Chairman Rupert
Review by Richard Walsh. Repost ABR
Bruce Dover
Rupert’s Adventure in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife
Viking, $32.95 pb, 302 pp, 9780670071050
For two decades of my life, I worked as a senior executive with first Rupert Murdoch and then Kerry Packer. These were challenging years, not without their hairy moments, but I always felt my best way of retaining any kind of perspective at that time was to conceive of myself as a bit player at the court of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century monarch.
Bruce Dover, in the 1990s, was attached to the court of the Sun King (aka Rupert Murdoch) at the time when he was attempting to negotiate a series of treaties with the highly exotic imperium headquartered behind the walls of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Dover sees with great clarity all the jockeying for position and for favouritism on the Chinese side; but he does not seem to see quite as clearly the mirror image of that struggle – the jockeying at the Murdoch Court. Nonetheless, from his position of considerable advantage, he has a mighty tale to tell that is both riveting and revealing.
In the early 1990s everyone in the media became excited by the general prosperity that had then been achieved by the Four Tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – and by the possibility of establishing thriving new businesses there. But even though the transformation of the economies of India and China had barely begun, these two countries were seen as the ultimate glittering prizes, particularly after the Asian meltdown deprived the striped cats of much of their roar.
Fresh from making hay in the newly liberated Eastern European sunshine, the moguls were on the prowl. Murdoch, in particular, was determined to get his foot in the Chinese door, having acquired Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post as far back as 1987. Having experienced his near-death business crisis in 1991, and survived it, and having merged the potentially fatal loss-maker, the UK’s Sky Television, with its rival, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), to create the immensely profitable BySkyB – demonstrating once again what fun can be had in commanding a monopoly – he must have felt invincible. He certainly felt strong enough in 1993 to acquire Richard Li’s STAR TV for what seemed at the time like too much money (the underbidder was Pearson, whose book operation is the publisher of this book). Murdoch was raring to take China by storm. But, as Dover tells it, his Long March ultimately ended in a rout equivalent to that which drove the Kuomintang to their Formosan redoubt. His misadventures along the way were almost Shakespearean in their dimensions – fatal flaws aplenty – and only alleviated by the blossoming of the Great Romance (enter Wendi Deng).
What Murdoch ideally needed were the proverbial Chinese Walls, which would have allowed him to whisper sweet nothings into Beijing’s ears that could not be heard elsewhere and likewise speak his mind elsewhere without fear it would be blown back to the ears of those he was wooing. While politicians customarily master the dark art of dog whistling, this is not so easily achieved by a high-profile media mogul.
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