If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover’s book, Rupert’s Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can’t find any? I rest my case.
Dover was Murdoch’s vice-president in China. He 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.
Murdoch, Dover shows, began his assault on China with two strategic mistakes. The first was to pay a staggering price — US$525m — 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 state-controlled television channels.”
The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decree banning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next ten years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communist government’s most powerful supporter.
Within six months of Li Peng’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, written by Deng’s daughter. He built a website 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”, he said, “is a distinctive market with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies must learn to abide by.” His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that “every relevant Chinese government official received a copy.”
But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled 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 was “painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such as human rights”. Rupert employed his unsalaried gopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation 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 it had bought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to “kill the fucking book”) because his usual system of control had broken down. “Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to his senior executives or editors.” 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.” In this case executives at HarperCollins 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 Chris 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 cozy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s political Establishment”. For the first time in his later career, he had encountered an organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has now retreated from China, after losing at least $1bn.
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 serialisation. 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.”
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 snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered.
But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? “When you see the reaction of the British media to the book,” Bruce 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.”
Paradoxically for a publication which inspires such fear, Bruce Dover’s story sometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation never promised the Chinese government favourable 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 Corporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesman Wang Yukui that “we won?t do programmes that are offensive in China. ? If you call this self-censorship then of course we?re doing a kind of self-censorship.”
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.