On Apr 21, 1:33 am, nada <dwalters...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
Any country which manages to unionise Wal Mart and stich up Murdoch
gets my vote...
Keep on doing interviews in the New York Times attacking the
Chinese....
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The most potent weapon wielded by the empires of Murdoch and China
A riveting account of two of the world's most powerful forces has been
ignored - blame anticipatory compliance
* George Monbiot
*
o George Monbiot
o The Guardian,
o Tuesday April 22 2008
o Article history
Close
This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday April 22 2008 on p29
of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:09 on April
22 2008.
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, 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 - $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
10 years grovelling. In the interests of business the great capitalist
became the communist government's most powerful sup****ter.
Within six months of Li Peng's ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from
Star's China signal. His publi****ng 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
were "painting a falsely negative ****trayal 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 then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a
Downing Street lunch. To secure some limited cable rights in southern
China, News Cor****ation 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 the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris
Patten. Dover reveals that Murdoch was forced to intervene directly
(he instructed the publishers to "kill the ****ing 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 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 leader****p 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 relation****p".
The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn't replicate
"the cosy relation****p 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." The book
has been reviewed in the Economist and the Financial Times, but
neither other British newspapers nor 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 snivelling sycophancy that you
wonder why they bothered. The editor of another News Cor****ation
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 Cor****ate Takeover of Britain, it was
ignored. There appears to be an inverse relation****p 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 Cor****ation
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 Cor****ation'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-censor****p then of course
we're doing a kind of self-censor****p". He is wrong to suggest that
"Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions". As the
testimony by Andrew Neil (a former editor of the 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 sup****t the invasion of Iraq, but they did. He might not even have
had to lean on Tony 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.
monbiot.com
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