One Billion Customers - James McGregor [105]
Liu was born in Shanghai in 1951. His parents were government cadres who followed the army there. In 1953, his family moved to Beijing, where his father, an educated and cultured man, eventually worked his way into the upper ranks of the Communist Party Organization Department, which selects and assigns officials for leadership roles throughout the country. During the Cultural Revolution, Liu was sent to the countryside to work with peasants. But within a year, his father used his pull to get Liu a coveted slot in the PLA to escape the chaos. In 1979, when China and Vietnam engaged in a series of vicious border battles, Liu was assigned to China Central Radio, the government’s monopoly national radio broadcaster, where he made a name for himself as a fast thinker and fast talker with a knack for narrating live events. When he went to the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in the mid-1980s to polish his professional skills, he found some of his broadcasts were being used as models for students.
By 1988, Liu was a colonel and in charge of all military news broadcast on Chinese radio. While he loved the broadcast media, Liu wanted to gain more experience as well as make some money. Using family and military connections, Liu won an assignment to Sinochem, a massive state-run oil company. He was sent to a government oil trading office in Singapore in 1990, about the same time that Murdoch was scrambling to keep News Corp. out of bankruptcy. In Singapore, Liu started his own oil trading business with China, investing his oil profits in Beijing real-estate projects.
Watching Singapore’s tightly controlled press, Liu began to think about returning to his first love, broadcasting. He realized that it was possible to offer quality entertainment and informative news while also providing sophisticated government propaganda that openly discussed problems, albeit from the viewpoint of an efficient and noble government’s efforts to solve them. He didn’t know it at the time, but Liu had found the formula for the future of television in China. He also realized that the outside world’s view of China was coming from the Western press. Programs prepared by CCTV for overseas audiences were so blatantly propagandistic that they had no credibility. Like many of his generation, Liu wanted to see China modernize, to catch up to the rest of the world and earn its respect. He plunged into Buddhism, not to practice the religion, but to understand the core of Chinese traditional philosophy and culture.
About the time that Murdoch was taking over STAR TV in 1993, Liu began looking for ways to launch a Chinese-language TV station outside of China. His vision was for a station that would appeal to a global Chinese audience and beam its signal into China by satellite. At the time, the only satellite that could reach his intended audience, AsiaSat 1, was fully booked. In 1994, however, Liu heard that Mongolian state television was giving up its transponder on the satellite. STAR, which dominated the satellite, had the right of first refusal for the transponder.
Liu approached STAR about the transponder. STAR officials had seen a steady stream of Chinese entrepreneurs offering their special connections and relationships to help Murdoch out of his mess in China, but Liu was different. He was looking to build his own channel. His plan worried STAR CEO Gary Davey, who thought Liu’s planned channel would compete with STAR’s two Chinese-language channels. But STAR executives realized that Liu knew the Chinese media industry and its regulators thoroughly. He also had a nose for the nuances of Chinese politics. Liu and Murdoch began to talk directly. They were enough alike to be both comfortable with yet wary of each other. They both liked spicy food, taking business risks, and were willing to forgo short-term profits for long-term gain. But they also both liked to be in control. Neither plays second fiddle to anybody.
Liu wanted to control