It was one o’clock. We had arranged to meet for lunch a whole hour earlier, yet he was still making calls to arrange a last minute request from a film production company for an interview on a film on one of his radio channels.
Between phone calls, he filled me in: ‘I am devoting more and more time to going through film scripts these days. This indie film to be premiered tonight will do well, I am sure, just like all of my other film projects.’ He then gave me a list of titles. A mixture of mega-productions starring some of the region’s top entertainers and those that aimed to appeal to lovers of ‘art house’ movies, they have all succeeded in expanding not just his personal wealth but a business portfolio that ranges from radio and music production through events promotion to advertising and entertainment agencies, and, in recent years, film making. A-list international stars are among his clients.
The business empire that he has built up within a mere twenty years started with his passion for Western pop music, something barely known in the China of the late nineteen-eighties. He wrote to a radio station offering his collection of cassettes and vinyl to a ten-minute Western music programme, and was soon given his own show. When a hunger for all things exotic and especially Western started to grip the country, his reputation as the sexiest voice on air spread like wildfire. By the early nineteen-nineties, he had garnered such popular power that he quitted his day job as a translator in the state security department and set up a production company. We were then hit by one surprise after another as he coaxed a series of state media organisations into exclusive deals.
‘You know, what I have achieved with my radio production company is totally improbable. ’ He was referring to the ten-year deals it had made with several radio stations on programme and advertising provision, which, in being exclusive to those stations, were against broadcasting regulations.
Yes I know.
While it was a keen desire to engage the audience that launched his media career, he has never shrunk from utilising everything within his reach – charm, personal contacts, business acumen, legal loopholes – in order to build his business empire. One colleague also suggested bullying.
‘I was featured in two separate programmes by Japanese television. The first was to mark fifteen years of Chinese economic reforms by investigating the ‘new species’ like myself that it bred. Three years ago the second one marked thirty years of reform. Remember how tiny my father’s flat was? In the first programme, the cameraman followed me into my home to make me look taller in the tiny, cramped space. In the second, they showed the difference that fifteen years had made by coming to my villa.’
He does seem to be a new and very different species.
Yet on second thoughts, he is not that different, especially in China. He is a mere illustration of what the nation has bred over the short span of thirty years.
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