On Apr 22, 10:43 am, Vngelis <meberr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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
Want to discuss Chinese cops as part of the occupation of
Haiti...doing the bidding the US? Your turn...you just love defending
capitalism and cops don't you?
David
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