Inside the Chinese Meltdown Rocking Wall Street
Controlled Press, Out-of-Control Pollution and Corruption
By Bob Hennelly
Global Research
January 14, 2016
How do we know what we know about China? Tens of billions of dollars are invested in China’s markets and manufacturing sector based on government-generated statistics whose accuracy is—and should be — widely questioned.
Under China’s authoritarian power structure, the media, including the Internet, is tightly controlled. The most professional-appearing media outlets with the largest audiences are all state-sanctioned. As for Western media companies, their ability to operate within China is wholly reliant upon approval of the authorities.
Without a free press, China became a black box that, until the recent economic slowdown and stock market slide, consistently produced double-digit returns for multi-national corporations and eye-popping bargains for global consumers. But news about the corruption and sometimes deadly malfeasance that underlay this boom rarely reached the general public.
An August 2005 New York Times article summed it up with the headline,“Media Executives Court China, but Still Run Into Obstacles.” The story described the vigorous lobbying efforts by Disney, Viacom and News Corporation to clear hurdles with China’s Propaganda Department and Ministry of Culture to access the vast Chinese market.
Rupert Murdoch — Flattery Got Him Everywhere
Consider the narrative arc of NewsCorp mogul Rupert Murdoch. In the early 1990s, the global media baron, already well established in Australia, Britain and the US, set his sights on Asia. In two stages, in 1993 and 1995, Murdoch spent a billion dollars acquiring Star TV, which used a satellite (AsiaStat 1) that had been launched in 1990 atop China’s Long March III rocket.
Murdoch’s strategic acquisition gave his conglomerate control over what Joseph Straubhaar, a professor of global media at the University of Texas at Austin, describes as “the most prominent regional satellite and cable operation in the world.” Star TV’s reach extends from the Arab world to East and Southeast Asia.
NewsCorp’s plans for Star TV were nothing if not ambitious, and the politically conservative Murdoch was not shy about giving them an ideological, free-market twist. He proclaimed in 1993 that “advances in technology have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes,” while “satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.”
In October of 1993, Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng moved to outlaw the private ownership of satellite dishes, putting Murdoch’s plan for Asian media market domination in peril. The next year Star TV dropped from its lineup the BBC’s World Service, the world’s largest international broadcaster, whose unfettered news coverage did not meet with the Chinese government’s approval. And Murdoch went on a charm offensive aimed at getting back in the good graces of China’s leadership.
The Rest…HERE
