Wall Street Journal: Bowing Low to China

March 27, 2001

By Tunku Varadarajan, the Journal's deputy editorial features editor. His column, from which this is adapted, appears on OpinionJournal.com on Mondays.

Rupert Murdoch, a master practitioner of the corporate kowtow, has instructed his son James perfectly in the craft of craven submission to the Chinese regime. The young Murdoch -- a college dropout, now CEO of his father's Hong Kong-based Star TV company -- gave an impressive, almost balletic, performance of the genuflectory arts last week at the Milken Institute.

In words that astonished those gathered for the institute's annual business conference, James Murdoch, all of 28 years, lit into the Falun Gong [...] resistance movement in China, describing it as [slanderous words]. He criticized the Western media and the Hong Kong press for negative coverage of human-rights issues in China, concluding with the lament that "these destabilizing forces today are very, very dangerous for the Chinese government." Mr. Murdoch, who described himself as "apolitical," counseled Hong Kong's democracy advocates to resign themselves to the reality of life under an "absolutist" government.

The youthful CEO made no mention of the 150 Falun Gong members who have died in police custody, nor of the approximately 10,000 who languish in prison. Nor did he mention threats to Taiwan, slave labor, Tibet, arbitrary executions or the removal for sale of organs from the bodies of those executed. But let us not go there.

The Murdochs have had considerable success in China with their lapdog approach, and they must see no reason why this need change. This is not the first time a News Corp. executive has brown-nosed Beijing since a gung-ho little speech, made by Rupert Murdoch in 1993. In that speech, Mr. Murdoch said satellite TV was "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere." The angered Chinese clamped down on satellite dishes, much to the chagrin of Mr. Murdoch, who had purchased Star TV in the hope of capturing China's satellite market. The magnate had never before run up against real totalitarians, and was rather startled.

In a bid to undo the commercial damage, Mr. Murdoch abased himself immediately, dropping the BBC's World Service from Star's China beam. This he did shamelessly, telling all the world that he'd always believed that the folks at the BBC were pesky liberals who were out to portray China in the worst possible light. No wonder that Christopher Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, called Mr. Murdoch's decision to oust the BBC "the most seedy of betrayals."

Mr. Patten was later the victim of another seedy betrayal. His book, "East and West," which was to be published by the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, was dumped after Mr. Murdoch decided it was too critical of Beijing. In a pre-emptive smear, designed to ward off accusations that Mr. Murdoch was prostrating himself before Beijing, flacks at HarperCollins put out the word that the Patten book was dropped for being "too boring." This lie was nailed by the editor who commissioned the book, who lauded it as "probably the best written and most compelling book I have read by a politician since I came into publishing." Mr. Murdoch suffered a huge moral defeat when he was compelled to apologize "unreservedly" to Mr. Patten, as well as to pay him an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.

There are other examples, some boorish, some insidious, of Mr. Murdoch's willingness to sing Beijing's tune. [...] As Jonathan Mirsky, a peerless authority on China, responded in the New Statesman of London, "Murdoch is not falling for Chinese propaganda. He's repeating it word for word."

Mr. Mirsky has experience of how Murdoch-owned media have drawn in their horns on China. In the last year of his five-year stint as the East Asia editor of the London Times, Mr. Mirsky found that much of his copy -- invariably critical of the [party named omitted] regime -- failed to make it into the paper. He resigned.

Mr. Mirsky had harsh things to say about Mr. Murdoch then, and he has harsh things to say about him now. In reaction to James Murdoch's remarks, he mused: "Nothing the Murdochs say about China surprises me. I watched the influence at the [London] Times. There, in the last year, reporting from Beijing has avoided all controversial subjects and all analysis, unless they were of huge news importance like the Falun Gong suicides[Editor's note: The suicides had nothing to do with Falun Gong.]. Whenever possible on days when other papers such as The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post etc. were analyzing events, the [London] Times printed old stories about early discoveries about Christians -- and others of that sort."

What does one make of the Murdoch position on China? In my view, it is a form of corporate prostitution, quite different from ideological blindness or agnosticism. After all, it's one thing to make anodyne remarks about China's need for stability and the like, and quite another to aim specific censure at a religious movement, especially when that movement lays claim to being the best-organized opposition to a repressive and godless regime.

The younger Mr. Murdoch (clearly with pater's blessing) accuses dissidents of not having China's interests at heart. It's touching to see the Murdochs compensate for the Falun Gong's unpatriotism, even though they are guilty of confusing the interests of the small coterie governing China with those of the Chinese people.

But the Murdoch method -- demean yourself, for it's the pragmatic thing to do -- may, in fact, result in harm to News Corp's business. Willy Lam, a Hong Kong-based China analyst, says the Murdochs should be more careful, even as a cold-blooded business calculation: "Many businessmen seem willing to do or say anything to get into the China market. This is a tricky venture because Chinese politics is going through unprecedented changes."

Mr. Lam continues: "Rules and regulations -- and more importantly, the cadres running the show -- can change overnight. The millions of dollars spent, and the flattering remarks and half-truths uttered, by Western businessmen could come to nought when the wheel of political fortune in Beijing spins in an opposite direction."

From a philosophical perspective, the essence of James Murdoch's position, like that of his father, is contempt for the First Amendment bargain: to wit, that news media are generally protected from government interference on the understanding that they act as a check on government.

American conservatives often regard Rupert Murdoch as an ally. They are quite wrong to do so. He has promoted social-democratic governments in Britain (Tony Blair) and Australia (Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating) with as much alacrity as he has conservatives like Margaret Thatcher. Now, and nakedly, Mr. Murdoch is an apologist for the Chinese regime. The only qualification is that a government, or a politician, must be ready to go along with his business requirements.

But China is run by sophisticated tyrants. They see the use of people like Messrs. Murdoch, pere et fils. They aren't taken in by flattery, unctuousness, or bowings of the corporate knee. They aren't unduly impressed by the Murdoch attempts to be more Catholic than the pope when it comes to China. They know that he wants to make more money in China and that he will pay any price to do so.

They also know that the Murdochs become less useful to China by becoming such obvious prostitutes. A touch of discretion might have served James Murdoch better at the Milken Institute, not just in terms of public dignity, but eventually in terms of profit as well.