It was not long before Richard Owen, The Times’s foreign editor, found himself summoned before the Chinese press attaché in London in order to be told of their embassy’s acute irritation at Mirsky’s reporting. An article by him that caused particular offence concerned allegations of cannibalism in Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution and the state-created famine of 1959–61 that killed between sixteen and forty million people. Nor was Mirsky the only miscreant. There were also complaints about an article by Bernard Levin that thundered against the Foreign Office’s selling out of Hong Kong, or, as he put it, ‘the brave, beautiful, blazing bulwark against tyranny into bondage’. ‘The people of China are ruled by brutes and tyrants,’ Levin had continued, warming to his theme, before adding that Beijing’s occupation of Tibet ‘was a crime hardly less dreadful than those of the Nazis; it encompassed the utter destruction of a culture (and, more to the point, of the human beings, too) that had endured for countless centuries’.33 The embassy’s complaints were politely noted and, it seemed, ignored.
Whether Britain was about to betray its Hong Kong subjects to a repressive regime was hotly debated on the pages of the paper. The 1984 Sino-British Declaration established that China would leave Hong Kong’s constitutional laws intact for at least fifty years after the handover in 1997. Deng Xiaoping summed up this settlement as ‘one country, two systems’. Yet the pretence of mutual trust had been subsequently rocked by two events. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres raised the spectre that Beijing would crush dissent in Hong Kong, imprison political opponents and imperil its economy by undermining the freedoms upon which its success was built. At the time of the massacre, one million Hong Kong citizens marched through the streets of the colony to protest. Many of them had fled from Chinese Communism in the first place and were fearful for their future once the colony was reabsorbed. In turn, China had cause to accuse Britain when Chris Patten set in motion plans to give the colony a fully elected legislature (it had been partly elected since 1991) and a Bill of Rights. Such reforms, coming so late in Britain’s ownership of the colony, naturally infuriated Beijing which proceeded to denounce Patten as a ‘strutting prostitute’, a ‘criminal of a thousand antiquities’ and a ‘tango dancer’. Nonetheless, the reforms had the strong endorsement of The Times, not only from its man on the spot, who knew Patten very well and got stories directly from him, but also at Wapping where the editor and the chief leader writer, Rosemary Righter, were keen to hold Beijing to account.
On 18 September 1995, Hong Kong’s first wholly elected Legislative Council ushered in a pro-democracy majority that put the colony on a likely collision course with her future overlords. The Beijing-backed and funded party won only seven of the sixty seats on the Legislative Council and Li Peng, the Chinese Prime Minister, insisted that his country would not abide by the result. Predictably, The Times’s leading article stated that the vote had vindicated Patten’s reforms.34 From Beijing the talk was of reneging on the commitments in the 1984 declaration as well as replacing the elected Legislative Council with an appointed body. Describing China’s threats as ‘arrogant’, The Times backed John Major’s warning that Britain would involve her allies, the UN and the International Court of Justice, if China made any attempt to revoke the institutions and safeguards guaranteed by the 1984 Agreement.35 Incurring the strong rebuke of the Chinese Ambassador, The Times also expressed intense hostility to China’s threats towards Taiwan, which in 1996 held its first democratic presidential elections (which Beijing interpreted as a step towards declaring the independence that Taiwan already effectively had in practice). Appealing to Clinton not to waver in the United States’ defence of Taiwanese integrity, the leading column made clear that ‘China is the provoker. The greatest risk lies in turning a blind eye.’36
In 1973, The Times had sponsored a politically ground-breaking exhibition of Chinese treasures at the Royal Academy. In September 1996 it did so again, by sponsoring The Mysteries of China at the British Museum. Featured were exhibits unearthed in recent archaeological discoveries from the Neolithic era of 4500 BC to the end of the Han dynasty in the third century AD. As part of the cultural exchange surrounding the Mysteries sponsorship, four board members of the People’s Daily were flown over at company expense. They were entertained at a Times reception at which John Major made a fleeting visit. After dinner, they were given a parting gift of that evening’s Times. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate present. On its inside pages were two stories about China, one by Bronwen Maddox headed ‘Clinton gambles on Far Eastern trade taming the tyranny of Peking’ and a second, by Mirsky, entitled ‘President warns China against bullying’.37
Although he had officially retired in 1990 and had been in uncertain health thereafter, the death in February 1997 of China’s ‘Paramount Leader’, Deng Xiaoping, was recognized as having far more than merely symbolic significance. A survivor of the Long March generation who had finally become unchallenged leader in 1978, Deng had straddled the contradictions of encouraging the private sector while retaining the iron commitment to one-party rule that guided the Tiananmen crackdown. The Times tried to do justice to both sides of his legacy. While there were doubts about which successors would establish themselves, the obituary hailed Deng as the saviour of the Communist Party and progenitor ‘over the most ambitious and successful market and free enterprise reforms ever undertaken by a socialist country’ which ensured ‘that millions of Chinese reaped tangible benefits’. Mirsky provided a lengthy assessment too, suggesting that Deng was not interested in ideas, and ‘probably went to his grave thinking that technology was the secret of Western power, a blindspot in the leader of a country which professed to be ideologically driven’. He was, Mirsky concluded, ‘like a Mafia capo di tutti capi, boss of bosses, who thought of China as Cosa Nostra, the Party’s creation, and was ready to crush under a tank any young man or women with a mimeograph who thought they could transform China – as Dr Mimeograph once dreamt of doing – and did’.38
Three months later, Stothard flew out to Beijing accompanied by Les Hinton, News International’s executive chairman, and James Pringle. There was a possibility that Stothard might be granted an interview with President Jiang Zemin. With Hong Kong’s handover just over a month away, this would have been a notable scoop for The Times. China’s leaders were not in the habit of offering impromptu interviews to foreign journalists and a request was made to see in advance what the questions would involve. Stothard submitted some proposals (the content of which had been suggested by Mirsky), adding that he wished the discussion to spread beyond them. In the event, President Jiang opted not to see The Times but Stothard was granted an audience with the deputy prime minister, Zhu Rongji, instead. He was duly invited into the Zhongnanhai, the enclosed complex of offices and gardens where the country’s leaders worked. Zhu could not have been more welcoming, even stating that he had been a reader of The Times since childhood and that its editor should feel free to ask whatever he liked, being, as he was, among friends. Possibly he did not appreciate that his guest accepted this courtesy literally. When the deputy prime minister provided reassurance that Hong Kong would enjoy press freedom under China’s rule, Stothard asked why, in that case, dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan were imprisoned. Astonished, Zhu stood up and told him that was not the sort of question friends ask one another, reminding the editor that it was supposed to be a friendly chat not an inquisition. Within minutes the audience was over.39 Stothard had not got his interview and when he returned to Wapping few of his colleagues were even aware that he had been in China at all.
On 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was duly handed over in a ceremony attended by Blair and the Prince of Wales. Save for a few isolated possessions, the event marked the end of the British Empire and The Times gave it the comprehensive treatment it deserved. Mirsky was the only journalist among the small group of well-wishers allowed onto the quayside to bid Patten farewell as he boarded the Royal Yacht Britannia with the Prince of Wales to sail off towards
the Philippines. Barely an hour later, a Boeing 747 touched down at Kai Tak airport bearing President Jiang, the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party to touch Hong Kong soil.
As The Times’s leader column noted, China’s future ascendancy would be dictated by how she responded to her new responsibility over the former colony.40 Beijing did not want the liberal-minded elements in the Hong Kong success story to contaminate the Communist one-party state on the mainland. Hong Kong’s elected Legislative Council was immediately replaced with an appointed one in a ceremony controversially attended by Patten’s British critics, among them Sir Edward Heath and Lord (formally Sir Geoffrey) Howe. The reformers’ hope was that Beijing also recognized that it could not afford to kill its golden goose; on the eve of the handover Hong Kong was handling 60 per cent of external investment in China. A political crackdown could have serious economic consequences for the precedence was clear: the Hong Kong stock market had slumped 30 per cent on the news of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Hong Kong’s recession began the day after the RY Britannia passed beyond its harbour. Ironically, the downturn was caused not by China’s assumption of authority but by the Thai baht which collapsed on 2 July, bringing in its wake an Asia-wide financial crisis. A year after reunification with China, the Hong Kong stock market had halved in value. By then, Mirsky was back in London. Approaching retirement age and with the handover achieved, he had stepped down as South East Asia editor in November 1997. To his surprise, George Brock, The Times’s managing editor, asked him not to retire altogether and instead extended his contract so that he might continue to write on Chinese affairs for the paper.
Whatever awaited Hong Kong’s longer term future or how serious the immediate economic recession, the former colony did not experience the sudden Tiananmen-style bloodbath that some had feared. There seemed some possibility that the principle of one country, two systems might be acknowledged. Inevitably in this state of affairs, news stories about the province became less frequent – despite Mirsky’s attempts to get them in the paper – while attention switched to those parts of the world in greater crisis. Yet, for The Times and its Far East coverage, this was a brief lull before the storm for, early the next year, it found itself embroiled in a bitter dispute about its Chinese coverage and the behind-the-scenes dealing of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, which would do immense damage to the paper’s reputation.
In a pointed leader in June 1996, The Times had warned that China’s potential as a magnet for Western investment was making foreign leaders – in particular Helmut Kohl – wary of criticizing its record on human rights.41 This was a brave observation given the commercial pressures on Rupert Murdoch to behave similarly. In 1993, he had bought Star television, a Hong Kong-based satellite broadcaster. The potential was enormous and with his investment in Sky starting to pay off in Britain, he announced that satellite television would prove ‘an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes’. Beijing promptly banned all private ownership of satellite dishes. This concentrated Murdoch’s mind. Shortly after the deal for Star TV went through, he sold Hong Kong’s leading English language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to a Chinese-Malaysian tycoon. The paper, reputedly the most profitable in the world, was an influential voice in the region – Murdoch, indeed, had described it as ‘The Times of Southeast Asia’.42 The sale was not without financial logic. News Corp. had bought it in 1987 for HK$ 2.4 billion and sold it six years later for HK$ 6 billion. The paper’s sale recouped two-thirds of the cost of buying Star, whose prospects would bloom if Beijing removed the obstacles to its expansion. It was widely assumed that jettisoning the South China Morning Post with its independent editorial line was one way in which Murdoch might bring about a more accommodating attitude from Beijing. This, at any rate, appeared to be his motivation when in 1994 he dropped BBC World Service TV from the Star TV satellite that was received into thirty-eight Asian countries. The decision to drop the BBC, which scandalized almost every section of the British media, went unrecorded in The Times.
This was not the only shortcoming in the paper’s reporting. Harper-Collins, the publishing house owned by News Corp., had commissioned Chris Patten to write East and West, an account of his governorship. It was due to be published in September 1998, but in July the previous year Murdoch had told HarperCollins executives that he thought it would be better if they paid Patten back his advance and suggested he took his book to another publisher. Murdoch was no fan of Patten’s politics and was anxious that the book’s publication would be interpreted as a declaration of hostility by the Chinese government. It was not a courageous position to adopt. The manner in which executives at HarperCollins implemented it made it look exceptionally inept. In February 1998 they dropped East and West with the phoney claim that it was too boring to be published. This flatly contradicted the opinion of the book’s editor, Stuart Profitt, who resigned and subsequently won compensation for constructive dismissal. All too predictably, the person least harmed by the fallout was Patten himself. HarperCollins had to pay him substantial damages and his book was published by Macmillan instead. For Murdoch, the financial penalty was paltry compared to the scale of the public relations disaster. Patten’s successful claim for damages dominated the news in the broadsheets. Beyond Wapping, Fleet Street was cock-a-hoop. ‘Murdoch is forced to apologise’ ran the Telegraph’s front-page headline with ill concealed glee. The Telegraph’s leading article overreached itself, accusing Murdoch of being ‘the biggest gangster of them all’. Nobody would have expected The Times to lead the denunciation, but its attempt to ignore the issue was a serious editorial misjudgment. Tardily, it reported the news on 28 February in an article that focused on News Corp.’s side of events. In consequence, it had opened itself up to allegations of self-censorship. These were not slow to materialize. The paper had never bid for the serial rights to East and West. This was a perfectly understandable decision that some now chose to construe as being done in deference to Murdoch. Stothard immediately rebutted the suggestion as ‘outrageous and absolutely not true’43 but rival newspapers, under pressure from The Times’s cut in price, knew they had found a weapon with which to fight back. The issue threatened to seriously tarnish the paper’s principal asset – its credibility.
Stothard responded to criticisms over The Times’s inadequate coverage by admitting that he had misjudged the Patten book’s importance and in particular the level of attention competitors would give it. But he refuted any suggestion that he was acting on the proprietor’s orders – the subject, he said, had not even been touched upon in the telephone conversation he had had with Murdoch earlier in the week. Furthermore, he attempted to explain that because those tipping off the press had gone first with their stories to rival newspapers, The Times’s coverage had been less complete and had constantly struggled to catch up. He admitted, though, that of the many ‘difficult calls’ he had to make as editor, he had not called this one correctly.44 Indeed, he had not. On 6 March, The Times’s media editor, Raymond Snoddy, wrote an article that confronted the problem. ‘No national newspaper in the UK covers its own affairs really well,’ he admitted. Guardian readers received little information about the manner of their paper’s purchase and financing of the Observer while the Independent was coy about its own attempts to squeeze out of business the Sunday competition. ‘Why, even The Times has been known, occasionally, to appear to avert its gaze when some activity of Mr Murdoch is being criticised by ill informed souls,’ wrote Snoddy with just a hint of whimsy before going on to suggest that the FT (his former employer) had the best record of independent judgment from the interests of its owners.45 This certainly was objective journalism.
Nonetheless, with a price war in full cry, the Daily Telegraph had no intention of letting the matter pass. Under intense pressure from The Times’s fast-increasing sales, it began to run derogatory references to its rival and its owner as a matter of course. This quickly descended into crassness. A surprisingly lengthy report in the Telegraph’s news pages abou
t Murdoch’s purchase of an American baseball team even suggested he might ‘vulgarise’ the Los Angeles Dodgers in the same way that he had The Times. A war of letters broke out between Stothard and the Telegraph’s editor, Charles Moore, after the latter took umbrage about an article by Brian MacArthur that pointed out the extent of the Telegraph’s gratuitous digs at its commercial rival.46 The Telegraph, however, had another trump card to play – a disgruntled Times employee.
On 20 January 1998, Jonathan Mirsky had attended a round circle meeting of the Freedom Forum in London, an intimate gathering assembled for the benefit of a visiting group of young Chinese journalists. Told it was off the record, several of the British journalists there felt sufficiently relaxed to start bemoaning aspects of their own newspapers’ East Asian coverage. Emboldened, Mirsky duly joined in, giving vent to his frustrations that so much of his filed copy had never made it into The Times. Unfortunately for Mirsky, the supposedly off-the-record meeting was duly reported on the Freedom Forum’s website. What was worse, the website report left off the other journalists’ gripes about their employers except for what Mirsky had said about The Times – which was published in detail. He was accurately quoted as attributing his spiked copy to ‘the general junkification of the paper’ but also to his belief that it was done to protect the proprietor’s Far Eastern business empire. ‘The Times has finally decided, because of Murdoch’s interests, not to cover China in a serious way,’ Mirsky suggested. When a member of the audience questioned whether he was endangering his job with such criticisms, Mirsky waved the concern aside with the reply, ‘I’m too old and too famous for them to do something really terrible to me.’47 This was rather naive.
For a while nothing happened. The website of the Freedom Forum was not a major Fleet Street news source. All this changed on the morning of 4 March 1998, when Mirsky got out of bed and went to his front door to pick up the newspapers. Across the front page of the Daily Telegraph ran the headline ‘Times man hits at censor Murdoch’. Hot on the heels of HarperCollins’s dropping of the Patten book, Mirsky’s quotes provided a great story for the press. The Telegraph devoted its lead editorial column to condemning The Times over what it decided was its failure to report the Patten fiasco fully and the allegations levelled by Mirsky. That the paper had been outspoken in its support for the Patten reforms was not mentioned. The Telegraph’s leading article ended with words that went beyond the usual badinage traded by rival papers: ‘Such suppression is not “a pretty minor story”, and anyone who thinks it is is well suited to work for Mr Murdoch, but not for a proper newspaper.’48
The History of the Times Page 73
