From Breaking News (Paul Barry) p125
Since then, Rupert had been grovelling furiously to China’s rulers to repair the damage. First, he had dropped the BBC from STAR‘s Hong Kong satellite service. Then he had paid Deng Xiaoping‘s daughter a reputed US$1 million for English rights to her biography of ‘China’s Paramount Leader’. Next, he had canned ‘ former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten’s critical memoirs in 1998. Then he had laid into the Dalai Lama as ‘a political old monk in Gucci shoes’. And finally he had apologised to Premier Jiang Zemin, pretending his original remarks had not been about China at all.So James’s first priority was to have another shot at getting the satellite ban removed, and within months he was proving at least as good as his father at putting profit before principle. Glossing over the fact that at least 100 members of Falun Gong had died in Chinese prisons of torture or neglect, and that many thousands were still incarcerated, he publicly defended the Chinese government’s persecution of the sect, which he characterised as ‘dangerous’ and ‘an apocalyptic cult’. In the same speech to a conference in Beverly Hills in March 2001, he also took aim at ‘Hong Kong’s democracy movement, by advising them to ‘accept the reality of life under a strong-willed absolutist government’. And finally, he wrapped it all up by attacking the western media for ‘painting a falsely negative portrait of China’ by focusing on human rights.
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