RUPERT Murdoch’s second son, James, has voiced strong backing for Beijing’s crackdown on the Falun Gong movement. In a speech in which he also criticised western press coverage of China, Mr Murdoch called the Falun Gong as a dangerous and apocalyptic cult.
Addressing a conference in Los Angeles, the 28-year-old head of News Corp’s Asian interests reversed his father’s famous aside that the spread of satellite television represented an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
Instead, Mr Murdoch repeatedly praised the "absolutist" regime in Beijing.
He sought to stoke Chinese Communist Party suspicions of a free media. In a broadside at publications ranging from Hong Kong newspapers to western news magazines, he said a falsely negative view of China was being portrayed - one that threatened Chinese communism by concentrating unfairly on controversial issues such as human rights. "I think these destabilising forces today are very dangerous for the Chinese government," he said. Hong Kong journalists were a particularly irritating bunch, he added, saying, in effect, that they should accept Beijing’s iron-fisted rule and get on with it.
With his father in the audience, Mr Murdoch went on to lambast the Falun Gong, which the Chinese government is harshly crushing. The spiritual group, he said, "clearly does not have the success of China at heart". So strident were his remarks that members of the audience uncomfortably pointed out that western businesses should not be seen as wholehearted supporters of the Chinese government.
Robert Kapp, president of the US China Business Council, distanced himself from Mr Murdoch’s blanket endorsement of the Beijing regime’s record. "I personally get nailed as being China’s best lobbyist," said Mr Kapp, who represents the most prominent US-China business group. "We go to great lengths to explain we are not working for China. We are working for the interests of the US business community."
Critics have accused Mr Murdoch, a Harvard drop-out, of engaging in a blatant attempt to curry favour with Beijing to further the company’s interests in China. Spokesmen for the Falun Gong accused Mr Murdoch of unthinking regurgitation of the Chinese government line. "We understand he has strong family ties with mainland China," a spokeswoman, Sophie Xiao, said. "But what he hears are just one-sided fabrications. If his accusation is right, how can 100 million people be fooled and how could professionals across the world all report wrongly?
"He is not saying things based on the facts," she said.
In its crackdown on the Falun Gong, the Chinese Communist Party has revived some of the darkest tactics from the Mao era. It holds that Falun Gong is an "evil cult". Dozens of Falun Gong followers have been killed and thousands incarcerated, many in labour camps and mental institutions, since the Chinese government declared it an enemy of the state in 1999.
Members of the group, which number at least two million in China, claim its Buddhist belief system and qigong exercises promote well-being and a sense of purpose. Followers have flocked into the group as a refuge in a state that has maintained Marxism as a veneer for dictatorship and allowed the state industrial system, healthcare and pension provision to atrophy.
A spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Journalists Association, Mak Yin-ting, said she was perplexed that the offspring of one of the world’s biggest media moguls did not understand that journalists were "rightly performing their duty" by comprehensively reporting events. The last public figure to make headlines by criticising Hong Kong newspapers was the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin.
Doing whatever it takes to break into China is a Murdoch family obsession. News Corp has invested more than $1 billion in Asia, with negligible returns, over the past decade. Hong Kong-based Star TV, which James Murdoch has run since last year, is the company’s main Asian interest. For all the wooing the Murdochs have conducted in China, Star’s channels have tiny penetration on the mainland, but are popular in democratic India.
Other News Corp interests in China include a minority share of Phoenix Television, a Mandarin Hong Kong channel. Also, during a temporary easing of Rupert Murdoch’s scepticism of the "new" economy, News Corp invested about $40 million in Chinese internet businesses that are now struggling.
James Murdoch and his Chinese wife, Wendi, are regular visitors to the Chinese capital and are said by company sources to believe massive opportunities are emerging in China. Analysts estimate that revenue in China’s cable and satellite advertising market is worth more than £550 million a year. Even more enticing, they say, the sector is expanding by 30 per cent a year.
The family attitude, according to James Murdoch, is that foreign operators with a strong stomach should push the regulatory envelope to establish a presence before the Beijing regime starts removing its protectionist barriers as a result of gaining membership of the World Trade Organisation. "People are going to start piling in quickly," he said. "The time is very ripe right now."
In potentially its biggest move so far, News Corp has established a strategic beachhead with the help of Jiang Mianheng, the son of President Jiang. In February, News Corp joined with three other companies to take a $325 million placement of 12 per cent of China Netcom, the country’s fourth largest telecommunications provider. The deal, which is of dubious legality given that Chinese regulations bar foreigners from direct equity participation in the sector, was a triumph for Wendi Murdoch, who has courted the younger Mr Jiang as a key ally for her husband’s China ambitions.