COMPANY TOWN : MTV Hopes Chinese Will Be Staring : Television: A funky, cross-cultural host leads music channel into battle for the Mandarin-speaking market.

Schutze, with half his head shaved, the rest of his hair hanging to below his waist, pierced ears, lederhosen, purple tights and combat boots, is not the kind of guy you often see in China.

But he soon may be. Schutze is the face of MTV’s Mandarin-language channel, beamed by satellite to Chinese-speaking countries around Asia. A funky combination of Greenwich village and a Chinese village, Schutze has already sparked a craze for lederhosen in Taiwan.

“It’s a little bit harder to get my hair,” says Schutze, who started growing it out 10 years ago as a teen-ager in Nanjing. “But I’ve seen that already too.”

In the battle for Asia’s increasingly affluent young viewers, MTV is dueling with Star TV’s Channel [V], a Hong Kong-based satellite channel that was once MTV’s Asian licensee. After MTV split from Star last year, Channel [V] grabbed the market. What will distinguish the two channels, which have similar repertoires of music videos, is localization, distribution and personalities.

And Schutze, with an energy level so high that he recently bounced from China to Singapore to Hong Kong in one day, stopping only for a toothbrush and a change of tights, is the kind of host MTV hopes will help it win the battle.

Schutze is more than an ultra-cool video jockey: A recent album marked his debut as a musician, with his own poetry and paintings on the lyrics sheet. His art has been shown in galleries in New York and Berlin. His name is a German variant of his Chinese name, and he says he chose it because he thought it was cool that in German it means “archer.”

“He brings together in one person a lot of elements we look for,” says Bill Roedy, international president of MTV Networks.

Schutze doesn’t just make you want to watch. He makes you want to stare. Though he didn’t always look like this, even in his hometown he was something of a rebel and an artist. At Nanjing University, he met several foreign students. One turned him on to the Talking Heads, setting him on the path to rock ‘n’ roll. Another eventually became his wife, leading him to New York.

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There he struggled with his art, his music and culture shock.

“I reached a point where I didn’t feel at all Chinese,” he says, fiddling with one of the 26 chunky silver bracelets on his arms. “I just turned off everything I had.”

He stopped painting and became “practically an anti-artist,” and considered quitting music.

“But then,” he says, “I thought about being 75 years old, my hair all long and silver gray, rocking on a porch by a field with the grass really high. I saw myself sitting there, my hair waving in the air like the grass, wishing I had been a rocker when I was young. So I thought, I just gotta do it!”

In New York, and later Taiwan, he honed his English and his guitar skills and reclaimed his Chinese influences. He recalls sleeping in a stone courtyard with other village children in the Chinese countryside, eating watermelon in the summertime, listening to old women tell ghost stories at night. “That’s all in there,” he says.

But so is a hard-driving, chaotic sound to his music that evokes the style and energy of his time in New York. His videos--which are also a hit on rival Channel [V]--are a tribute to those days.

It’s this combination of Nanjing and New York that make him what one fan describes as “very MTV.” And though it wasn’t what his parents had in mind, even his name is perfectly suited for an MTV video jockey: The Chinese characters mean “rock village.”

Both Schutze and MTV have found that it’s not always easy to be the envoy of international entertainment. Schutze just visited his family in Nanjing for the first time in three years. They don’t really understand what he does as a VJ, and he hasn’t had a chance to show them. MTV isn’t broadcast in China yet.

MTV spokesman Todd Phillips says the company is hoping to work out a cable distribution agreement for mainland China by the end of the year. Mandarin Channel, targeted at China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, is scrambled, available only to cable subscribers or satellite dish owners with a decoder--a decision made in part to appease control-hungry governments.

“Encryption provides us with a revenue string,” says Phillips, contrasting it with Channel [V], which beams free across the region and depends primarily on advertising for income. “But we also want to make sure we aren’t upsetting the governments behind the make-or-break decisions for us.”

Phillips is talking about China, whose population of 1.2 billion is potentially the largest market in the world. The mainland’s consumer market is still embryonic, with just 20 million people considered middle class, but advertisers such as Coca-Cola, United International Pictures, Levis and Budweiser are promoting products that are within the average urban shopper’s reach.

Schutze recalls that one of his first and favorite purchases as a college student was a pair of Nike basketball shoes. Record companies, too, after a long battle against pirates, are waiting for music sales to take off in China the way they have elsewhere in Asia. Purchases of American tapes and CDs in Asia made up a quarter of U.S. record sales last year.

But Asian governments are less enthusiastic about the influx of Western products and influences than their young citizens are. Even Singapore, the new home of MTV and now Schutze, keeps a tight grip on foreign TV and publications.

“It’s pretty tight. It’s definitely not New York,” says Schutze, who admits he gets more double takes when he walks down the street in Singapore than in almost any other place in Asia.

“It’s too clean and too much the same,” he says. “Even the weather. I need four seasons. I need to see leaves falling and flowers dying. There’s a lot of passion in that.”

Singapore, which envisions itself as Asia’s up-and-coming information capital despite its tight rein on what is seen and read in the country, offered inducements to MTV to set up its regional headquarters there. MTV, with its in-your-face reputation, accepted warily.

“They have the option to look at our videos coming in the country, but so far they haven’t done that,” says Roedy, the MTV international president. “We have in writing that they will not interfere with the signal going out.” Roedy leans forward intently. “We wouldn’t tolerate any attempt at censorship. We’d just go somewhere else.”

That there are not too many other choices reveals the challenges MTV faces in trying to go global. Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has described MTV as a purveyor of “ghetto culture.”

That country has a longstanding ban against men with hair past their shoulders appearing on television, a rule that would keep Schutze off the air there. MTV decided to show its English-language version in Malaysia instead.

Says Roedy: “We’re not out to change the world. We simply want to reflect the tastes of our audience. Some rap comes from urban violence and racial discord. That doesn’t really appeal to Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia] or Phuket [Thailand].”

So the search continues for a winning formula that will appeal to Asia’s diverse audiences.

When MTV made its debut on Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV network nearly four years ago, the idea was to create a pan-Asian product. Now the catchword is localization. Like Channel [V], MTV added a Chinese-language channel for more specialization.

On MTV Asia, the English-language channel, prime-time programming moves with the sun across the globe: Chinese ballads when it’s 7 p.m. in Taiwan, Indian rap 3 1/2 hours later when it’s 7 p.m. in Bombay.

After MTV decided to cut loose from Star last year and go it alone, Star dubbed its program Channel [V], kept the basic format and the personalities and added a Chinese channel. While MTV regrouped, Star entrenched itself.

Star raised the stakes in January, just before MTV’s comeback, when Warner Music, Sony Thorn EMI and Bertlesmann agreed to invest $50 million in Channel [V] for a 50% non-controlling stake. They topped it with a May agreement to stage live concerts at Hard Rock Cafes across Asia.

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Now MTV must compete with its own creation for an estimated 30 million to 40 million viewers, balancing Channel [V]’s industry linkup with its own 50-50 alliance with PolyGram Far East records.

“It’s amusing” that MTV must catch up with Channel [V] now, Roedy says. “We taught them how to do it.”

The goal is to win 50 million viewers--nearly everyone with a TV set and access to the channel--by the end of the year.

“There’s room for more than one channel, just like there’s room for more than one radio station,” Roedy says. “But we do it better.”