As Media Deal in Taiwan Collapses, Political Fallout Lingers

HONG KONG â€" Today was the deadline for two liberal publications in Taiwan to be sold off to investors who favor stronger ties with mainland China, a deal that alarmed many Taiwanese suspicious of the current government’s warming ties with Beijing.

But the deal is apparently is dead, as my colleagues Neil Gough and Lin Yang reported. Mark Simon, a spokesman for the papers’ owner, Jimmy Lai of Next Media, said on Tuesday that the prospective buyers “pulled out.”

The reasons for the deal’s collapse remain somewhat of a mystery, and speculation is rife in Taiwan about why it fell apart. Some media outlets reported that Tsai Eng-meng, a pro-China Taiwan billionaire whose son was to buy the publications, became concerned that the purchase would lead to unwelcome antitrust scrutiny. Mr. Tsai’s son, Tsai Shao-chung, already controls a leading newspaper and several Web sites in Taiwan as president of the Want Want China Times group.

The deal, which involved the sale of the Taiwan editions of Apple Daily and Next magazine, had in fact already drawn the attention of antitrust regulators in Taiwan. And more worrying for pro-Beijing elements, it helped energize protests in January against Taiwan’s president Ma Ying-jeou, who has made closer ties with mainland China a hallmark of his stewardship. Among the demands of the protesters was that the government block the Next Media deal.

The opposition Democratic Progressive Party has also been pushing for new legislation to prevent media monopolies, and their leaders signaled that their fight is not likely to end with the collapse of the deal.

Government media regulators, who had been looking at the transaction for months, “moved very slow on this deal because the public opposition to this is strong,” said Hsieh Kuai-Hueh, a spokewoman for the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. “The DPP will continue to push for a law that bans media monopolies in Taiwan.”

But some see the collapse of the deal as only a partial loss for Beijing, given that public opposition had made the sale of Mr. Lai’s Taiwan publications politically problematic for the island’s governing, China-friendly Kuomintang party.

“Beijing didn’t want a cashed up Jimmy Lai,’’ said Mark Simon, a spokesperson for Mr. Lai’s Next Media group in Hong Kong. He suggested that perhaps “mainland China sent a message out that this is not a necessary fight to have.”

And the furor over the Next Media deal is emblematic of wider concerns about the media’s ability to play a watchdog role in Asia. Radio Television Hong Kong has been the target of criticism over perceived censorship by the outlet’s broadcasting director, Roy Tang Yun-kwong, who was appointed to his post by the government. And accusations of political interference come in many forms: in Malaysia, Clare Rewcastle Brown, the founder of Radio Free Malaysia, told The Wall Street Journal that the Malaysian government was behind cyberattacks that disrupted the Monday debut of her show.