Wendi Murdoch and the smack heard around the world

For much of the time when media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was being interrogated by a British parliamentary committee investigating the phone hacking scandal, his wife Wendi Deng Murdoch was the picture of solicitous concern.

Seated right behind Murdoch, Wendi watched the proceedings with grim interest, her body language conveying a bit of tension early on, when the questions directed at Murdoch and his son James were particularly sharp. Once, when the elderly Murdoch began pounding the table while making a forceful point, Wendi reached over and stroked his arm, evidently to calm him.

But when, towards the end of the testimony, a protestor in the audience approached Murdoch and smeared white foam on him, Wendi – reacting with admirable reflexes – leapt up and smacked the man, well before security  officials could intervene.

That smack, heard around the word, injected some drama to the sombre proceedings, instantly set off “Crouching Tiger” and “Tiger Wife” metaphors, and refocussed attention on the prizefighter quality in Wendi that had led her to become the ‘trophy wife’ of one of the world’s most powerful media barons.

The daughter of a state factory director in Guangzhou in southern China, Wendi had found her way to America and secured American citizenship on the strength of two marriage-breaking relationships that gave her the unfortunate tag of being a “gold digger” who preyed on older men.

After graduating from Yale, Wendi doubled back to Hong Kong and interned at Star TV, owned by News Corp, where – after gate-crashing a party – she caught Murdoch’s eye. She began serving as his translator on his trips to China, a market that had been frustrating him because Chinese leaders were wary of him since his September 1993 speech in which he thundered that advances in communications technology had “proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

From all accounts, Murdoch did not have China on his mind, but Chinese leaders nevertheless took it very personally: barely a month later, the private ownership of satellite dishes was banned in China, cutting off Star TV’s footprint in a lucrative market.

The intimate relationship between the powerful media baron in his 60s and his associate who was less than half his age was the subject of wild speculation, and evidently even caught the eye of Chinese leaders. In his book One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes that at one point , a Chinese official boasted to a News Corp executive that “we know what is going on between the two of them in the hotels.”

Wendi and Murdoch married in 1999, following his divorce from his second wife Anna after rancorous proceedings. It was believed then that Wendi would be the key to Murdoch’s hopes of cracking open his ‘Final Frontier’ - China’s closed media market.

Media commentators believed that if anybody could ‘deliver’ China to Murdoch, it would be Wendi. Star CEO Gary Davey once said that News Corp had in the past been overrun by “fixers and influence-brokers” promising riches in China but not delivering – but that Wendi was different. Apart from an understanding of Chinese culture and language she also had “really intense business nous, one of the missing pieces of the China puzzle,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 bioprofile of Wendi.

That dream was never fully realised. But as the freak, made-for-television moment overnight revealed, Murdoch’s consort battleship still sails closely alongside, defending his flanks – and swinging a right hook at anyone who gets too close to him with ill intent.