From The River at the Centre of the World (Simon Winchester, 1996) pp309-10
Xichang, blessed with so clear an atmosphere that locals call it ‘Moon City’, is China’s Cape Canaveral — the principal site of the country’s (currently unmanned) space effort. Satellites are lobbed up into orbit from here with impressive regularity, using the commercial workhorse rocket that is known, appropriately, as the Long March.
Once, when I was being shown around the gigantic Hughes Aircraft headquarters in southern California, I came across one of the satellites that was about to be sent up from Xichang. It was a huge drumlike communications satellite that had gone wrong sometime after its first launch; it had been plucked from orbit by the American space shuttle and brought back down to earth for repairs. At the time I saw it, it had just been bought by a consortium of businessmen in Hong Kong; a few months later it was shipped off to Xichang and eventually launched back into space by a Chinese rocket in April 1990 — inaugurating, as it happened, one of the most profound cultural revolutions the modern East has ever seen.
For the satellite soon began beaming down the various programmes of the Hong Kong-based organization that the owners set up — Star TV, it was called, Satellite Television for the Asian Region. The effect of the programme was to erase, with consummate ease, a whole slew of cultural boundaries that extended from Kuwait to Japan. Within the huge broadcast footprint of the satellite, an unending diet of popular music, sports, news and old films became instantly available to anyone below who had a satellite dish — meaning that Chinese in Shanghai could watch Taiwanese films, and Indians in Bombay could dance to Seoul music, and Iranians and Koreans could watch football from Hokkaido and Singapore.
The implications — a cross-pollination of ideas among the region’s young, a steady homogenization of cultural icons, the creation of a new, Pan-Asian identity among the millions of viewers — have already proved fascinating, despite being little
anticipated by the satellite’s owners.
They were recognized very swiftly, however, by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who bought a controlling interest in Star TV soon after its creation, and now has ambitious, plans for increasing the reach of his various news and entertainment organizations into this immense potential market. One of his early decisions, which sparked some anger, was to drop BBC World Service News: the Chinese, whose favours he sought, found it unpalatable, preferring their viewers to exist on a diet of music and old films, which Murdoch’s managers were more than happy to supply.
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