The website of People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP, is now a listed company in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The company raised 1.4 billion yuan (US$222.2 million) in its IPO, nearly three times the amount it hoped for. On the first day of its trading, its stock price surged 76%. Before People's Daily's IPO, some pro-democracy activists said that no citizen would buy the stock of a propaganda machine whose profit comes solely from government subsidy. But they couldn't be more wrong.
Hu Xijin (胡锡进), the Chief Editor of Global Times and a shareholder of People's Daily, proclaimed victoriously, "The strong performance of People's Daily on the stock market clearly showed that the majority of Chinese people support our political system. People have voted with their own money." Meanwhile, pro-democracy blogger Wu Yue San Ke (五岳散客) sadly reflected: "In our society most people are still willing to exchange democracy for monetary gains."
I do find the retail investors’ enthusiasm over People's Daily unnerving, only because it confirms my pessimistic view that many people are not against a repressive system as long as they have a chance to join the repressor side. But from an investor's perspective, People's Daily's success is no surprise. The single most important lesson Chinese investors learned in the past several years is that you have to "Follow the Government". People are buying People's Daily only because they believe the government will not let it fail even if it means showering taxpayer money on it.
- A Webpage of People.com.cn
Here are some facts about the website of People's Daily that have been discovered by netizens so far:
- It has certain monopolistic advantages in the heavily controlled news industry. For example, a Chinese journalist can only be acknowledged as a "professional journalist" after they received a "journalist license" from the government. Any journalistic investigation might be considered illegal if the journalist does not have the "journalist license". None of the other Internet news portal has any journalist licenses, while People's Daily has more than 120 ones.
- The other Internet news portals, from Sina, Sohu to Tencent, are required to buy and publish news from People's Daily. How many companies have such power over their competitors?
- The biggest clients of People's Daily are all government institutions who are not price sensitive at all.
- It can generate profit even without income. For example, the People's Search Engine, which is set up to compete with Google, has not been monetized at all, but already has more than 30 million yuan profit magically showing up in its book.
- It plans to spend part of the money it raised on office equipment, namely iPhones and iPads, at the price of 10000 yuan each, several times the market price.
The successful IPO of the website of People's Daily is a testament to the success of state capitalism in China. The bureaucrats working for People's Daily must be celebrating: Who said the Internet or the market will undermine state authority? Now we have more money to buy luxury goods such as iPhones and LV or to fly first class to the US for business tour. And if we have some money left, we can spend it on educating people that democratic values are just Western imperialist ideology.
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