W hile waiting to interview Liu Changle, something feels not quite right.

Phoenix Satellite TV, the only private network allowed to broadcast in China in Chinese, demonstrates its special status by having its Beijing offices in the Diaoyutai state guesthouse. But inside the villa that the company occupies in this heart of official Communist China, incense wafts through the high-ceilinged, dimly lit rooms, and there is a glimpse of a Buddhist statue.

Combining things that seem to contradict each other is what Mr Liu and the business he built are all about. The 60-year-old is a devout Buddhist and a Communist party member, a critic of Beijing’s censorship regime and a key supporter of the regime itself. “We understand their situation, and they probably also understand our situation,” he says about senior officials to explain how Phoenix navigates the political difficulties of this market. “They need Phoenix, and Phoenix also needs them.”

The country’s leadership, which still invests vast resources into ensuring that its people live on an information diet of state and party television and a filtered, monitored internet, relies heavily on Phoenix in its own homes. “While they are watching CCTV [the main state broadcaster], many hope to gain more information,” says Mr Liu. “Therefore Phoenix is probably a very important channel for their understanding of the outside world.”

Mr Liu underwent tough training early in his life for dealing with the political risks of Communist China. When he was just 15 years old, his parents, officials whose position had allowed the family a comfortable life until then, were attacked in the Cultural Revolution, the 10-year political chaos campaign organised by Mao Zedong from 1966 to consolidate his power. Mr Liu shares the memory of this brutal movement, which made the Chinese greatly appreciate the relative freedom and prosperity brought on by later market reforms, with a whole generation of entrepreneurs.

Liu Chuanzhi, the founder of Lenovo, the PC company, and Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, the telecom equipment maker, are prominent examples. But Mr Liu emerged from China’s dark years with unrivalled skills at simultaneously accommodating and challenging the party.

Mr Liu joined the army at 19. He asserts that working in construction brigades and digging up mines has helped him develop the perseverance, strength and sure instinct needed later in the struggle to keep Phoenix going. “Phoenix’s road was a rough one, and some of the pressures, put on someone else’s shoulders, couldn’t have been borne,” he says. “Life in the barracks helped me steel myself after my upbringing as a rich kid.”

Mr Liu boasts that sometimes even when jetlagged, he will often last longer than his staff, echoing the company slogan: Don’t give up until the very end. And when you arrive at the very end, give up even less. “I follow that as well,” says Mr Liu.

Starting his career in the armed forces has also paid off in other ways. The young man, following his training as a journalist, found work as a military reporter at the state radio station and rose through the ranks to management. Those positions were all about producing propaganda and building ties with those high up – a task which Mr Liu, according to a senior Phoenix executive, “handled with unmatched genius”.

A year before the bloody crackdown on the 1989 student democracy movement ended a relatively liberal period, Mr Liu moved to the US to work as an oil trader. In the early 1990s, he started investing in infrastructure projects in China and overseas before moving into the media business.

Although he set up Today’s Asia, his own TV company, his real breakthrough came after he convinced media mogul Rupert Murdoch to bet on him for his China strategy with a joint venture: Phoenix. “Murdoch and I had a tacit understanding,” says Mr Liu, praising the head of New Corporation for never intervening in day-to-day management, and claims that the joint venture was Mr Murdoch’s most profitable China investment.

Mr Murdoch may have seen that differently. In 2006, News Corp halved its stake in Phoenix after the network was gaining momentum but proved to be no help to Mr Murdoch’s own Star TV in China.

While Mr Murdoch has had to scale down his ambitions for China after years of frustration, Phoenix has come far. The Hong Kong-listed company says its news broadcasts reach more than 300m Chinese. Its revenues jumped by 71 per cent to HK$2.6bn last year on the back of organic growth, while net profit increased 41 per cent to HK$421m. Last week, it filed with US regulators to raise up to $200m through an initial public offering of its new media subsidiary.

Mr Liu has achieved this growth with a mixture of paternalistic and modern western management methods. He likes to compare the company to a family and jokingly quotes a newsreader as saying nobody is as gossipy as the boss because he knows more than anyone else about his individual employees.

The Phoenix founder admits to being an information junkie. Although he prefers books, he says he likes all the devices of the modern technology era and admits that he has a TV installed even in his lavatory.

China’s latest crackdown on dissent, driven by the rulers’ intense fear that the “Jasmine Revolution” sweeping North Africa and the Middle East could trigger copycat uprisings at home, has somewhat tried Mr Liu’s patience.

“Once the word Libya or Gaddafi appears, the screen turned snowy,” he says of the excessive jamming of Phoenix’s news programmes in March. “Isn’t that insane? When [complaints about incessant jamming] mount, those in charge of maintaining stability must ask themselves if this will not cause things to get ever more unstable.”

Beijing’s willingness to liberalise the media landscape further is clearly limited as the group has failed to gain approval to broadcast beyond Guangdong, the province neighbouring Hong Kong, and outside three-star hotels and the homes of officials and foreigners. But its founder asserts that no longer matters as the internet is now helping spread information far beyond the reach of satellite TV.

Mr Liu’s recipe for keeping these operations alive and kicking despite the government’s pervasive censorship apparatus is keeping himself out of editorial operations as much as possible. “My management concept is not managing [it],” he says about the talkshows Phoenix considers more daring. “If I were one of the local politicians they get at [in one show], I would have a heart attack. For sure they are swearing at me [and say this is] anti-party, anti-socialist. So my biggest support to the anchors is that I don’t watch, I help you cover.”

Mr Liu also prides himself in having allowed reporters to push the envelope on important news events. One example was his lobbying in 2003 to be allowed to broadcast live a central government press conference about Sars, the respiratory disease that had originated in China but initially been covered up by local officials. Another example was the decision in 2005 to lead the news with the death of Zhao Ziyang, the former premier who was demoted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest after expressing support for the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

However, that does not make Phoenix a heroic freedom fighter. Mr Liu says he requires the network’s journalists to keep their criticisms of China’s political problems positive and constructive: “Of course that is in conflict with an objective and fair media. But it is better than being negative, malevolent and destructive.”

The rest remains unsaid. Asked what kind of special relationship with Communist party leaders secures Phoenix’s unique position, Mr Liu replies enigmatically that having friends high up is not necessarily the key to success: “How to combine the realistic ‘right behaviour’ and the metaphysical ‘values’, how to walk the tightrope between the scissors of the censor and the people’s money, how to keep a clear head and not lose your passion – we really do have some experiences and lessons that you can sense but not explain in words.”

Editor： Kathrin Hille & Lifen Zhang

News source: Financial Times

Web source: https://www.ft.com/content/2f970b5c-6d2d-11e0-83fe-00144feab49a