In one of the juicier quotes making the rounds on social networks this week a private equity investor in Shanghai savaged the Chinese media for its unblinking corruption, quipping to the New York Times that "if one of my companies came up with a cure for cancer, I still couldn’t get any journalists to come to the press conference without promising them a huge envelope filled with cash.”

Exactly how bad is this problem and were does it cross the line? This week Sinica dives into the question of how Chinese journalism works in practice with a show that splits cleanly along industry lines. Joining host Jeremy Goldkorn this week and representing the journalism and public relations industries in turn are Sinica friends Li Xin, managing editor of Caixin magazine, and Will Moss, China PR expert and blogger of Imagethief fame.

Want more Sinica? We've just passed our second anniversary with the show, and have a ton of shows covering a huge range of topics in our by now fairly massive Sinica archive. And if listening online isn't your thing, why not try downloading them? To subscribe to the Sinica feed, just click on the Advanced file menu in iTunes and select the option "Subscribe to Podcast". Provide the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted, and your computer will take care of the rest. If you want to download this show as a standalone mp3 file.
 said on
April 15, 2012
A belated list of the links recommended in our podcast. First, on bank profits we have Caixin's coverage of the story in three different stories: Bank Regulator Offers a Little Breathing Room, The False Promise of Bank Profits and Shadows of Doubt on Banking Profits.

Stories on paid coverage in China include In the China Press, Best Coverage Cash Can Buy by David Barboza and a followup blog post by Lou Hoffman titled Much Ado About Nothing.

Recommendations this week included a folk music podcast with original recordings from places like Xinjiang by a Chinese ethnomusicologist from Jeremy, Rob Schmitz's new piece A look behind the Gates of Foxconn. And Li Xin recommended the book Open the Window and Speak Frankly by Wu Jinfa.

Mark Lesson Studied