BUSINESS	MARCH 9, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10
	The Murdoch Chill Factor The media mogul sets off a controversy by shutting down Chris Patten's book on China By ELIZABETH GLEICK /LONDON he larger a company gets, the more difficult it can be for the left hand to know what the right is doing. Especially when the whole body belongs to Rupert Murdoch, a man with a long global reach and still greater global aspirations, and a man rarely afraid to let the marketplace rule. But badly mixed signals, at least, seemed to account for a sudden decision by HarperCollins U.K.--a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation--to dump East and West, a memoir by former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten that offers up a frank and often unflattering assessment of the Chinese government. The decision set off a furor in the publishing industry on both sides of the Atlantic: just over a month ago, Patten was being feted for his forthcoming book, for which he was paid a $200,000 advance last July. In January, he turned in the first two-thirds of his manuscript to Stuart Proffitt, publisher of HarperCollins U.K., and to Times Books, a division of Random House in the U.S., both of whom had agreed to publish the book simultaneously in September. Proffitt, one of Britain's top nonfiction editors who has worked with Simon Schama, Frank McCourt and Doris Lessing, was so excited by what he read that he wrote Patten: "I don't think I have ever read a book by any modern politician which is so lucid or engrossing or which has quickened my blood so frequently." This description is confirmed by Peter Bernstein, publisher of Times Books. "He recounts in great detail and with great style and verve his dealings with the Chinese," says Bernstein. And with considerable acerbity. In one section of the book he describes the difficulty of negotiating with the Chinese over the Hong Kong handover: "The talks dragged on and on, which was doubtless the Chinese intention," Patten writes. "The mulish opacity of the Chinese position was made all the more irksome by the personality of the chief Chinese negotiator, Jiang [Enzhu]. Behind the sloppy smile lurked the personality of a bureaucratic speak-your-weight machine." HarperCollins was so excited by its new author, in fact, that on Jan. 29 the publisher threw a party at London's swank Savoy Hotel to introduce Patten to important booksellers. At the end of the evening, Patten was toasted "effusively," according to a publishing source. But a more important person, it turns out, was less than enthusiastic, and his consternation about East and West was growing. A statement released last week by News Corporation read in part: "Rupert Murdoch at no time tried to change Patten's book. From the start, however, he expressed dissatisfaction about the decision to publish it. He made his view clear to HarperCollins when he first learned the book had been commissioned. Rupert Murdoch did not agree with many of Patten's positions in Hong Kong." It was not the first time Murdoch, who plans to do major business in China, has deferred to Beijing. In 1994, he removed the British Broadcasting Corporation from his STAR satellite system's offerings to China, reportedly because the Chinese government was upset by a documentary about Mao, among other things. Murdoch told his biographer, William Shawcross, "We said in order to get in there and get accepted, we'll cut the BBC out." Murdoch's position on Patten put his minions in a difficult position. On Jan. 20, Eddie Bell, chairman of HarperCollins U.K., tried to salvage the project. In a memo published by London's Daily Telegraph, Bell told Anthea Disney, chief executive of Murdoch's News Corporation in New York, of his concerns about "your instruction to relinquish rights" to the Patten book. "KRM [Keith Rupert Murdoch] has outlined to me the negative aspect of publication which I fully understand," Bell wrote. Nevertheless, he worried that the company would be leaving itself open to criticism. "I have reviewed this issue with our p.r. agency in confidence and they confirm that this is a potentially strong story." Bell's effort failed. On Feb. 5, his superiors told Proffitt to drop the book and threatened dismissal if he breached HarperCollins' confidentiality. When he asked for the reasons for the cancellation to be put into writing, Proffitt said, he was suspended. Last week, Proffitt slapped HarperCollins with a lawsuit, as did Chris Patten. Meanwhile, Macmillan Ltd. which had bid on the book originally, eagerly snapped it up. HarperCollins remains one of the world's publishing giants. But Murdoch's decision to quash a book because he disliked its content may have a chilling effect. "This is bad for publishing," notes Michael Carlisle, a vice president at the William Morris agency in New York City, who points out that, "HarperCollins is not the only company trying to get a foothold in the Chinese market." Derek Johns, joint managing director of the U.K. agency A.P. Watt Ltd., says that he would think twice before sending HarperCollins another book about China. "It's just one book," notes a News Corporation source in frustration, denying that Murdoch is interfering with free expression. But as media conglomerates evolve into media monoliths, conflicts of interest can only become more frequent. "Sometimes they'll be resolved in a dignified way, sometimes in a very undignified way," notes Johns. "We're bound to see more of this."
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