The economic powerhouse of China is a land of myriad opportunities and is looking increasingly outwards as internationalisation, digitalisation and urbanisation fuel cultural change, explains Xiaowei Hu.
cent on 2011. The slowed-down growth rate is necessary but is likely to be challenged by the global growth-oriented way of thinking. Another interesting trend is urbanisa-
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tion. The rate now exceeds 50 per cent – a once-in-a-5,000-years’ breakthrough, which means over 700 million people now live in urban areas of China. A burgeoning edu- cated middle class is inevitable, but there are also signs of a more mature media mar- ket and one firmly rooted in the digital era.
Culture As far as our culture is concerned, it has many aspects that have helped create a dif- ferent media environment. People give expensive gifts to each other at festivals, people give money as a gift at wedding cer- emonies, families usually have only one child and, therefore, parents invest a lot in their children’s education, people believe less in food safety here and prefer imported food, etc.
It is important to bear these dif-
ferent attitudes in mind when visiting or considering doing business in the country. Furthermore, the magazine industry is small in comparison with other media industries in China, and is quite tiny in com- parison with those in many other developed countries. So the magazine sector has a huge margin for further development.
lthough economic growth in China has slowed from its incredible heights, GDP is still increasing, reach- ing $8,660bn in 2012, up 7.8 per
Print magazines are still very important in China, but digital is now the main reading platform for consumers in the country
Popular titles Every year, there are 17 million newly-born babies in China, a number on a par with cre- ating Sweden every annual. Consequently, parenting titles have been booming in the past ten years. Next up are the education- al titles, part of an unimaginably lucrative market, not just in the media, but more so in products and institutional classes. As far as platforms are concerned, digital is
now charging ahead. Print was an extreme- ly important channel of information from the 1980s to the early 1990s during China’s opening-up era. But with the internet era coming in waves, print was not allowed to reach maturity before digital reading became the main platform. As such, the annual print-run for magazines has been sustained at around 3 billion copies in the past 30 years. I would rather not say that less peo-