Murdoch takes one more step on long march into China

The long march by Rupert Murdoch into China's giant emerging media market continues with the signing of a partnership deal with a government-owned television channel.

Under the agreement with Guangdong Television Centre, Mr Murdoch's Star TV will be allowed to sell programmes to local Chinese stations. It follows two recent deals that enabled him to broadcast a Mandarin language cable channel to hotels and diplomatic compounds.

Under the new partnership, Phoenix TV, a part subsidiary of Star, will be in a joint venture with Guangdong to sell programmes and advertising. The programming will, initially, be in Chinese, but the deal paves the way for the marketing of such hit shows as The X Files, The Simpsons and 24.

The television advertising market in China is estimated to be worth more than £1.2bn but Phoenix, whose three news channels already reach 42 million homes, has experienced problems with local broadcasters replacing Phoenix advertising with their own.

The joint venture will stop this from happening. The Guangdong Broadcast Centre is a part of the Chinese government's state administration of radio, film and television, and it is in the interest of the government that the new venture is not plagued by broadcast piracy. Phoenix said it would "open the way to a major boost in Phoenix's income from advertising and the sale of programming".

Mr Murdoch has been energetically pursuing the Chinese connection ever since he acquired Star TV 10 years ago. There were serious initial problems when he declared that satellite television would prove "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes". After that statement, the Chinese government banned the private ownership of satellite dishes.

Subsequently Mr Murdoch has assiduously mollified the Chinese government with measures such as dropping the BBC's world news service from Star, selling the South China Morning Post to a businessman favoured by Beijing, and cancelling a deal for HarperCollins, a News Corp subsidiary, to publish the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong.

Mr Murdoch, 71, is said to have been helped in this fence mending by his Chinese-born third wife, Wendy Deng, 32.

The Chinese market was regarded as impenetrable before Mr Murdoch's offensive, and he is by far the biggest international media player in the country. Kingsley Wilson, a media analyst with Investec, said: "Time and again Murdoch finds a solution that others can't see."

The deal, the first such agreement between the Chinese media and a foreign broadcaster, was orchestrated by Mr Murdoch's son James.

While expanding in the Far East Mr Murdoch was also inching towards a deal to buy the US satellite network DirecTV from General Motors. He is said to harbour ambitions of turning DirecTV, which has 11 million subscribers, into a US version of BSkyB. Last year he appeared to have been beaten in the race to buy the group by rival satellite company Echostar. Then, after a long inquiry, regulators decided they would block any Echostar bid, citing lack of competition if two leading satellite firms merged.