NYT 

May 4, 2008

 

OFF THE SHELF

How Murdoch Got Lost in China

 

By STEPHEN KOTKIN

Correction Appended

RUPERT MURDOCH seems to have become a 24/7 story — even, or especially, in media he does not own. He is often portrayed as either a master Machiavellian who always gets his way or a money-grubbing lowbrow impresario. He may be neither.

The phenomenal success of the News Corporation, of which Mr. Murdoch is chairman, owes a lot to his shaking up the business side of media properties — and to risk taking. “Rupert Murdoch’s China Adventures” (Tuttle, $18.95) by Bruce Dover offers a smart read on a big bet by Mr. Murdoch that confounded him: trying to reach China’s 380 million television households with Fox-style news and entertainment.

Mr. Dover, the News Corporation’s representative in China from 1992 to 1998, takes us inside the business and the mind of its boss. He indicates that an organizational chart of the global company “would have Murdoch at the top and under him a single straight line to everyone else.”

The billionaire Mr. Murdoch, seen as a colossus in New York and London, is shown getting lost alone for hours in Kowloon, nearly being killed by a bus in Shanghai, and delighting in acquiring cut-rate silk ties from stall vendors or getting a $1 haircut (“including massive tip”). Mr. Murdoch, writes the author, “was forever in search of a good bargain.” China, however, turned out to be no bargain.

Much of the book concerns the consequences of a speech to advertisers that Mr. Murdoch gave in London in 1993, riffing that “advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.” These were the heady days after the Soviet collapse.

But the News Corporation had just acquired Star TV, a satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong, with a plan to gain access to homes in mainland China — which was then and still is under a Communist regime. Responding to the self-announced Murdoch threat, Mr. Dover shows, Beijing banned the sale of private satellite dishes. Mr. Murdoch, a zealous anti-Communist, began a decade of obsequious damage control in China, hurting his company’s reputation in the United States, Britain and Australia.

His company dropped the BBC (and its uncensored news on China) from Star TV; spiked the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last British colonial governor of Hong Kong; and paid an advance for a hagiography ofDeng Xiaoping, then the paramount leader, by his daughter. Mr. Murdoch also mounted a “joint venture” — supplying the capital — with the Communist Party mouthpiece, The People’s Daily.

Revisiting this well-known kowtowing, Mr. Dover adds details, but this is not the book’s achievement. Rather, matters become interesting when Liu Changle, a Chinese tycoon, approaches Mr. Murdoch to suggest a Chinese-language channel, Phoenix, in partnership with China’s state television, CCTV.

Mr. Liu appears to grease the way, and Phoenix’s reality shows and chitchat prove a hit with China’s aspirational class. But the effort, Mr. Dover says, lost $53 million in its first three years. CCTV, for its part, got a Murdoch-financed course in his trade secrets. And the whole time, Mr. Dover writes, Mr. Liu enabled Beijing’s security services to monitor the internal operations of the News Corporation in China.

So, the wily Communists stole Mr. Murdoch’s recipe and spied on him, and he paid for it.

Mr. Murdoch’s checkbook stayed wide open. In December 1998, after years of pleading, he finally landed an audience with Jiang Zemin, then China’s party chief, to try to schmooze away the satellite ban that was costing Star TV so much cash.

Mr. Murdoch, according to Mr. Dover, put $60 million into a venture of Mr. Jiang’s son. Mr. Murdoch also relocated his own son James to China. While the elder Mr. Murdoch went on to disparage the Dalai Lama in 1999, his son disparaged the Falun Gong in 2001.

The satellite ban stayed in force. Outfoxed!

In 1999, having lost a mini-fortune in China, Mr. Murdoch gained a wife; he married Wendi Deng 17 days after divorcing his second wife, to whom he had been married for three decades. The bride, born in China and educated at Yale management school, was 38 years his junior and two years earlier had been a Star TV intern. Mr. Dover writes that she reinvigorated Mr. Murdoch.

Once displaced as Mr. Murdoch’s point person on China by Ms. Deng, the author ceases to be an inside witness. (He then worked for Time Warner at CNN, and now works for the Australia Network, where he is chief executive.)

“Murdoch,” this chronicle concludes, “was by no means infallible.” Exhibit A, perhaps, is Mr. Dover himself. At an Internet show-and-tell for Chinese officials, the author tried to impress by calling up the site for an Australian newspaper but instead displayed a pornography site. At a dinner, Mr. Dover was served what looked like a whole mushroom, which he found chewy. The translator, when queried, informed him it was “sphincter of male suckling pig.”

But I digress.

Mr. Murdoch came up short in China, the author would have us believe, because he did not tread lightly enough. But would the politically controlling Communist regime have ever opened the country’s living rooms to the network of a foreigner, even a subtler one?

Beijing, despite various personnel changes — involving Chinese characters who enliven the book — held to a strategy: using the News Corporation to help the centrally controlled media learn modern techniques.

All the while, in democratic India, Mr. Dover reports, Star TV was minting money, with close to all of the 50 most-watched programs on cable, including “Indian Idol.” Yet even after Mr. Murdoch had obtained broadcast access to one province of China — in exchange for giving Chinese state propaganda access to global media markets — his shows were called a threat to Chinese morals.

That was not just by the censors, but also by the newly risen commercial media interests that had brazenly copied him. A Chinese version of “American Idol,” not owned by Mr. Murdoch, had 400 million viewers. The conquest he so craved was achieved, but on the Communist regime’s terms.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 11, 2008
The Off the Shelf column last Sunday, a review of “Rupert Murdoch’s China Adventures,” a book by Bruce Dover, referred incorrectly to Mr. Dover’s current employer, the Australia Network, where he is chief executive. It is part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the ABC-TV unit of Disney.

 

READ MORE:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/how_murdoch_got_lost_in_china_0.pdf

 

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Rupert and Wendi Murdoch (But Were Afraid to Ask)

The couple, who met in 1998 when she worked as an intern at one of his Hong Kong-based companies, have been living apart for six months.

 

JUNE 13, 2013

 

BY SETH ABRAMOVITCH

 

She was born Deng Wen Ge in China, in 1968, to college-educated engineer parents in an upper-middle-class household. As detailed in an infamous Wall Street Journal profile from 2000, Wendi Deng later immigrated to the U.S. in 1987 with the help of a couple from La Crescenta, Calif. — Jake and Joyce Cherry. Jake was building a factory in China at the time, and his wife taught Wendi, who was then studying toward a medical degree, how to speak English. The couple eventually sponsored a student visa application for the 19-year-old Deng, and she lived with them in their home, sharing a bunk bed with their 5-year-old daughter.

 

But all was not right with the arrangement, Joyce suspected, especially after she found “a cache of photographs her husband had taken of Miss Deng in coquettish poses in his hotel room in Guangzhou,” as the New York Times put it. Jake later admitted he had become infatuated with the young foreign exchange student, who had begun to offer “recommendations” on things like diet and wardrobe.

 

Within months, Jake and Wendi were living together in a small apartment near Cal State Northridge, where Deng was enrolled. The Cherrys divorced, and Jake and Wendi married in 1990. That marriage lasted less than three years. Upon ending it, Wendi admitted that she could never see Jake, 30 years her senior, as anything more than a father figure. She sought no financial gain in the divorce proceedings.

Rupert Murdoch first met Wendi in 1998. He was 67 and a billionaire media tycoon; she was 29, an intern at a Hong Kong-based satellite company he owned. According to a 2005 New York magazine profile of Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s third-born, Wendi was “the first person to put her hand up” in a staff meeting. Rupert was instantly taken with her beauty, boldness and intelligence. The chemistry was instant, and Deng became Rupert’s chaperone and interpreter throughout his stay.

“I had heard of him before but never seen him,” Deng told the China Daily in 2008. “My boss assigned me to introduce the Chinese market to him. He was very interested in Chinese culture and we talked a lot.”

The couple first started appearing in public together in 1998, one year before Rupert’s marriage to his first wife, Anna Maria Torv, ended after a protracted divorce settlement. Seventeen days after the papers were signed — at a cost to Rupert of $1.7 billion — he married Wendi on his yacht, Morning Glory, in New York Harbor.

“Wendi happily traveled the world with him, sweetly holding his hand in the back of a sedan (Rupert thinks limousines pretentious),” New York’s Steve Fishman wrote. “She accompanied him to China, where it must’ve seemed she was living a fairy tale. At dinner one evening, the daughter of the factory manager was seated next to the then-president of China. Rupert sat on the other side.”

Wendi also oversaw a physical fitness regimen for herself and her husband, hiring full-time personal trainers and closely monitoring their diet. Despite a battle with prostate cancer, a newly revitalized Murdoch never missed a day of work during that period. And Murdoch seemed equally voracious in bed: “She was said to have told an associate that Rupert used Viagra but didn’t need it,” Fishman writes.

The couple moved into a $7 million loft in New York’s Soho district, and soon after Rupert paid $44 million — a then record-setting sum — for a penthouse on Fifth Avenue that once belonged to Laurance Rockefeller. They then began snapping up residences around the globe, adding homes in Los Angeles; London; Canberra, Australia; Carmel, Calif.; and Centre Island, N.Y. Children followed — Grace Helen Murdoch, born in 2001, and Chloe Murdoch, born two years later.

Deng never assumed a formal role at News Corp. — Rupert told Vanity Fair in 1999 that she was too “busy working on decorating the new apartment” — but it quickly became obvious that Wendi was deeply involved in shaping its vision, particularly in its Asian business dealings. In the mid-aughts, Deng worked closely with stepson James Murdoch to initiate $45 million in Chinese Internet investment. She was chief strategist for MySpace China and co-CEO and co-founder of Big Feet productions, the film production company that produced Snow Flower and the Secret Fan for Fox Searchlight.

Meanwhile, the media’s fascination with Deng proved to be Murdoch’s weak spot. That Wall Street Journal story about his wife — the one that unearthed the dirt about the Cherrys — incensed him so much that seven years later, when Murdoch was bidding to buy the newspaper, it was obviously still lodged under his skin like a splinter.

“If it’s a legitimate news story, Rupert would say fine,” a News Corp. executivetold The New York Times in 2007. “But it wasn’t a legitimate news story, in that Wendi had no role in the company at that time. What they were doing was looking for a pretext to write a public story about a private individual.” There were rumors Rupert had other stories about his wife killed — including a 10,000 word profile by a Forbes reporter that was to run in several Australian newspapers in which he held a partial stake.

It wasn’t until 2011, however, that Wendi went from an object of fascination for media-watchers and Rupert-haters alike to a veritable household name. All eyes were on the couple that day, as Rupert testified before a House of Commons hearing in London, the frequently befuddled mogul being made to answer hard questions about his involvement in the tabloid phone-tapping scandal that had dominated international headlines for months.

Son James sat frozen and impotent as a prankster launched himself at Murdoch, cream pie in hand. But Deng, poised right behind her husband in an immaculately tailored pink jacket, cornflower-blue shirt and black skirt, launched herself with abandon at Jonnie Marbles, the dessert-wielding interloper. A former volleyball player, she put her athleticism to good use that day, and was dubbed an unlikely hero — a rare PR coup during her husband’s most vulnerable moment.

The footage went instantly viral, and the requisite parody Twitter account soon followed. Only unlike most fake Twitter accounts, this one was accidentally verified by Twitter, with hilarious consequences: When fake Wendi tweeted to Rupert, “@rupertmurdoch RUPERT!!! delete tweet!” even Rupert himself was fooled, and promptly obeyed what he thought were his wife’s wishes.

And now, 14 years after they tied the knot aboard the Morning Glory, the billionaire mogul and his wife have filed for divorce. A News Corp. spokesman tells CNBC that the couple have been living separate lives for over six months. The news comes ahead of News Corp.’s planned split into two separately traded companies, dividing its entertainment and publishing empire into stand-alone entities. The couple had signed a prenup, the terms of which allow for Wendi to receive cash and property but no control of News Corp. or its subsidiaries.

Rupert, for his part, has a new mistress of sorts. The mogul tweeted last month that he was in the market for a Bel Air vineyard.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/everything-you-wanted-know-rupert-568444/

 

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RUPERT HATES THE CHINESE.

 

 

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By Benjamin Norton / Multipolarista

 

The Chinese government has announced that it is forgiving 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations, while pledging to deepen its collaboration with the continent.

This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructuring of around $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019.

While Beijing has a repeated history of forgiving loans like this, Western governments have made baseless, politically motivated accusations that China uses “debt-trap diplomacy” in the Global South.

The United States has turned Africa into a battleground in its new cold war on China and Russia. And Washington has weaponized dubious claims of Chinese “debt traps” to try to demonize Beijing for its substantial infrastructure projects on the continent.

For its part, China has pushed back against the US new cold war.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a meeting with leaders from various African countries and the African Union on August 18.

In the conference, Wang condemned the West’s “zero-sum Cold War mentality.” He instead proposed a model based on “multi-party cooperation” with Africa that brings “win-win results” for all sides.

“What Africa would welcome is mutually beneficial cooperation for the greater well-being of the people, not major-country rivalry for geopolitical gains,” he said.

Wang revealed that Beijing will support the African Union in its efforts to join the G20.

The foreign minister also announced that “China will waive the 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries that had matured by the end of 2021.”

Beijing pledged to strengthen trade with Africa, and has made agreements with 12 countries on the continent to remove tariffs for 98% of the products they export to China, increasing the competitiveness of African goods.

Wang said Beijing will continue to provide food, economic, and military aid to Africa, while offering assistance in the fight against covid-19.

Emphasizing the importance of “development cooperation,” China offered billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure projects as “a strong boost to Africa’s industrialization process.”

Africa plays an important role in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure project aimed at interconnecting the Global South and moving the center of the world economy back east.

“In the face of the various forms of hegemonic and bullying practices, China and Africa have stood with each other shoulder to shoulder,” Wang stressed, calling to “safeguard international fairness and justice.”

US diplomats visit Africa, pressure it to cut ties with China and Russia

China’s comments and promises to deepen “mutually beneficial cooperation” with Africa could hardly have been any more different from those made by top US diplomats.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, visited Uganda and Ghana in the first week of August. There, she threatened the continent, telling African nations they cannot do trade with Russia, or they will be violating Western sanctions.

Thomas-Greenfield warned in Uganda, “As for sanctions that we have on Russia – for example, oil sanctions – if a country decides to engage with Russia where there are sanctions, then they are breaking those sanctions; they’re breaking our sanctions and in some cases they’re breaking UN sanctions with other countries, and we caution countries not to break those sanctions because then, if they do, they stand the chance of having actions taken against them for breaking those sanctions.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken subsequently visited South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda from August 7 to 11, as part of a trip aimed at weakening Africa’s relations with China and Russia.

‘The Chinese “debt trap” is a myth’

One of Washington’s most powerful weapons in its information war on China is its evidence-free accusations that Beijing is supposedly trapping African nations in debt.

Yet as Multipolarista previously reported in an analysis of Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, Western governments, financial institutions, banks, and vulture funds are responsible for the vast majority of debt that Global South countries are trapped in.

The UK government’s own state media outlet BBC investigated allegations of “debt trap diplomacy” in Sri Lanka and reluctantly concluded that they are false.

“The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC reporter Ben Chu said in a dispatch.

Similarly, mainstream academics at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School acknowledged in Washington’s establishment magazine The Atlantic that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.”

Scholar Deborah Brautigam wrote that the US government-sponsored narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”

“Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” she added.

Brautigam found that, between 2000 and 2019, China cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced around $15 billion of debt in Africa, renegotiating at least 26 individual loans.

This past debt forgiveness is in addition to the 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries that Beijing has announced it will pardon.

 

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/23/china-forgives-23-loans-for-17-african-countries-expands-win-win-trade-and-infrastructure-projects/

 

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OF COURSE, THE WEST WILL COMPLAIN THAT THERE WILL BE "STRINGS ATTACHED" TO THE CHINESE DEALS... THE WEST (US EMPIRE) HAS BEEN AN EXPERT IN STRINGS ATTACHED, IN THREATS AND IN BOMBING THE "RECALCITRANTS".....

 

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