Media: Rob Brown's column

Several weeks ago, when it wasn't such a hot topic, I devoted this column to how Western media conglomerates are turning a blind eye to China's appalling human rights abuses in order to worm their way into what is potentially the world's largest media marketplace. I spotlighted the shameful record of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, among others, in this regard.

So you can imagine my satisfaction last week when the mogul as caught red Chinese-handed seeking to spike former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten's forthcoming book, East and West. I am delighted by the revolt which it has triggered among leading authors in his HarperCollins stable. Yet, as I have also argued before in this space, simply demonising the Dirty Digger is a futile gesture by those of us who like to see ourselves as morally superior to the Murdochs of this world.

The way in which the Chinese regime violates the rights of a billion people on this planet with barely a murmur of protest from the West is symptomatic of the corporatisation of our own societies and the moral corruption of our political and media elites. Many of them are doing no more than Murdoch to bring pressure to bear on Peking.

I can demonstrate this by highlighting a scandal that has received scant coverage in the Western media. The scandal is this: At the annual session of the UN Commission on Human Rights later this year, member states of the European Union are likely, for the first time since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, to drop their condemnation of China's human rights record, not because the regime has begun to shower the people of China with fresh new freedoms, but because of Western Europe's growing economic and commercial interests in that part of the world.

I believe this because Connor O'Clery, the Irish Times's excellent Peking correspondent, claims that he was tipped off by Western diplomats in the Chinese capital and filed a despatch to his newspaper about it. I haven't seen the story on the BBC's 9 o'clock news or on ITN's News at Ten. Yet when you stop and think about it, this would be a highly significant development. It confirms the way in which Western governments are falling over each other to curry favour with a deplorable one-party state in order to win commercial orders.

This trend has not escaped the notice of China's leading dissident, Wei Jingsheng, who was released into exile in December. In a recent half-hour meeting with Derek Fatchett, the junior minister at the Foreign Office who deals with Chinese affairs, Wei outlined how China can carry on ignoring human rights and denying any democracy to its people.

"Both the big businessmen and the Communists want a stable environment in which certain people can make a lot of money. It's a kind of collusion," he explained. The irony, Wei went on, is that "we Chinese never believed our own government's statement that the Western regimes are dominated by big capitalists - but now we see it's true. Look what happens when a Western journalist is thrown out of China. His government remains silent, or it may speak to Chinese officials in private."

Such has certainly been the fate of the British journalist Jonathan Mirsky, who was informed by the authorities in September 1991 that he could not return to China. Mirsky has continued to monitor Chinese affairs as best he can from his home in London. He was, until the end of last year, East Asia editor of The Times - a title owned, of course, by Rupert Murdoch - but it was the New York Review of Books that gave Mirsky a platform recently to report the views of Wei.

Could the main reason we in the West are so ignorant about this possible development be that the Western media have patently failed to inform us about this particular China syndrome? Perhaps ratings-driven TV news producers and circulation-obsessed newspaper editors don't care enough about what happens to their fellow human beings in the world's most populated state - except when China's human rights violations are paraded in full view of the world's media.

Such occasions - the Tiananmen Square massacre being the most obvious example - are extremely rare. As Michael Ignatieff observed in a recent seminar staged by the Freedom Forum in London, one of the great myths about our so-called global village is that it is transparent to the TV cameras. "That simply isn't true," Ignatieff reminded us. "One of the things that modern authoritarian regimes are learning and practising is that they can shut the cameras down. China is big enough, powerful enough, smart enough and ruthless enough to shut the world out. It is getting away, literally, with murder."

Some of us may like to delude ourselves that the Dirty Digger is the only Western media accomplice in this crime against humanity, but the opinion-formers who repeatedly turn a blind eye to China's deplorable human rights abuses aren't all on Rupert Murdoch's payroll.