What a household weighs before it pays

In 2004 I spent a week in a district service hall of Hexunpo Cable Television while households handed back analogue converters and collected digital set-top boxes. Almost everyone asked the same thing: what would the monthly charge be next year? Our planning papers had answered a different question, about how many channels the new system could carry. I have thought about that gap between what a company counts and what a household weighs ever since, and it is still where I begin a strategy discussion.

I graduated in economics from Quwanxi University in July 2002 and joined the planning office at Hexunpo, a municipally owned cable operator serving about 380,000 households in a prefecture-level city in south-west China. I built subscriber and tariff models for the analogue-to-digital conversion. The households already struggling with the old fee were the most likely to disconnect, and the model had to show them honestly rather than average them away. I held no budget; I prepared papers for the deputy general manager.

In July 2006 I moved to Duoyinwei Video Services, a private Chengdu company that packaged films, drama series and children's programmes into on-demand channels for cable operators and, later, IPTV services. As networks went digital, operators wanted on-demand menus but paid us only a share of what households spent. I worked first as a content operations analyst and from 2009 led business planning. By 2011 online video sites offered much of the same library free with advertising, and viewing per household on our channels fell even while connected homes increased. I negotiated carriage terms with eleven operators and learnt how little a supplier controls when another company owns the subscriber, the bill and the menu.

Shuzhenghe Publishing Group, a state-owned provincial publisher and book distributor, recruited me in March 2012 to evaluate digital investments. I learnt how a state-owned partner reasons: approvals take longer, rights are held for the long term, and responsibility for content review is never delegated. Its investment committee rejected two of my five proposals, including a stake in an audio company I still consider sound, because I had not explained how content approval would work after completion. The rejection was fair. I reported to that committee for five years without being a member of it.

I joined Qiaoyuting in March 2017 as director of strategy and partnerships. The founders had built a strong fiction catalogue but still earned RMB38 million a year from reading and audio channels sold inside cable and IPTV set-top packages, a source shrinking as households gave up television subscriptions. I proposed running it down deliberately instead of defending it. By 2020 it earned RMB9 million; we closed it in 2021 and moved its 26 staff into audio production and partner support. In 2020 I also led the negotiation that brought Qingyaoshan Culture Investment Fund, a state-owned provincial fund, in as a 17 per cent shareholder. Our venture investors feared that its content review would slow us. We wrote down which categories it would review and how quickly, and that agreement has held.

I became chief strategy officer in January 2021. Three decisions have defined the role since. In 2022 we made older completed titles free with advertising while new serials stayed paid. In 2024 we licensed short-drama rights title by title instead of granting a joint venture first access to the catalogue. In 2025 we began synthetic narration for the backlist, limited to authors and narrators who agreed, with each track labelled. Each time someone I respect argued the opposite case, and each time they were partly right.

I lead 24 people across research and planning, rights licensing and overseas partnerships. My habit is to write the strongest case for the option I am recommending against before I write my own, and to circulate both. I also bring authors' representatives and narrators into strategy discussions earlier than many colleagues find comfortable, because their objections usually reveal a cost that a revenue model has not yet priced. I present to our board as an executive invitee and have never been a director of any company.

I would now like to bring this experience to one board outside Qiaoyuting. The questions I know well, such as what to give away, whom to license, when to accept a partner's capital and how to introduce machine-made content, are being asked across publishing, audio, video and subscription businesses in China. I know where my experience stops, too: I have not run a network, held a broadcasting licence or managed a listed company's disclosure.

Open to Board appointments · Advisory roles

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