1. Media tug of war in China:  Last week, my daughter sent me this amazing Bloomberg.com story, accompanied by graphics and clickable family trees, that unraveled how the “princeling” ancestors of China’s “Eight Immortals” – the generals and party leaders who built the communist superpower – now control the country’s leading industrial and financial conglomerates. The New York Times has also been on the case, detailing in articles like this one and this one how those controlling China’s national and regional governments have showered favors on their entrepreneurial relatives.  Then, last Friday the Times added a report describing heightened Internet blocking measures that Chinese authorities are taking to keep these kinds of stories about Chinese crony capitalism and other scandals from being seen online in China. The new efforts to firewall information that would embarrass the ruling class even include trying to block offending content from reaching the virtual private networks (VPNs) used by corporations to ensure the privacy and security of the information their employees transmit around the world.  It’s all fascinating, important stuff. But it’s only the opening rumble of what could be one of the major business and political stories of 2013. After all, this is the kind of information that threatens to overturn the implicit deal with the citizenry that the Communist Party rulers have depended on for the last two decades: let us rule and we won’t act like Communists when it comes to giving you economic opportunity.  Yet maintaining a digital firewall seems fruitless – and trying to is hardly going to go unnoticed.  So, this confrontation is going to be worth constant coverage. News organizations ought to set the scene now for the fight that’s coming by giving us the scoops on:  My wife and I went online last week to buy two tickets to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center as a Christmas present for two of her relatives. The price for two orchestra seats in Row U, off to the side: $470. It’s the opera, we thought – clearly a worthy charity.  But, it turns out, quite a flush charity, too. According to its latest publicly available tax return, the non-profit, tax-exempt opera took in $362 million in ticket sales and contributions in the fiscal year ending July 31, 2011 but spent just $321 million. That’s a $41 million (11%) profit. To be sure, $194 million of the $362 million that came in was from contributions, and, of course, there’s nothing wrong with an important cultural institution building up its endowment for a rainy day. It’s also true that the Opera has lots of far less expensive seats from which the sound is great even if the view isn’t. But the combination of this profit margin, the high ticket prices and the high salaries reported in the IRS filing – the director made $1,379,000 – suggests someone ought to survey major non-profit cultural institutions in New York and other major cities and do a report on profits, expenses, prices, and accommodations made to those who can’t pay full price to go to the show.
After smart reporting from Bloomberg and the New York Times about China's increasing efforts to limit stories about its crony capitalism, we're in need of more stories. How serious is China willing to be about limiting information, and how serious is it already?