television producers confirmed the language licence had been used as a pretext to get the show off the air.
Most of the renewed wave of censorship in China over the past year, which has seen numerous papers closed and journalists jailed, has been directed at government critics generally classified as "liberals".
But while the government has recognised the growing rich-poor gap as a serious problem, it is clearly uncomfortable about the issue being highlighted, whatever the critic's colour.