Wendi Murdoch and a Train Crash

For days, Chinese airwaves and newspapers have marshalled nearly round-the-clock coverage of News Corp. woe and Wendi Deng Murdoch’s defense of her husband, Rupert, against a would-be shaving-cream-pie-thrower. No detail about Wendi Murdoch’s upbringing in China is too picayune to escape attention: “I taught her how to spike like that!” declared Jiang Limo, the former deputy director of the physical-education department at Xuzhou No. 1 Middle School, where she played on the volleyball team as a child. The Xuzhou City Morning News dedicated a detailed review to her downward, open-palm swipe and concluded, “At the crucial moment, her spike is just as beautiful and powerful as ever!”

While Wendi Murdoch’s right hand has thrust her into a new spotlight in the West, the effect in China has been less about sudden celebrity than about an image makeover. To admirers, she is the daughter of a factory director in Guangzhou who made it to the U.S., mastered English, and climbed from a California commuter college to a degree from the Yale School of Management. She became an executive at Star TV in Hong Kong and interpreted for Murdoch on a working tour of the mainland. Rupert Murdoch later left his wife of thirty-one years and married Wendi in 1999, seventeen days after his divorce was final.

Her Chinese detractors, by contrast, are inclined to recall the saga of her arrival in the U.S. thanks to the help of a California family; the husband soon left his wife to marry her, a union that lasted less than three years and provided ammunition to those in China inclined to see her as a symbol of ruthless aspiration.

Until last week: “That ambitious and ever-climbing woman showed the courage and anger a wife should have,” as popular blogger Heicaitou put it. (h/t ChinaGeeks.) In an online Chinese poll about her pie-spike, two thirds of respondents voted, “Admirable! In a crisis, she jumped up bravely in defense of her husband!” A fifth of those polled chose: “I didn’t like her before, but after this slap, I’ve changed my view completely!” (Fourteen per cent of those polled were unmoved, choosing “I don’t like this kind of calculating woman.”)

But Wendi Murdoch’s omnipresence in the Chinese press is not simply about her. Even before the punch, Chinese state media had been savoring the News Corp. case as a chance to turn the tables and chide Western reporters and politicians for misdeeds. As a piece in the Guangming Daily put it, “Murdoch has showed us once again that the so-called independence and objectivity [of the Western press] is merely a fig leaf that the western world uses to fool its people.”

Are Chinese reporters really so eager to flog their British peers? Not exactly. Party news bosses have explicitly instructed them to report as much as they can on the News of the World case, according to Chinese journalists. Ji Ye, a director at Phoenix television, wrote, “Over all my years in the business, the internal instructions have always been ‘you are not allowed to report on such and such’ or ‘we have to toe the line on such-and-such.’ But this is the first time that we’ve received an advisory saying we can report more extensively, more freely. We’re totally overwhelmed with gratitude, and we don’t know what to do now!”

The Murdoch-mania is so conspicuous that some Chinese viewers are asking if it has anything to do with the fact that it coincides with the moment that Party leaders are struggling to quell criticism over a train crash that casts doubt on the safety of a marquee political symbol, China’s high-speed rail network. (As one Chinese commentator put it, “The evening news has the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal over and over again, but only a brief piece on the disaster in our own nation.”)

Ultimately, Party news chiefs might not want to dwell too long on the moral implications of digital hacking. At it happens, Caixin magazine reporter Zhao Hejuan’s e-mail account was recently hacked, and the hacker’s I.P. address was traced to the city of Shaoyang. It just happens to be the city in which Zhao recently uncovered an enormous scoop: local officials were abducting and selling children to adoption agencies. Her employer, Caixin, reported the e-mail hacking to police and posted the news on its Web site.

But don’t bother searching other sites for much more on that case. The news has been censored.