I BOOKS
BOOKS Short history of the FCC A NEW edition of Historic Postcards of Hong Kong, published by Stock House, features on its cover the now celebrated Murray Zanoni painting of the FCC's Lower Albert Road headquarters, ald on the flyleaf a brief history of the club. The history tracks the FCC fortunes from its origins in Chungking in 1943 to the magnificent current premises which have been our home since 1982, thanks to the assistalce of former governor, Lord Maclehose. It is a mixture of elegantþ crafted
witty observations on some of the lighter aspects of the club's research and
-
Australia towards the end of 1987 that went: How do you make a small forlune
in Australia? Answer: Give young Warwick Fairfax a large forhrne.
In time Warwick Geoffrey Oswald Fairfax stood to inherit one of the world's few remaining family-owned
Fairfax was a hugely profitable company which prided itself on the journalistic excellence of its newspapers. Slhat makes Carroll's book compulsive reading is his ability to take the reader behind the headlines that sur-
of 26, young
rounded young Warwick's takeover. According to Carroll there were four
Warwick launched a A$2 billion takeover for John Fairfax Ltd - publishers
contributing factors which went handin-hand in the demise of Fairfax.
ne\Mspaper empires.
In
1987, at the age
of the Sydney Morning Herald, Age and the Australia Financial Reuieu.It was the biggest takeover by a single person in Australian business history. Three years later, the company was
in ruins, strangled by debt and eventually forced into receivership, drawing the curtain down on 150 years of pub-
lishing history in Australia.
Carroll's timely book is not only a chronicle of the demise of John Fairfax Ltd, it is also a case study of what happened in corporate Australia when the Federal Labor Government cut the banks loose in the 1980s. Carroll writes with a deep understanding of the Fairfax company. During his 26 years he edited the
First there was the Fairfax family itself. On one side was Lady Mary Fairfax, Sir Warwick Fair{ax's third wife, mother of young Warwick, and the power behind the throne. On the other rvas James Fairfax, Sir War-
wick's son from a previous marriage, who replaced his father as chairman in 1976 after a bitter boardroom battle. The second factor was the shift in the
balance of power within the family from Sir Warwick to James. As Carroll points out: "The management and style of the company had radically altered."
The third factor was the rise of the Labor Party at federal and state levels
in the 1980s. Carroll writes: "State
26 THE CORRESPONDENT FEBRUARY 1991
P I
',;''llUX¿ 's zodiacal
emblem and the totem
of
Chinese
power) recentþ arrived in Hong Kong. He has been travelling around Asia since 1973, when he started covering the Indochina wars in Cambodia and Laos for the Paris daily Liberati.ott. He has never stopped reporling on
the region since that time, and criss-
to Hokkaido and from Ulan Bator to
overthe media, butthe Federal government controlled radio and television
After Labor's win in 1983 it set about creating the conditions to break up the fwo newspaper groups it saw as its broadcasting.
the Heral.d and Weekly Times group (later taken over
-
by Rupert Murdoch) in
Melbourne,
Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, and Fairfax in Sydney and Melbourne. Both had substantial television and radio interests apart from newspapers.
Ownership rules for radio and television stations changed, opening up the opporbunity for company raiders to break up both groups." The fourth factor, and perhaps the most important, was the Federal Labor Party's decision to allow foreign
banking into Australia.
time of rising deregulation of
"It
came at a world liquidity and money markets and
opened the way for financial deals based on debt the size and shape undreamed of." The Man
Wo
Couldn't Wait: War
wick Fairfax's folþ and the banh,ers who backed hirn. By V. t. Cawoll Milliam
Heinem¡tn Australia).
Bandoeung through Peking.
He opened Liberation's first Asia¡r
governments had no direct powers
traditional enemies
crossed the continent from Afghanistan
bureau in Hong Kong in 1985. He is also the Asia correspondent of In Point, one
Review by Karl Wilson Australian Financi.al Reuiew, the now dehnctNatioynl Times and the Sydney Morning Helali and was a director of several Fairfax subsidiary companies.
-
Historic Postcards of Hong Kong, with a¡r introduction by Ian Buruma, is
the man who lost a fortune
THERE was a joke doingthe rounds in
the'mythical creature'
47 years.
now on sale at the club.
Warwick
Deng
of the major French weekþ magazines. Sabatier joinedthe FCC atthattime and was asked by the French publishing house Lattes (part of the giant Hachette
group) to write a biography of Deng
Xiaoping. Though not a sinologist, a¡rd not even a Mandarin-speaker (he graduated in English from the Sorbonne), his more than 15 years of acquaintance with Chinese politics and society and numerous trips from Tibet to Heilongjiang enabled him to write a book aimed at a wider public as well as
at those for whom China is work or passion. Iz De:rnier Dragoz is as much a saga
of the last century in China as the story of Deng himself. The book had more or less been completed by early 1989, and
was to be published for the 40th anniversary of the PRC, in October that year. Then came Tiananmen! Sabatier
arrived in Peking on April 20, a few days after Hu Yaobang's death and stayed in the Chinese capital without intemrption (except a two-day round trip to Hong Kong to have his visa
renewed)
until the end of
Ju1y,
chronicling dayby dayin the columns of Liberation the momentous events of the Peking Spring. On the night of June 3rd-4th, he was one of the few reporters who stayed on the square until its evacuation by the
Patrick Sabatier "Deng doesn't really last students around 5am. His reports on Tiananmen were published as a special supplement of Liberation and sold more than 100,000 copies. This, and the subsequent coverage of the evolving situation in China, led him to add new chapters to his draft, and to complete the book only last June, one
year after Tiananmen.
I¿
Demi.er
Dragon reads like fiction, though it is as rigorously factual as possible, given the secretive nature of Chinese communist politics. It relies on a vast amount of published books and arlicles, both scholarly and journalistic, as well as French archives and personal interviews. Sabatier was one of the first reporters to visit Deng's
birthplace, Guarg,
in
Sichuan, in
1988.
I¿ Demier Dragon does not claim any sensational "revelations", coming as it did after the masterþ Deng of Sabatier's colleague and good friend, David Bonavia, published in Hong Kong in 1989. But it has been widely acclaimed in France variously as "a factual novel", "a masterþ historical
to-date and penetrating assessment of Deng's careet", and well received by the general public and sinologists. Sabatier describes a Deng who is
neither the Great Reformer nor the Butcher of Tianalmen, neither the antiMao nor the last Maoist, but a complex character, molded by the four revolutions he has been through. "One may argue", says Sabatier in his preface, "that Deng doesn't really exist. As his totemic animal, he is a composite
and largely mythical creature. His words and his acts express at any given moment the ever-changing balance between factions and opinions within the Communist Party, or rather within the tiny elite that runs it". This, he reminds us, "is nothing new. Power in China, as Father Huc remark-
ed in the mid-l9th century, is not as despotic as one may think. The Emperor is only the centre, and can remain
so only by embodying the
balance
between many forces and groups who singularly limit his freedom to act...", I-e Dernier Dragon, 423 þ., .Inttæ, Parß. Price: HK$284.
narrative" and "the most complete, upTHE CORRESPONDENT FEBRUARY 799127