One Billion Customers - James McGregor [75]
Letters, Lobbying, and Delays
We had been given three months to register with Xinhua. Our plan was to delay registering until we could obtain a written agreement that narrowed the scope of the regulations to those with which we could live. We looked for different ways to keep Xinhua off our backs. One tactic was to scare them with the complexities of our business. In a series of letters, and a product demonstration in our office, we pointed out that if Xinhua signed contracts with our customers, Xinhua would have the legal liability to collect our money from deadbeat customers. We also let them know that they could be the defendant in lawsuits filed by our third-party information suppliers whose information was being stolen by Chinese competitors. I launched into a complex explanation of technology issues, some of which I made up as I went along. The man in charge of trying to understand all this was a kindly Xinhua sports editor named Wang Yongsun. He had been called back from retirement to handle this project because he could speak English. As he sat in our office getting increasingly befuddled by our product demonstration, sweat beads formed on his forehead and he nervously shuffled his shoes back and forth on the floor beneath the desk. Clearly he was going to have a hard time explaining these complexities to the bosses.
The delays gave us time to organize a massive lobbying and letter-writing campaign that would take advantage of the international attention that Xinhua had brought on itself. Within China we had plenty of tacit support from our banking and trading company clients, but they all declined to take any action. In China, Xinhua held the ideological high ground. The Communist party’s deep-seated belief in the need to control information—and Xinhua’s well-known ties to Chinese intelligence agencies—made it politically risky for Chinese companies to actively oppose the new regulations. Our Chinese bank customers basically wished us luck and settled down to watch the show.
We knew from the outset that we had to enlist the U.S. government on our side. Dow Jones hired a Washington, D.C., law firm that was headed by President Clinton’s close friend Vernon Jordan, who was also a member of Dow Jones’s board of directors. I had been a reporter on Capitol Hill during the Reagan administration, so I knew how both Washington and Beijing worked. It would be my job to focus on tying together our lobbying efforts in the two capitals.
Our strategy was to insure that every time a Chinese official or minister met with a foreign politician or government official—whether in China or overseas—the Xinhua issue would arise. Richard Pascoe and I became letter-writing machines. We churned out letters for our bosses to send to everybody from top Chinese leaders to European Union officials to important members of Congress and Parliament. I personally wrote letters that, after editing by their aides, were sent out over the signatures of U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Senator John McCain, Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat, and many others. A letter in March from Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann to Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was aimed at educating him on our viewpoint that the regulations were bad for China. The flurry of letters reached an absurd stage. At one point I drafted a letter that was sent over the signature of a U.S. government official. Then I helped the Chinese recipients of the letter to draft the response.
We had friends in high places. Shortly after Xinhua announced the new regulations, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor warned the Chinese ambassador that Xinhua’s power grab might be embraced by the anti-China lobby in Congress and used as a weapon to fight the Clinton administration’s efforts to ensure annual renewal of China’s MFN trade status. Kantor