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CAIXINMEDIA

A Chinese Woman's Takedown Of Wendi Deng Murdoch

For this Chinese writer, Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife is a symbol of all that's wrong with the power women of the new century.

"Divorcee of the year" Wendi Deng
"Divorcee of the year" Wendi Deng
Hu Ziwei*

-Essay-

BEIJING — In its end-of-2013 review, British daily The Guardian awarded the “Divorce of the Year” prize to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng. Ah, but of course. For it is not just this year but throughout our new millennium that Madame Deng has commanded our attention.

Fourteen years ago, Murdoch divorced from his second wife, Anna. Just 17 days later he married Deng, a Chinese woman 38 years his junior whom he met after she rose from an intern position at Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp. Everyone was taken by surprise. This tall and glamorous woman, hanging on the arm of the most powerful media mogul on the planet, appeared to the world as both alluring and puffed up with pride.

For the next decade, dazzling reports about this power couple produced a steady supply of headlines. First it was about the use of Murdoch’s frozen sperm, supposedly hidden from his second wife, that helped Deng become the mother of two Murdoch heirs. Deng would then become the chief strategy officer of News Corp’s website MySpace. (She famously blocked a “pie-throwing expand=1] attack” while her husband was at his lowest moment in recent years during a British Parliament investigation into his newspapers’ phone-hacking scandal.)

Still the couple’s two daughters did not obtain voting control over the family’s trust holding, as Deng had wished. By mid-2013, in fact, Rupert Murdoch filed for divorce, and the couple ended their marriage by year’s end in a New York court.

Spoils and youth

No outsider is going to know exactly what happened behind the scenes over the past 14 years. What we see, though, is the relaxed and happy face of the media tycoon, while Deng, once seen as so vibrant and cheerful, wears the sullen expression of the loser in the whole affair.

Wendi Deng and Ruper Murdoch in April 2012 — Photo: Ki Price/ZUMA

Most gossip involving Deng is about her spoils from the divorce, even as some snipe that what she’s lost in exchange is her youth. After all her earthshaking efforts to have a stake in the empire, all she has gained are two expensive properties.

Still, there are others who applaud Deng and praise her talent for knowing well how to maximize the utility of it, characterizing her with words like "assertive", "successful" and "glamorous'.

I have never met Wendi Deng. But I have met other tough women, ones who fly under a black cloud and attack by surprise in a dense mass. They set a goal, build the model, then advance like a bulldozer, exerting irresistible force over the lives and souls of others.

Two categories

These women are the major thoroughfares of the world, not the quiet labyrinths. Their lives are an ode, majestic but impossible to calibrate to something softer. Their capacity for awareness is particularly strong, a kind of “sixth sense” to assess those around them. In their eyes, everybody is divided into two categories — useful or useless.

If you are the latter, your fate is simply to be ignored by her, but if she sees some utility, you are destined to be selected like a puzzle piece and assembled as one of the bricks and tiles of her life.

I often sigh to myself: Why is it that the more successful a man, the more popular he is, yet a woman’s success often has the opposite effect? I believe that is part because of the design of institutions and the weight of social prejudice. But it’s also related to our own limitations: Women tend to be fixed on pre-determined objectives, unable to extricate themselves along the way.

The degree of a person’s success often also reflects their absurdity. That’s because even a glamorous lifestyle will not withstand questioning. I have a luxurious mansion right next to the Forbidden City, and my upper East side New York apartment is worth more than $44 million. So what? I have become the world’s leading socialite with Tony Blair and Hugh Jackman as friends. So what? I had the chance to control the world’s largest media empire. So what?

Everybody, we can never forget, ultimately becomes but a handful of new soil.

So what does a lack of sensitivity do to a woman? Just look at Wendi Deng. It's nothing that cosmetic surgery can help. Vanity is ultimately the worst enemy of any woman. The contradiction of beauty and purpose are often thought to live side-by-side in so-called “successful women.” For some, facing the choice of being a nice person or a strong person, the latter seems more economicially viable.

So what will you choose to be — a nice person or a tough one? I’m fed up with talk of success. I dare you and everyone else to be someone nice.

* Hu Ziwei is a TV host and columnist for Caixin.

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Society

Pillar Of Shame, Symbol Of Freedom: Tiananmen To Hong Kong To Berlin

The “Pillar of Shame” in Hong Kong, a memorial to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, was a symbol of freedom and democracy. Beijing has taken it down, but a replica is being built in Berlin. Activist Samuel Chu explains why that means so much to him.

Image of the famous statue Pillar Of Shame marking the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The famous statue Pillar Of Shame marking the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed in 2021 at the University of Hong Kong, China.

Liau Chung-ren/ZUMA
Samuel Chu

-Essay-

HONG KONG — On Dec. 22, 2021, shortly before midnight, masked workers removed the original “Pillar of Shame” statue from the campus of the University of Hong Kong, where it had stood for more than 24 years. The sculpture was dismantled into three pieces and wrapped in white sheets that were reminiscent of the shrouds used to wrap dead bodies.

The pillar has a very personal meaning for me. Its arrival in Hong Kong in 1997 marked the start of a friendship between the artist Jens Galschiøt and my father, the minister Chu Yiu-ming, a founding member of the Hong Kong Alliance.

The Alliance was founded to support the protest movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing (Tiananmen meaning the Gate of Heavenly Peace). After the protests were brutally suppressed, the Alliance became the most important voice working to ensure that the victims were not forgotten, and for 30 years it organized annual candlelight vigils on June 4 in Hong Kong.

When the pillar was removed from Hong Kong in 2021, I traveled to Jens’s workshop in Odense, Denmark to start work on our new plan. We wanted to ensure that the pillar, as a memorial to the murdered of Tiananmen Square, as well as to those who kept these forbidden memories alive in Hong Kong, did not disappear. To understand how it came to this, you need to understand the history and the idea behind the pillar in Hong Kong.

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