Anticipatory Compliance

If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of BruceDover’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 fromthe boss. His book, which was published in February, is a fascinating study ofpower, and of a man who could not bring himself to believe that anyone wouldstand in his way(1). 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 - US$525m - for a majority stake in StarTV, a failing satellite broadcaster based in Hong Kong. The second was to make aspeech in September 1993, a few months after he had bought the business, whichhe 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 ofmany closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels."

The Chinese leaders were furious. The prime minister, Li Peng, issued a decreebanning satellite dishes from China. Murdoch spent the next ten years grovelling.In the interests of business the great capitalist became the communistgovernment’s most powerful supporter.

Within six months of Li Peng’s ban, Murdoch dropped the BBC from Star’sChina signal. His publishing company, HarperCollins, paid a fortune for atedious biography of the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, written by Deng’sdaughter. He built a website for the regime’s propaganda sheet, the People’sDaily. In 1997 he made another speech in which he tried to undo the damage hehad caused four years before. "China", he said, "is a distinctivemarket with distinctive social and moral values that Western companies mustlearn to abide by." His minions ensured, Dover reveals, that "everyrelevant Chinese government official received a copy".

But the satellite dishes remained banned, so he grovelled even more. Hedescribed the Dalai Lama as "a very political old monk shuffling around inGucci shoes". His son James claimed that the Western media was"painting a falsely negative portrayal of China through their focus oncontroversial issues such as human rights". Rupert employed his unsalariedgopher Tony Blair to give him special access: in 1999 Blair placed him next tothe Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at a Downing Street lunch. To secure somelimited cable rights in southern China, News Corporation agreed to carry aChinese government channel - CCTV 9 - on Fox and Sky. Murdoch promised to"further strengthen cooperative ties with the Chinese media, and explorenew areas with an even more positive attitude".

Most notoriously, he instructed HarperCollins not to publish the book it hadbought from the former governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Dover reveals thatMurdoch was forced to intervene directly (he instructed the publishers to"kill the fucking book") because his usual system of control hadbroken down. "Murdoch very rarely issued directives or instructions to hissenior executives or editors." Instead he expected "a sort of‘anticipatory compliance’. One didn’t need to be instructed about what todo, one simply knew what was in one’s long-term interests." In this caseexecutives at HarperCollins had failed to understand that when the boss objectedto Patten’s views on China it meant that the book was dead.

Anticipatory compliance also describes Murdoch’s approach to Beijing. Dovershows that the Chinese leadership never asked for Chris Patten’s book to bebanned: they didn’t even know it existed. But when Murdoch killed it,"our Beijing minders were impressed and the Patten incident marked adistinct warming in the relationship".

The strategy failed. Murdoch was astonished that he couldn’t replicate"the cosy relationship he enjoyed with Britain’s politicalEstablishment". For the first time in his later career, he had encounteredan organisation more powerful and more determined than he was. He has nowretreated 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 forserialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But wehad to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We’ve hit brick walls andwe don’t understand why."(2) The book has been reviewed in the Economistand the Financial Times, but neither the other British newspapers nor thebroadcasters have touched it.

As far as I can discover, the book has been reviewed by only one Murdochpublication anywhere on earth - the Australian Literary Review - and that was anarticle of such snivelling sycophancy that you wonder why they bothered(3). Theeditor of another of News Corporation’s titles, the Far Eastern EconomicReview, commissioned a review of Dover’s book, then admitted to contracting"cold feet" and spiked it(4).

But what of the other papers? Why should they appease Murdoch? "When yousee the reaction of the British media to the book," Bruce Dover tells me,"one can better understand why in some respects the Chinese so admiredMurdoch – an Emperor who inspires fear in his followers need not raise a handagainst them."(5) He might be right, but I think there is also a generalbias against relevance in the review sections. When I worked in farawaycountries my books about the tribulations of obscure peoples werecomprehensively reviewed. When I came home and wrote Captive State: theCorporate Takeover of Britain, it was ignored. There appears to be an inverserelationship between how hard a book hits and how well it is covered.

Paradoxically for a publication which inspires such fear, Bruce Dover’s storysometimes steps back from the brink. He observes that News Corporation neverpromised the Chinese government favourable coverage; Murdoch undertook only tobe "fair", "balanced" and "objective". Dover takesthese terms at face value, though it is obvious from his account that they werebeing used as code for sympathetic treatment. His book does not contain NewsCorporation’s most direct admission: the statement by Murdoch’s spokesmanWang 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 ofself-censorship."(6) He is wrong to suggest that "Murdoch very rarelyissued directives or instructions". As the testimony by Andrew Neil(formerly the editor of the Sunday Times) before the Lords CommunicationsCommittee shows(7), the paramount leader micromanages the editorial content ofthe newspapers he owns which swing the greatest political weight.

But I am sure it is true that anticipatory compliance is Murdoch’s mostpowerful weapon. I doubt he needed to tell all 247 of his editors to support theinvasion of Iraq, but they did(8). He might not even have had to lean on TonyBlair to ensure - as Blair’s former spin doctor Lance Price reveals - that noBritish minister said "anything positive about the euro."(9) Power issustained not by force but by fear, as everyone seeks to interpret the wishes ofhis master and to meet them even before he asks.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Bruce Dover, 2008. Rupert’s Adventures in China: how Murdoch lost afortune and found a wife. Mainstream Publishing.

2. Email from Bill Campbell, 17th April 2008.

3. Mark Day, 2nd April 2008. More than a mogul can bear. Australian LiteraryReview.

4. Donald Greenlees, 3rd March 2008. Review of Book on Murdoch Is Killed. TheNew York Times

5. Email from Bruce Dover, 17th April 2008.

6. Agence France Presse, 20th December 2001. Murdoch’s News Corp looks forfurther China access after TV.

7. Andrew Neil, 23 January 2008. Minutesof evidence taken before the Select Committee on Communications: MediaOwnership and the News. House of Lords. 

8. David Harvey, 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p35. OxfordUniversity Press.

9. Lance Price, 1st July 2006. Rupert Murdoch is effectively a member ofBlair’s cabinet. The Guardian.