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Taking a proper gander at PR

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THE invitations had been sent out. The conference room at Capital Mansions was prepared with microphones and speakers. All the top members of the board were present, and the journalists had dutifully arrived with their cameras and notebooks.

It was supposed to be a big day. CITIC, China's largest investment company, was expected to announce details of its largest investment yet and one of the biggest undertaken in the country - the development of Daxie Island, off the eastern city of Ningpo.

The only problem was that the company had nothing new to say. ''We'll tell you all the details in a few weeks,'' said an exasperated Mr Wei Fuhai, vice-president of CITIC, after several questions about how the company would raise capital for what appearsto be a multi-billion US dollar project spanning 15 years The CITIC press conference was a classic case of the terrible state of Chinese public relations.

As China opens up its economy to the rest of the world, it has begun to realise it needs to develop a means of public communications which the rest of us can understand. Unfortunately, the message often comes out more in the style of old-fashioned propaganda than anything else.

Western public relations companies started setting up offices in China in the mid-1980s, and see China as a potentially big market with more and more Chinese companies floating shares on foreign stock exchanges and setting up operations abroad. But for the time being, most of the work these Western firms do is for foreign clients with operations in China.

''A lot of the Chinese companies say they don't have the money, without thinking that we can save them a couple of hundred thousand dollars by avoiding mistakes,'' said a Western public relations consultant. SOURCES say Chinese companies often prefer to bribe the press to write favourable articles about them - which works out far cheaper than hiring consultants.

According to Mr Wang Jiaming, head of the Public Relations Association of China, there are more than 100 Chinese public relations companies and offices in Beijing alone.

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