BBC’s Carrie Gracie: ‘China is difficult – a giant piece of history rising’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/28/bbc-carrie-gracie-china-editor

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Back in 2013 the BBC journalist and presenter Carrie Gracie was faced with a dilemma. For 30 years she had mostly lived and worked in China, and was a fluent Mandarin speaker. But she had recently returned to the screen as a London-based BBC News channel presenter after chemotherapy for breast cancer. And she was the main breadwinner supporting two teenage children by her Chinese ex-husband, a rock drummer.

James Harding, the BBC director of news and current affairs, who had personal experience of her unique qualities after founding the Financial Times’s Shanghai bureau in the 1990s, asked her to return to Beijing. A new senior post was even to be created for her: China editor. “My decision to go back was a very difficult one,” she says. “I said no several times before I said yes. James made me go away and come back with a better answer.

“China is a very difficult story to cover effectively, and I feel frustrated I have never covered it effectively. It is difficult for all of us, it is a giant piece of history rising, and we don’t know what will happen, nobody knows, yet you have to make some educated guesses – report on it as it happens.

“I had been a bit frustrated as a presenter sitting there in that studio watching other people’s reporting. James is quite clever at getting people to do what he wants. Basically he conveyed the impression it was both urgent and important. Seeing as I did too, it was a meeting of minds.”

Gracie had won widespread recognition reporting on China even when she wasn’t living there with her White Horse Village series, screened mainly on Newsnight since 2006, which she made during visits from London. It illustrates over a decade the country’s often brutal urbanisation and break with the past through people’s lives in south-west China near Chongqing.

“It is very hard for people to do the close-up China work, about people, and the slightly longer perspective, the ‘first draft of history’ work,” she says. “And what we tend to get is coverage all of the same perspective, neither close enough nor distant enough. And I wanted to do a bit of both of those.”

Though Gracie’s roots are in the World Service, her brief is to get China more effectively on the main channels. But she remains a defender of the BBC News channel, which is under review.

“It gets slagged off a lot internally and externally, in some ways unfairly,” she says. “It has provided an enormously important gym for everyone to learn their skills and practise, try things out. So much of it, the great quality pieces on it, get lost. It doesn’t have a means of aggregating its best output.”

Gracie remains wracked by the dilemmas of a working parent. The family was evacuated by the BBC back to the UK in 1999 from China because Gracie’s then two-year-old daughter (now aiming for university) had leukaemia. She made the pragmatic decision to work as a London-based TV presenter because of fixed, shorter hours. Her first bout of cancer then struck in 2005.

She subsequently blotted her copybook in BBC terms, if not with viewers, in 2009 when she replied honestly to a politician’s question and revealed on air that her salary was £92,000.

“I can be blunt,” she says, without a trace of regret. (When told a photographer would be taking a portrait for this piece she emailed back five words: “I will brush my hair.”)

So her former husband, who speaks no English, agreed to live in Richmond while she spends at least half a year in China. She gave up the BBC-owned flat in Beijing because “I am on the road so much, a lot of China coverage should be done outside Beijing.”

It seems to have worked for viewers: Gracie was shortlisted for a Royal Television Society award earlier this month. She provided an informed Panorama report on President Xi Jingping’s power and use of a sensational anti-corruption drive to remove rivals. She explained China’s stock market collapse of last July with expertise backed by a first-class degree in PPE from Oxford, but she also found a former Manchester student now home in Shanghai to explain how he felt markets were rigged. And she visited an oppressed Muslim minority, the ​ Uighurs, on a tourist bus.

“I wanted to do less of the ‘hand in front of the lens’ coverage because we all know China is like that,” she says. “My view on pointing out how much we are under surveillance as reporters is to do it a bit sparingly. It can become a bit lazy.”

China’s political situation worries her greatly. “The level of oppression, Orwellian security is very serious,” she says. “I feel perhaps I need to ratchet up the coverage over some of the sombre truths. It is not about surveillance of us as reporters – that is never going to be life threatening.”

Gracie points to the Chinese lawyers who have been in prison since last summer, as well as the Hong Kong booksellers who disappeared last December.

She says China is one of the hardest places for journalists to operate. “In Beijing, at the embassy here, they try and put on pressure, it may be on the BBC here, the individual reporter.

“I think China has become more paranoid and more powerful since 1999. I don’t remember a British chancellor talking about a golden age of China in 1999. Lots of reporters are under surveillance, bugged, I don’t really want to talk about all of that. It might put certain people at risk. Any reporter should make that assumption, and keep their sources safe. The ethical questions of interviewing people are tricky.”

“It is still worth doing the things you can do. I like my White Horse Village pieces, you really learn meeting Chinese people. There were moments I thought I would not be allowed back. The Chinese state and minions are not all bad, there are some really intelligent, broad-minded people and at the beginning I got some significant backing.

“I was surprised by the way global markets reacted to July’s sudden fall in the stock market. The Chinese economy is so confoundedly complex, in the ways in which all the bits hang together and politics interfaces with economy. I don’t blame the global markets, it is impossible for anyone to understand.”

Gracie is currently taking long service leave until the summer to supervise her children’s A-level exams, while thinking up fresh series. “I am too old to spend all my time in China,” she says. “I find it a hard environment, very punishing, the pollution, congestion, travelling, intensity of surveillance, difficult ethical issues. I have to recharge my batteries, I’m not 32 any more. I should do slightly more longer form, slightly less crashing about on daily news.”

She still spends three hours a day reading coverage and keeping on top of developments in China. And despite the challenges of covering the country, there is little sign she’s losing her passion for its stories.

Curriculum vitae

Age 53

Education Edinburgh University; Oxford University PPE

Career 1985 Taught English and economics in China 1987 BBC World Service trainee producer 1991 BBC Beijing correspondent, covers handover of Hong Kong 1997-99 Returns to BBC News in various roles including presenter, News channel 2005-06 Begins White Horse Village TV series 2014 China editor 2016 Nominated for Royal Television Society specialist journalist award