If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover’s book, Rupert’s Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife (Mainstream Publishing). Well, go on, read them. You can’t find any? I rest my case.
Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China, and took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study of power and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone would stand in his way. So why aren’t we reading about it?
Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price — US$525 million — for a majority stake in Star TV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make a speech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, which he had neither written nor read very carefully.
New telecommunications, he said, “have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere ... satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass the state-controlled television channels.”
The Chinese leaders were furious. Then-premier Li Peng (李鵬) issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next 10 years groveling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.
Within six months of Li’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’s China signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for a tedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), written by Deng’s daughter. He built a Web site for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’s Daily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage he had caused four years before.
“China is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by,” he said.
Murdoch’s minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy.”
But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he groveled even more. He described the Dalai Lama as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.”
His son James claimed that the Western media were “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights.”
Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher, former British prime minister Tony Blair, to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to then Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) at a Downing Street lunch.
To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corp agreed to carry a Chinese government channel — CCTV-9 — on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to “further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explore new areas with an even more positive attitude.”
Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book that it had bought from former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten.
Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly on the issue — he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book” — because his usual system of controls had broken down.
“Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors,” Dover wrote.
Instead he expected “a sort of ‘anticipatory compliance.’ One didn’t need to be instructed about what to do, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests,” he wrote.
In this case HarperCollins executives had failed to understand that when the boss objected to Patten’s views on China, it meant that the book was dead.
Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dover shows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Patten’s book to be banned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it, “our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked a distinct warming in the relationship.”
The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate “the cosy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political establishment,” Dover writes.
For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organization more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China after losing at least US$1 billion.
This is a riveting story about two of the world’s most powerful forces. Dover’s British publisher told me.
“I thought this was a natural for serialization. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls and we don’t understand why,” the publisher said.
The book has been reviewed in The Economist and the Financial Times, but no other British newspapers or broadcasters have touched it.
As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdoch publication anywhere on earth — the Australian Literary Review — and that was an article of such sniveling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered.
The editor of another News Corp title, the Far Eastern Economic Review, commissioned a review, then admitted to contracting “cold feet” and spiked it.
But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch?
“When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Dover tells me, “one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admired Murdoch — an emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a hand against them.”
He might be right, but I think there is also a general bias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in faraway countries, my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples were comprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverse relationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.
Oddly for a publication that inspires such fear, Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corp never promised the Chinese government favorable coverage; Murdoch undertook only to be “fair,” “balanced” and “objective.”
Dover takes these terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they were being used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain News Corp’s most direct admission — the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won’t do programs that are offensive in China ... If you call this self-censorship then of course we’re doing a kind of self-censorship.”
He is wrong to suggest that “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions.”
As the testimony by Andrew Neil (a former editor of the London Sunday Times) before the House of Lords communications committee shows, the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content of the newspapers he owns that swing the greatest political weight.
But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s most powerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support the invasion of Iraq, but they did. He might not even have had to lean on Blair to ensure — as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals — that no British minister said “anything positive about the euro.”
Power is sustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes of his master and to meet them even before he asks.
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