One Billion Customers - James McGregor [101]
But this story also shows how China makes progress. The huge misconception in the West is that China moves forward and changes because all-powerful officials at the top issue orders that everyone follows. It isn’t like that at all. Instead, it is all about networks of like-minded people creating a web of protection for the reform. Deng began the transformation of China in 1979 because he was empowered and protected by thousands of officials who, like him, had suffered personal political persecution under the tight grip of Mao’s feudal politics. This story follows the careers of two Chinese journalists who have had the greatest impact in improving the news business in China. They have followed different paths to reach similar results. Liu Changle, under Murdoch’s mentorship, is transforming Chinese television news behind the banner of improving China’s overseas propaganda efforts. In contrast, magazine editor Hu Shuli has crashed straight through all obstacles in her crusade to bring integrity and objectivity to print journalism in China. The success of both depends on their network of supporters and the fact that China desperately needs what they are offering. Along the way, we see Murdoch learn that foreign businesses in China also need to build networks of supporters and friends. It isn’t all about cozying up to the guy at the top.
The Blaring Loudspeakers
The loudspeakers were never silent. From lampposts in virtually every city, town, and village in the Mao days, the speakers blared out an unceasing line of propaganda, leaving no room for silence, lest that silence be filled by the people’s own ideas. Until Deng cracked open the door to a market economy in 1978, the media in China had been firmly under the heel of the Communist Party. When Deng launched economic reforms at the end of 1978, China had only 186 newspapers and thirty-two television stations, all government owned. Most media content emanated from the Xinhua “news agency,” which distributed government announcements, filtered and refocused all international news, and, most importantly, disseminated a steady barrage of government propaganda.
But the rapid transformation of China’s socialist command economy into a market economy created the need for an informed citizenry. In the wake of Deng’s reforms, many Chinese journalists and progressive government officials began using China’s newspapers and magazines to focus and refine China’s impatient emergence from the grinding poverty, political chaos, and inhumane cruelty that had gripped the country during most of the 1960s and 1970s. The press was even given a short leash to act as a watchdog on government corruption, all under the guidance, of course, of the Propaganda Department, which allowed reporters to unveil the details of corruption cases that the government wanted to use as examples to frighten others into behaving.
While the idealists saw the press as a way to push for reform and government accountability, the Communist Party officials who served as the country’s newspaper editors and TV station directors realized they were sitting on a gold mine. Advertising had disappeared under Mao when the government funded the media. Within weeks of Deng’s pronouncement of economic reforms, Shanghai’s Wenhuibao newspaper carried the headline “Restore the Good Name of Advertising.” Two weeks later, Shanghai TV ran an advertisement for medicinal