In China, A Version Of 'The Apprentice' Stirs Controversy

BEIJING — When television producer Wang Lifen lived and studied in America last year, she spent much of her time watching TV to gather ideas that might work in China.

"Among so many different programs, it was The Apprentice that really absorbed me," said Wang, 41, of China Central Television. "For the first time I saw that a successful businessman can be selected by a TV program."

Last September, when Wang returned home, she developed Win in China, a reality series loosely based on NBC's The Apprentice.

With Wang as the host, the weekly series debuted last month with a barrage of images of shopping malls, subway trains, skyscrapers and computer screens before profiling several of China's richest businesspeople, each a prototypical rags-to-riches story.

For the rest of the year, a panel of judges will evaluate the business plans and acumen of 108 competitors, eliminating most of them in a "training camp" and then, as in The Apprentice, "firing" the finalists one by one each week. The winner will receive at least $1.2 million in startup capital to build a company.

Given China's conflicted history with capitalism (from the 1950s until the late 1970s private capital was largely banned here), Wang decided to focus the TV competition on entrepreneurship and innovation instead of profit-making.

But even in its toned-down version, Win in China glorifies capitalism.

And the program has sparked an explosive debate among viewers about the very essence of China's economy in a nation that has undergone three decades of dizzying change. Once one of the world's poorest yet most equitable nations in terms of distribution of wealth, today China is much richer, but with a yawning gap between the relatively few rich and the poor masses.

When the show's Web site solicited viewers' comments about whether "kids from wealthy families have a better chance of success than kids from poor families" scores of Chinese posted angry notes.

The first episode attracted 1.8 million viewers, according to MindShare, a global ad agency. And the program has given some Chinese an opportunity to criticize the system.

"In rich families children can go to the best schools, enjoy the most advanced technologies, even go abroad to study," one Web posting read. "There is no real equality in this society."

"The poor have few opportunities," another post read. "In China if you want to start a business you need a lot of help, but the poor have none."

An anonymous Chinese blogger lamented: "China is becoming more unequal all the time. Win in China might make the poor child want to fight, but they are certain to lose."

China's increasingly conspicuous capitalism has created a slew of contradictions for the world's most populous country and the Communist Party that runs it.

In cities, donkey-drawn carts share streets with luxury cars while beggars, even a few years ago rarely seen, gather at tourist sites and outside of expensive restaurants.

Complaints about government corruption and the hard lot of average people are common.

On the surface, airing a show about the benefits of capitalism shouldn't be a problem in China. Since Deng Xiaoping introduced sweeping economic reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s, the changes have created the largest sustained economic growth ever for a large economy. Since 1978 China's GDP has grown at about 9 percent annually, on average.

In that context, the show's creator tried to make Win in China uniquely Chinese.

"I didn't like Donald Trump and I didn't like the values presented by The Apprentice because everything was oriented around making money," she said. "It's totally unsuitable for Chinese audiences."

One of the businessmen profiled on the show, Yin Mingshan, was incarcerated in labor camps for 20 years during the 1950s and '60s because his parents had been wealthy landowners before the Communist Party seized power in 1949. After Mao Zedong died in 1976 and his successor Deng kicked off reforms that unlocked private capital, Yin quickly built Chongqing Lifan Holdings, now China's largest private motorcycle manufacturer.

In 2005, Forbes magazine ranked Yin among China's 200 richest people, estimating his personal wealth at $130 million.

"Yin Mingshan sets a very good example for young Chinese," Wang said, adding that he showed that "capitalism includes a noble spirit, responsibility and organization."

"The show is about encouraging people to seize those ideals," she said.

But statistics on the nation's divide between rich and poor bear out the dissatisfaction of many viewers.

Beijing's minimum wage in 2004 was $67 a month, slightly more than half of the "local monthly average living expenditure" in the city, a recent Chinese government study said. At the same time, China's rich have gotten richer: A report last year by the Boston Consulting Group found that less than half of one percent of Chinese households own more than 60 percent of the nation's personal wealth.

"The (wealth) gap means that the families of the minimum earners cannot meet their basic living needs," Liu Junsheng, an author of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security report told the China Daily newspaper.

The contradictions between the Communist Party's roots and the obvious inequalities across the country have forced successive Chinese leaders to tie themselves into verbal knots trying to mesh their history with the capitalist present. Deng Xiaoping issued perhaps the most famous attempt to square the circle in 1992, when he called for a "socialist market economy."

In an interview, Wang sought to sidestep the debate by saying that the program promotes entrepreneurship and innovation - not unchecked capitalism.

"I want to focus on how persistence and hard work can make people successful," she said. "I think the show captures the psychological trend of this time."