Sinica live in London, with legendary BBC presenter and China editor Carrie Gracie

Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Carrier Gracie.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to this special live recording of the Sinica Podcast coming to you from Aviation House in London. Hello, London.

Audience: Woo! (cheers)

Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, and we are, of course, part of The China Project, formerly The China Project. This is our first event under the new name. All right. Well, our name has changed, but we still offer you a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. And we still report on China with neither fear nor favor. I am Kaiser Kuo. And joining me, of course, is my dear comrade, Jīn Yùmǐ 金玉米, sometimes known as Jeremy Goldkorn, who is delighted to actually finally be in a place where, at last his funny South African accent is not mistaken for British.

Jeremy, who keeps trying to persuade me to get on an airplane for Martha’s Vineyard for some reason, I don’t know… We’ve been doing this together for so long. Greet the people, Jeremy, would you?

Jeremy Goldkorn: Hello people. Good evening. Thank you so much for coming. It’s great to be at last in London.

Kaiser: Would you do us the honor of introducing our fabulous guest for the evening?

Jeremy: Yes. Carrie Gracie is obviously familiar to all of you tonight, as well as to our audience around the world who listened to the podcast as a legendary BBC presenter who spent much of her career focused on China. She’s also very well known as the woman who spearheaded the long overdue efforts to secure equal pay for women at the BBC, and consequently across the world of work in the U.K. Carrie Gracie, welcome to Sinica.

Carrie Gracie: Thank you both so much. I know it’s customary at this point to say that I’m privileged to be here. And, of course, I am, but I’m also going to give a little disclaimer, which is that I don’t know much about China, and these two dodgy provincial party secretaries twisted my arm on here. And so, any nonsense that I talk, you can hold them responsible.

Kaiser: Okay. Our fault.

Jeremy: Fair enough.

Kaiser: Carrie, it’s actually funny that’s how most people know you as this famous presenter and all this, but I actually first got to know you because first of all, you were a very good friend of my dear sister, Mimi, who lives in Oxfordshire, and who I will be seeing tomorrow. She wasn’t able to come tonight. It’s too late for her. She goes to bed early, and who, I guess you just had tea with her this afternoon.

Carrie: I did, which was lovely, so at least I’ve seen her before you.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, you did. But I also know you because your ex-husband, and actually your son by that man is here tonight, which is… It’s remarkable. And he’s the spitting image. It’s just crazy.

Carrie: Oh, come on. There’s some Gracie genes in there somewhere.

Kaiser: There’s some Gracie genes there for sure, for sure. But the Cheng Jins, the Cheng Jins, get it? Cheng Jin, he was actually my band’s manager in the early 1990s. I worked very closely with him. He was a fantastic drummer himself. I think he still plays drums.

Carrie: He does.

Kaiser: He does. He does. But he was my manager in Tang Dynasty way back in the early ‘90s. So, yeah, that dates me a bit. But hey, this is just crazy how small the world is. Carrie, you have had just a remarkable career as a journalist in China spanning three decades and a huge body of work. So, it’s really hard to identify just a few works that we can sort of pull out and focus on for tonight. But for me, there’s two things that I think really stand out that I want to shine a light on. One of them is a podcast series that you did called Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel. And the other is a film series that you did, focused on a single village in southwest China called 10 Years in White Horse Village. It’s a village that was then consigned to oblivion in China’s pitiless and inexorable process of urbanization. I want to focus on these two because I think the first, besides being just kind of a juicy and salubrious, kind of murder mystery thing is wonderful. Salacious, not salubrious, salacious, it-

Jeremy: Insalubrious.

Kaiser: Insalubrious, very insalubrious.

Carrie: The Chinese foreign industry described it as tabloid. And I said to them when they were giving me a hard time about it, I said, “You know, you need to try tabloid more often. In fact, I think Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 could try tabloid because the governance of China is not being recommended for book groups in the U.K. I need you to know.”

Kaiser: Wait, I thought Mark Zuckerberg had it in his book library.

Carrie:Yeah, but that was for another reason.

Kaiser: I mean, so tabloid. Absolutely, tabloid is the way to soft power.

Carrie: My view entirely, Kaiser. We agree.

Kaiser: Absolutely, yeah. I want to focus on these two things because one of them is focused so much on elite politics and the other on ordinary people, in a kind of almost Peter Hesslerian kind of way. And it takes place over 10 years, so it has a kind of longitudinal aspect.

Carrie: Yeah. So, one of my friends, another BBC presenter who shall remain nameless, whenever I was going off to film in White Horse Village from London because I did a lot of London presenting as well. And I used to get up out of the studio and fly a few thousand miles, and then a few hundred more miles and end up in a field in southwest China, and then spend a bit of time in there, and then have to go back to London and put the presenter clothes on and get the hair brushed again. And he said, “Oh, she’s been off flogging a dead horse village in southwest China.” And this went on for 10 whole years. So, some of the kids who were born during the time that I was filming there are grown up now.

Kaiser: Yang Yang.

Carrie: Exactly Yang Yang and Pei Pei, we got them on film from early childhood to now Pei Pei’s 18. I mean, I haven’t been back to film there for a few years, but someday l I’ll get my Wellington boots on and get down to that village again. Flog that dead horse again.

Kaiser: Yeah, no, please flog away. Yeah, so I think that’s the contrast between these two things. But let’s start with Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel. I mean, for somebody like Yumi, who just loves a good true-crime podcast and is obsessed with Chinese politics, it really hits the sweet spot. So, these events took place 10 years ago now, but were really, I think the really important, well, not only because of the anniversary of the events, but also because we’re on the cusp of yet another major party Congress. One that may be as consequential as the one that took place in 2012, the very memorable 18th Party Congress. Perhaps maybe Carrie, you could start off with just kind of a quick overview of what that podcast covered, and introduce those of us who didn’t live through those events to the kind of dramatist personae about who these characters were.

Carrie: So, some people in this room, in fact, are young enough not to have lived through all those events of 2000 to 2011, ‘12 as adults I guess. What you need to remember about that period, so just to set the bigger stage before we look closely at the characters is it was an incredible decade for China in terms of the WTO entry, which put the Chinese economy on steroids. And the China that we all know today was, in a way, grown in that period. So, huge power and influence and wealth. China went from being a country where everyone was poor together and basically a farmer to being a country with one of the most unequal wealth divides in the world. At the same time, on the international stage, the West was busy crushing its own soft power with problems in Iraq, in Afghanistan. 9/11 had happened. The West got distracted, obviously massively from China by the war on terror, which went on all of that decade.

Then you had the Beijing Olympics and then you had the Arab Spring. And the Arab Spring was another hugely important zeitgeist moment for China, I feel, because it was the moment when China looked out and saw, my gosh, that is not what we want, a public who feel internet enabled to call out inequality and to call out corruption and get on the street and do something about it. We are stopping this. So, there was a domestic dimension to the enormous inequality and downright depravity, and savagery, and corruption, and despair of much of the Chinese public. I mean, Kaiser loved that decade because he had a good time. But I spent a lot of that decade when I was in China, as we all know, with my Wellington boots on in a field.

And I can tell you that everybody in rural China was not having a great time in that decade. I mean, I shouldn’t generalize, probably not everybody in China was having a bad time in rural China, but a lot of people were having a terrible time. And because all the previous decencies that at least some Chinese Communist Party officials had held to were being thrown up and their land was going for development, and their homes were going for development, and they were often at the very raw end of that development urbanization bargain. Where am I going to put my coffin? Whereas, we just seen the Queen’s lying-in-state. Every Chinese farmer expects a lying-in-state in their own courtyard. Where is that gonna happen if you’re living 10 floors up in a shoddy urban apartment where the walls are cracking when the next earthquake in Sichuan happens.

So, it was a decade of enormous division, enormous uncertainty, enormous turbulence in China, where the epic scale of things was crushing the predictability or control that people felt about their lives. Into this, you then have that crucial decade, once in a decade moment of a transfer of power, which as we all know in China, is a very tense moment. We got another one coming.

Kaiser: Except there won’t be a transfer.

Carrie: No. Well, exactly. Going back to, there really is no comparison in other ways as well because, at that point in the run up to the 18th Party Congress, those elite families at the top of Chinese politics, if you think about the way they present a Communist Party Congress with that utterly, it’s to bore you into submission with the tedium of all those dark suits, red ties, the same haircut, the same dye hair, and the monotony and hypnotizing inexorable boredom of it. And yet, and yet, take all of that off and what you have, remove that veil, and what you have is a squid game or a hunger game. I don’t know what your imagery is for a savage unpredictable winner takes all, loser loses all, life threatening, crisis of unsafety. And you’ve gotta remember all of these people were traumatized in childhood by the cultural revolution, lived in a very unsafe childhood. And here it comes back again at this moment, and you’ve got a very, very unpredictable and dangerous moment with all these things flying around. Then, I’ve talked enough, but then we get to the characters. Why don’t you two describe the character? I mean, the characters are incredible.

Kaiser: Overview of the main characters: Bó Xīlái 薄熙来, Gǔ Kāilái 谷开来, and Neil Heywood. Yeah. Well, why don’t we throw them out name by name and you can give us a sort of…

Carrie: Okay.

Kaiser: Let’s start with the person at the very, very center of this Bo Xilai, who was the Chongqing Party secretary, and before that had been the mayor of the city of Dalian.

Carrie: Yeah. So, he was, to many people, China’s Kennedy. I mean, I’m not sure that that parallel works terribly well, although we could do another podcast on that. But he was tall, handsome, smiley, charming, endlessly charismatic, an absolute monster.

Kaiser: Very Kennedy. Yeah.

Carrie: And yet, a compelling monster. I mean, if you want to make the next Netflix series, and you are brave enough to make it about Chinese elite politics, you definitely need Bo Xilai in there. And so, he-

Kaiser: Call it Hungry Squid Game.

Carrie: Yeah. He started off like Xi Jinping. I mean the parallels are really interesting as well as the differences. They are both of a generation of an elite princeling background. And he started off, we can’t go into his entire childhood, but anyway, tough, difficult youth. His father was jailed. In fact, Bo Xilai is probably now sitting in exactly the same jail. I’ve given away the ending, but he’s sitting in exactly the same jail as his dad was in during and after the cultural revolution. And he then was… The dad was rehabilitated, the dad was a immense figure, one of the 80 mortals alongside Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, etc. And he then, Bo Xilai, got posted to Dalian as mayor, and he did all these incredible things. He was totally theatrical in a way that Chinese politicians are not supposed to be. He didn’t believe in being boring and kind of sanctimonious and predictable.

He believed in having fashion shows, having sex with lots of the people who were in the fashion shows. He believed in chucking his enemies off trains or getting somebody else to do it. I mean, the climate in Dalian under Bo Xilai was intense. And then he got posted down to Chongqing. I mean, we don’t have time to go into his whole career, but that was a crucial moment. His dad died at a vital moment where he might have hoped to shunt higher and not go to Chongqing. Got posted down to Chongqing, and instead of saying, “All right, I’ll sit in this quiet backwater.” I mean, Chongqing is not exactly a backwater anyway. It’s gangster paradise at that point. But anyway, that’s another story. And instead of saying, “I’ll sit quietly and sulk in Chongqing, he said, “Oh, I’m in Chongqing, so this is where the story is. Let’s make Chongqing where all the action is”. So, it was like, “We’re all going to get into the stadium and sing red songs together”.

Everything he did, we’re going to beat corruption. If you think about the Xi Jinping playbook now, it was Bo Xilai who wrote it. He started writing it in Dalian, and then he finished writing it in Chongqing. But we’re not even at the murders yet. I need to shut up. We need to move on to the next character.

Jeremy: What about his wife?

Kaiser: Let’s get to his wife and the man that she allegedly murdered, Neil Heywood.

Carrie: Right. Yeah. In this story, there are some known knowns, and we don’t even know if they’re true. Then there are known unknowns, and then there are the unknown unknowns. And there’s loads of the known unknowns, and there’s loads of the unknown unknowns, and then there’s a few known knowns, but you can doubt a lot of them. What we do know, one of the absolute truest facts as I sit here now is that a man very sadly died in a hotel room. I’ve been to that hotel. It’s a very sinister place. He never should have gone there. Next time you’re thinking about going to a hotel on a hilltop outside Chongqing in November on your own to blackmail the wife of a senior Chinese leader just before a Communist Party Congress, do call me and ask me if it’s a good idea, because I’ve been to that hotel, and I’m going to give you some very good travel advice.

Kaiser: See, Jeremy, how many times have I told you to stop doing that? He keeps doing, he’s blackmailing people and he keeps wanting to meet them at these hilltop resorts-

Carrie: Poor Neil Heywood, who is an interesting character in his own right. There are some very significant unknowns about his story. He met the bull couple. This is a power, the Kennedy power couple, and Gu Kailai, an incredible woman in her own right, she was also from this princeling background. Very beautiful, very charming, very talented. She ironically spent some of the cultural revolution as a butcher outside her parents’ prison.

Kaiser: Good practice.

Carrie: And then she trained as a lawyer. Again, we don’t have time to go through the full CV, but in Dalian, things in that power couple’s marriage started to go wrong, and her life went off the rails in certain ways. But obviously, it was the moment coming back to what I was saying earlier about the wealth and the income disparity and the savagery and depravity of the Chinese Communist Party. There was plenty of that going on. She had no shortage of lovers herself. She also wanted her son, Bó Guāguā 薄瓜瓜, to have the British gentleman’s education, Harrow, Oxford, then possibly Harvard, which is obviously his career path. So, she needed to pay for that somehow, which on the salary of a mayor of Dalian, governor of Liaoning, Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, you are not paying for Harrow School. Sorry to disappoint you if that’s your career path.

The money had to come from somewhere. So, Neil Heywood ended up being their white glove. The guy who cleaned up a lot of their money on the way through, bought a lot of… He used to call it his bunga bunga fund that he had. I heard some incredible stories while making this podcast, some of which I couldn’t actually put on air because they were dangerous for people.

Carrie: But really astonishing stories about the level of entitlement and outrageous behavior. Anyway, Gu Kailai ends up in Bournemouth with Guagua in the early part of the decade, and they’re trying to buy a hot air balloon, and this and that is going on. But to cut this long story short, back in Chongqing, she is getting paranoid and depressed. She believes she’s being poisoned, which is really interesting. A lot of the Chinese elite think they’re being poisoned or at risk of being poisoned. She was one of them. And anyway, to get to the point, finally, she decided she needed get rid of Neil Heywood, or this is what we are told by Xi Jinping, or whoever is running the propaganda now, and whoever managed, stage-managed the trial, that she is the one who murdered, by her own hand, which seems to be a little improbable when you think about it, that she poisoned.

The poisons coming back again, that she poisoned Neil Heywood in Lucky Holiday Hotel. That is the story that was told at her trial. So, she’s now serving… She got a suspended death sentence because there were mitigations, her son was threatened, she was mentally deranged, etc. And so, she got commuted and she’s serving a life sentence.

Kaiser: All of that happened because of the fourth character, and final character that will introduce here, who really will advance the story, Wáng Lìjūn 王立军.

Carrie: Wang Lijun is the police chief who followed this power couple from Dalian to Chongqing and liked to have… He also was an absolutely theatrical crowd pulling TV pantomime villain. He had his own TV series. He called himself the Iron Blood Police Spirit. I was saying to Kaiser and Jeremy earlier that one of the stories that one of my interviews told me, an interviewee he had been arrested by Wang Lijun in Chongqing coming down the steps of an aircraft late at night. And Wang Lijun had come up with his normal massive flanks of police underlings, plus huge numbers of TV cameras, the lights and everything. Wang Lijun was wearing his trench coat. And he said he struck the pose for the cameras, and he said to the guy who was resting, he said, “We meet again.”

That gives you a sense of the… Everything was done for the image. And yet, he had a moment where things started to fall apart for him, which was basically due to the people who wanted to take down Bo, who you’ve gotta wonder who benefited from that. Well, ask yourself, who benefited? Obviously, Xi Jinping is one of those who clearly benefited. We don’t know exactly what went on with the Discipline Inspection Committee who rocked up in Chongqing, three months after the murder. I’ve missed a step.

Kaiser: Yeah.

Carrie: Wang Lijun…

Kaiser: Confronted him. Yeah.

Carrie: He did. What happened was that Wang Lijun was being lent on by the National Discipline Inspection Committee, and he basically went to Bo Xilai, and he said, “You need to protect me because I’m being lent on here.” Bo Xilai always was a reckless person and an overconfident person, and a person who underestimated his enemies. And Bo Xilai punched Wang Lijun. He literally punched him. Or again, this is one of the facts that came out in the trials. Is it a fact? Is it a fiction? We don’t know. But anyway, this was the story that Wang Lijun told. He got punched, and he knew at that point, the reason that he got punched was because he told Bo Xilai that there was forensic evidence, and wiretap evidence of Gu Kailai, the wife having killed Neil Heywood. And it was at that point, when they’ve had that confrontation that Wang Lijun knew that his life was in danger, this is the story that he told, I have to keep saying, I think his life probably was in danger. I’m not questioning that, but he then was under surveillance, was demoted, and he fled.

Where did he flee to? He fled 200 miles, disguised, or was he not? There seems to be some question about this, but the story for a long time was that he was disguised as an old lady and fled. I mean, the iron blood police spirit disguised as an old lady. He fled to Chengdu, 200 miles away, and he presented himself at the American consulate, banging on the door, claiming asylum. I mean, you couldn’t make that up, could you? That is definitely fact stranger than fiction.

Kaiser: I actually asked somebody who had been there at the Chengdu Consulate, and they told me that at least when he arrived, he was no longer in drag.

Jeremy: That was when he arrived, so we can-

Kaiser: That was when he arrived. He might have been-

Carrie: He knows they’ll have a camera on the door. He needs to look like the police spirit.

Kaiser: I’m gonna believe that he was in women’s clothing.

Carrie: So am I.

Jeremy: Me too.

Kaiser: Go on believing that to my grave.

Jeremy: Were there other incidents where the outside world can see Chinese elite power struggles unfold?

Carrie, these dramatic events that you cover, I love saying the name of that podcast series, Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel. That’s the only time I can think of since maybe since the end of the cultural revolution when we got a peek into the reality of the senior leaders of the Communist Party. Or have there been other times that the veil has been lifted in this way?

Carrie: Not that I can think of in the same way. I mean, we got a peek in 1989, didn’t we? It’s when you get fractures in the elite that you get to glimpse inside because they’re all briefing against each other. In 1989, we got a little glimpse inside, but I would say, not since that Bo Xilai episode have we had such an extraordinary, since that… I call it the lid of the black box was lifted and we saw inside. Since then, we’ve only heard the occasional clap of thunder, but it’s very distant. You get this talk of the occasional matter in the official Chinese media about a conspiracy or a coup attempt between these figures, the tigers as Xi Jinping called them. Because obviously, Bo Xilai was the big tiger, a massive opportunity for Xi Jinping to take down Bo Xilai at this point. And then he used that thread to rattle that big rope to round up all these other tigers, of which there are now a considerable number.

Kaiser: Yeah. Quite a number. I’m curious, first of all, this was taking place five years after the events. You started to work on this I guess at the end of 2016 and into 2017.

Carrie: Yeah. We did the reporting for this, autumn 2016, and then we put it on air, 2017. And we faced a significant level of intimidation…

Kaiser: Yeah. I was going to ask about that. Why were they still so scared about this five-year-old story that doesn’t even maybe reflect too badly on the current leadership?

Carrie: I mean, as a long-time foreign correspondent in China, I can tell you, Kaiser, that Xi Jinping doesn’t want you to tell any story that he didn’t write the script for himself. That was increasingly the tenor of the times. I had got the black spot a year earlier when Xi Jinping was coming to London, and I did a Panorama doc about the life in times of Xi Jinping. They really were furious about that even before they’d seen it. And they said… They were really in a panic, all the Chinese foreign ministry officials and all the embassy people in London were in a terrible panic about it. And I kept saying to them, “I wish I’d got the scoops in that doc.” But it is a very fair up and down straightforward portrait of Xi Jinping. You don’t need to be afraid that I’ve got some massive scoop that I don’t know about. I mean, obviously I’m ashamed to say this, it would’ve been great if I had, but that record has been so sanitized, so sanitized, it is so terrifying to anyone to speak about the career of Xi Jinping in anything other than hagiographic terms that…

I still stand by that doc. I think it’s a good portrait of Xi Jinping, and very fair one, but it wasn’t something that they should be scared about, but they went back and forth. Unfortunately, the BBC headquarters is right across the road from the Chinese embassy on Portland Place, so there was a lot of shuttling to and fro. A lot of calling in and summoning. And they were calling Downing Street and saying, “Put the dogs on the BBC and get this Carrie Gracie in line. And this was going to be serious consequence.” All of the usual language. But anyway, so that… Whoever it was had my number already from that, which was late 2015. So, when it came to 2016, 2017, and we were about to put on air Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, to answer Kaiser’s question about what was sensitive about it, my first answer is accurate that Xi Jinping does not want any correspondent, domestic or foreign, to speak from a script that he did not write. So, national security is everything that Xi Jinping obviously says it is, and that includes the message internally and externally. That’s point one. And then-

Kaiser: So, when Xi says jiǎng hǎo zhōngguó gùshì (讲好中国故事), what he means is jiǎng hǎo wǒ de zhōngguó gùshì (讲好我的中国故事).

Carrie: Yeah, that’s definitely. Well, of course, you know that. Then the second thing was, something that I didn’t know, I mentioned earlier the unknown unknowns, what I didn’t know when we were reporting the story, I mean, various people had said to me, “You’re treading on slightly dangerous territory to this story, aren’t you?” I was thinking, well, we’re going to do it anyway because we’d never get to talk effectively about elite politics in China. And this is just the most amazing story. When I have FOMO about something, and there has really only been two stories over the last kind of 30-odd years that I’ve had FOMO about, after them, Bo Xilai’s story was one of them. And the other one was COVID. I really wished I’d been in China at the start of COVID because that was an incredible story, obviously very problematic story, but I wanted to be there, and wasn’t. With the Bo Xilai one, I was like, well, so what that it happened five years ago? I’m still going to do it because it’s the most instructive primer on what really goes on, the winner takes all, the loser loses everything, and all the other aspects of Chinese elite politics that you can tell through this incredible story of sex and drugs and violence and terror and elite, and the incredible cunning.

Xi Jinping, you look at him, and there’s a whole Winnie the Pooh meme about he’s dumpy and a bit stale, and a bit stayed, and a bit slow, and etc. I mean, he looks like George Smiley, right? In in Tinker Tailor’s Soldier Spy, and he’s a John le Carré character, but he’s a John le Carré character and he’s cunning as well. That is a front. He is a super cunning guy.

Kaiser: He’s a street fighter. Yeah, no, he’s absolutely.

Carrie: I also wanted to tell about that story that that’s the start of the Xi Jinping era. That is who Xi Jinping is. But coming back to the question of the reporting of it, we were down in Chongqing, and we were surveilled to within an inch of our lives. It was incredible, the level of surveillance there. Dalian was not too bad, it was predictable, but Chongqing was just a level beyond what I could… I mean, I was slightly like, “Why are you guys so uptight about this?” I never knew at the time why they were so uptight about it. And then a few months later, it became clear to me because the serving communist party secretary of Chongqing was about to be taken down, who also was somebody who had designs on the top job or was being rumored for a successor to Xi, in the top job, Sūn Zhèngcái 孙政才. They were about to take him down. So, at the time when me and two producers with radio mics were haring about Chongqing on motorbikes, trying to get away from our surveillance team and beat this impossible game, they were playing that own complex elite politics game that I didn’t know. So, I didn’t know that I was actually venturing into a real-time game, at the same time as I was trying to report a game of five years earlier.

Kaiser: So, you think they thought that you were onto the Sun Zhengcai take down somehow?

Carrie: They probably thought I was too stupid, which obviously would’ve been correct, but they couldn’t take a chance on that. It’s like, you can’t have the BBC’s China editor, it’s like you can’t put up with that if you are of Chongqing, right? These are dangerous people, you need to run them out of town.

Jeremy: Listening to the Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, I have to say that again, in preparation for this podcast, one of the things that stood out to me was how different today’s China is from the China of Neil Heywood and our earlier days in China, I mean, from the mid-1990s until 2008 at least, it was a very, very open time. And any foreign schmo…

Kaiser: Like you.

Jeremy: Like me, stood a chance of meeting very powerful and connected people in China.

Kaiser: Like me.

Jeremy: Yeah. So, hence this podcast. Neil Heywood had wormed his way into becoming the conciliary really.

Carrie: Sorry to interrupt you, Jeremy, but we haven’t mentioned the spy dimension. I mean, you saying, I mean, what do you think about this, Jeremy? You said he wormed his way in. I mean, it is still a very odd circumstance that somebody who wears kind of cricket whites in summer and tweeds in winter, what is he doing in Dalian, and what is he doing there?

Jeremy: He’s just a foreign schmo. I mean…

Carrie: He’s not. Yeah, he is a foreign-

Jeremy: I mean, I don’t know. I met his wife. He was a foreign schmo.

Kaiser: Didn’t he have like a 007 on his license plate and all this stuff.

Carrie: Well…

Kaiser: It’s like his little-

Carrie: Yeah, he did. He exactly did. I think he was a bit of a scarlet pimpernel. He was posing as a schmo while being something, Winnie the Pooh, dumpy. He was doing his thing, but obvious it went wrong.

Jeremy: It went very wrong. But do you think the fact that he had achieved, like he had wormed his way into the Bo family, do you think that also contributed to the growing suspicion and sometimes outright hostility that Xi Jinping’s government seems to have for foreigners?

Carrie: I think that Xi Jinping wanted to clean them all up, and this is one aspect of cleaning up the family mafia. They were all, I mean, I said it already, but it was just staggering the level of amorality, savage amorality and unacceptable, shockingly unacceptable inhumane and civilized behavior at the top of the party. And obviously, Xi Jinping had lived through that as a youngster. And he had plenty of opportunity, just like Bo Xilai did, to watch it all. And we do not know whether he performed some of it in himself. As I was saying, his record is entirely sanitized because the winner does tell all, the winner tells this, history is in the command of the winner. And so, we don’t know what his past looked like. I mean, there’s been the occasion muttering about it, this occasional mutters is about money attached to his family and so on.

As well as good reporting around that. But I don’t particularly think there’s a Neil Heywood angle to Xi Jinping. I think Xi Jinping had all kinds of reasons for wanting to remind the Chinese Communist Party of China what was true north. That was something that was a top urgent duty for anyone who was going to lead China into the current decade. Coming onto Xi Jinping properly, he has done, if were here, he would say, “And yes, haven’t I done a good job of it?” And I think most people, however horrified they are, perhaps by some aspects of Xi Jinping’s decade, count myself included, at another level, he has been audacious, bold. He has taken on those tigers, and it is no mean feat to take them on. And a bit like I have, despite the fact that Bo Xilai is a monster, I have got a lot of respect for the way Bo Xilai went down fighting, utterly defiant in his trial.

Kaiser: This is like Jiāngqīng 江青.

Carrie: Exactly.

Kaiser: He had this day in court in a weird way. He was able to sort of…

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a bit like that Shakespeare line, nothing in his life became the leaving of it. He was an utterly Shakespearean villain, and then the tragedy of the Shakespearean villain. Coming back to Xi, he needed to clean all that up, and it was no mean feat.

Kaiser: What do you think it did, coming into power in 2012 in the midst of this, when at least in the kind of quasi-official telling, if we take some of these murmurings that have been allowed to persist and haven’t been totally sanitized or squashed, if we take this all to… We come away thinking they had the knives out for him. It wasn’t just Bo Xilai. It was Zhōu Yǒngkāng 周永康, who had the whole security portfolio under him as a sitting standing committee member.

Carrie: Well, and it was two vice chairs.

Kaiser: Two vice chairs of the… Yeah. So, Guō Bóxióng 郭伯雄 and Xú Cáihòu 徐才厚, and they tied it to Lìng Jìhuà 令计划. There’s all these people, these tigers, as you say, who were taken down. What does this do to the character of Xi’s leadership in his initial years in power? How does this shape him as a political leader?

Carrie: I think it’s the game of, if you’re running that system, uneasy lies the head who wears the crown. It is a winner takes all world, as I’ve now said for the third time, but the winner is always endangered because you’ve given everyone else a massive stake in taking you down. Because if you lose in that world, you lose everything. And therefore, the people who are at risk of losing, it’s not like they’re going to go off to some comfortable retirement somewhere. They’re going to end up in jail or worse. Well, not worse, because the Chinese Communist Party does not tend to execute senior Chinese communists. They draw the line there currently. But you are going to end up in jail. So, there’s an enormous motive for everybody to win in that savage struggle. You can’t be Her Majesty, His Majesty’s loyal opposition. That’s just not a thing, obviously. So, it made it a permanent… He’s on a wartime footing, and he still is.

Jeremy: What’s your read on Xi’s current hold on power? You say he’s a war time foot footing. Because I’m operating on the assumption that his grasp on power is very close to absolute right now. But I keep on hearing from exiled dissidents, exiled Chinese journalists, some business people, and even the Wall Street Journal, that there are challenges within the party with Xi’s dominance. What do you make of all of this?

Carrie: Despite having spent quite a long time during this podcast speculating about things that we can’t know for sure, I’m going to say I don’t like speculating about things I don’t know for sure. I tend to agree with you. I have no good reason to doubt that Xi Jinping is firmly in control at the moment. I think he has an incredible array of weaponry now. I mean, an armory that Chairman Mao would look at and envy. He is listening, or he wants every Chinese citizen, and certainly every Chinese Communist Party official to feel that their every phone conversation from when they wake up in the morning to when they go to bed at night is overheard by Xi Jinping, or the Xi Jinping collective, the group of people known as Xi Jinping. Yeah. So, I think it’s very hard. Wiretapping, eavesdropping on each other was the game of that Bo Xilai moment, but no longer, he holds all those cards. So, the surveillance, the PLA, everything.

I mean, we could go through this endlessly, and I’m not following it closely at the moment. So, I am the least equipped person on this panel, and probably in this room, and certainly in your listenership more generally to comment authoritatively on this. But I used to say, when people in the BBC tried to get me to write speculative pieces when I was trying to editor about who’s up, who’s down, who’s blah, blah, blah, I was going, “No, I am not going to do that,” because I don’t know. When I see them in court, when I see something in the People’s Daily, which makes it clear, which direction, is this person going up or is this person going down? Then I will start to talk about them. But until that point, I am not going to waste my breath and your time speculating.

Kaiser: Well, we’re going to be doing a lot of shows that are focused on the political ups and downs in the coming month with the-

Carrie: Can I interrupt again, though, Kaiser?

Kaiser: Absolutely.

Carrie: I would just add that I do think it’s like that Swedish waterfall which freezes in the winter, and then there comes a day in spring when all the little furry animals have been crossing back and forth across the top of the waterfall, feeling this is a nice comfortable road for them to travel on. But the sun has begun to shine. And it’s going to come a day when the waterfall crashes down and all the little furry animals are going to plummet into the abyss. And anyone who thinks that unpredictable black swan events are not possible in elite Chinese politics should go back and listen to Murder in Lucky Holiday Hotel, and they will remind themselves that very, very significant things happen to Chinese leaders like that. Because it’s a hypnotizing, inexorable, invincible machine, as we all know, we all get hypnotized into thinking nothing dramatic is going to happen here. And as I said, I’m not going to speculate about who it’s going to happen to or when it’s going to happen, whatever. But you can be sure this is the permanent purge culture. It will happen to somebody.

Somebody will be up, somebody will be down, somebody will be singing qǐlái, qǐlái (起来, 起来)one moment, and they’ll be dragged off in chains the next. Who knows? But it’s not going to be Xi Jinping one day. I don’t know.

Kaiser: I very much share your sort of theory of the way that elite politics in China operates, that it is really careening from one black swan reaction to another. There is no hundred-year marathon plan, believe me. Or at least there isn’t ever one that lasts very long. I mentioned, let’s move away from this crazy realm of elite politics.

Carrie: Can I… Sorry, I’d much rather talk about Bo Xilai than I would talk about anything else that I might have to say. And I just want to say one last thing about reporting that story, which taught me a few things.

Kaiser: Okay, great.

Carrie: Which are not like in the way that the story is normally talked about, but which I experienced just from doing that shoe-level reporting in Dalian and in Chongqing, and towards loads of people who, not the primary players because the primary players are all either dead or they’re in jail, or they’re too terrified to speak. But the secondary and tertiary players in that drama, I spoke to a few, and the few things I learned are as follows. Bo Xilai and many other Chinese leaders are just unbelievably superstitious. I just find that so interesting. I’m just going to do these as bullet points because I’m rambling. The second thing that I would like to say about their world is how dead soul they are when you get up close. I don’t know if they are dead soul ever since the cultural revolution or if it’s being right inside that Chinese elite political machine that’s done it to them. But that world is, you would not believe how dehumanized they all are, how emotionally, not just ethically numb they are, but how deeply emotionally numbed they are.

You start feeling really sad for them, at the same time is having to remind yourself, pinch yourself, these are monsters, but you feel sad for them at the same time. What else did I want to say? I thought I had a whole ream of things that I learned. What did I learn? I learned that that it’s very sad for the women. So, Gu Kailai, the kind of red apricot image of the palace courtesan or whoever who is… She wanted to be in that marriage. And then, he basically left that marriage, and she started to drift emotionally and ethically, so she became corrupt. The corrupting effect of the money, the corrupting effect of the promiscuity, and the degree to which she was addicted to prescription drugs, alcohol, casual sex with people who were basically her underlings. It was a really sad picture. I mean, and just the comic elements as well, I mean, just the comedy of the whole world, at the same time as the tragedy.

It was an extraordinary world. I mean, the bunga bunga, the trench coat, buying the hot air balloon on the pier at Bournemouth, I mean, it’s so weird. Anyway, I’ll stop talking about that.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, again, that serves a very good segue to the stark contrast that I want to draw with the other work that I want to focus on, which is White Horse Village, a film series that you did over the course of 10 years. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, we don’t need to-

Carrie: So, how long do we have? Because I said there’s nothing I like talking about more than Bo Xilai. So, the only other thing that I really, really like talking about is White Horse Village, and that, it took me 10 years to film it, so it’s going to take me about 10 years to explain it.

Kaiser: Yeah. So, I guess what I want to talk about with that really, is that it seems to capture both the bright promise and the very, very steep price of headlong modernization. And that’s I said. Then you did a really great job in juxtaposing both of these things and giving them full treatment. You could cut that film and make it about how urbanization is a fantastic story, if you look at some of these kids. There’s one where you look at three generations of women and there is a pretty unequivocal, clear linear ascent in terms of the opportunities that open up for them. But then, there are others where you see people who have their land expropriated and were moved out of their ancestral homes and all these other things. Maybe riff on that.

Carrie: The first thing I’d like to say about White Horse Village is it’s absolutely my all-time favorite China project. If I think about things that made me happy working in China, it’s actually just being with those farmers in White Horse Village. They were just such lovely people. They had the full spectrum of human failings as well, but I really was so fond of them. I want to just nudge to a point that Jeremy was asking about, about the ability of journalists to work, at foreign journalists to work in China, or indeed Chinese journalists, more importantly, to work in China. And in those years, when I set up that project, what it came out of was in 2005, the BBC did a more enlightening thing than the BBC usually does. It did a China Week, and it took over a lot of the airwaves in terms of domestic TV, international TV, domestic radio, international radio, blah, blah blah, with China coverage.

And I was allowed enormous reign to produce material during that time. And I had a ball. We were on the streets. I’m proud to say I did the first live broadcasting from the streets of Shanghai, just wondering around. Imagine an international news channel, which puts me on looking in people’s shopping bags in 2005 on the streets of Shanghai. Imagine Xi Jinping letting you do that now. It’s just not going to happen. And so, that was going on. At the same time, we went to White Horse Village. When I went to White Horse Village, I thought, oh my gosh, this is an amazing story. They’re about to tear this place down and they’re going to be able to sit here, and all of this is going to go. And these people are already really, really angry.

Some of them are really angry. And as Kaiser says, some of those see an upside, some of the younger people. And some of the older people, it’s like, “Where am I going to put my coffin? Where am I going to put my pig?” All the very relevant real questions that you have if you’re a Chinese farmer. I went back to Beijing, and I knew by that stage that if you’re going to do a longitudinal project like that, all kinds of bad stuff is going to happen along the way. The only way of continuing your access to that is to get enlightened Beijing buy-in. This thing about a world in the decade, in the mid two thousands when we could do creative journalism projects, I went to an official, I won’t even mention his name now because it wouldn’t do much good, I would like to big him up by saying this, a senior foreign ministry official.

I said, “Look, I want to do this project and this is what I want to do. I want to take these three families and they’re like this, like this, and like this. And I want to follow them over time as this project happens, as this development happens. Obviously there’ll be bad stuff that happens. We all know, you and I both know, and you need to help Chongqing, because it was under Chongqing. It was like this poor tiny corner up in the northeast of Chongqing municipality. So, you need to tell Chongqing and you need to tell Wuxi municipality, I mean Wuxi country city, that they need to stick with it because it’s not going to put them in a bad light or put their superiors in a bad light. You need to smooth them down for me. Can you do this?

Astonishingly, the Chinese foreign ministry officials said, “Yeah, this sounds like a great project.” That’s not gonna happen for any journalist, Chinese or international now, sadly. But anyway, that’s what the foreign ministry did at that point. And they helped in the early stages. And then Chongqing bought in as well, and so we rolled. 2005, 2006, ‘07 were okay. In fact, 2007 wasn’t very okay. I mean, we started to get people threatening to beat the local officials to death if they tore down their house. And there was a lot of very intense chaos going on in the village. So, the project went on and on and on. We did the locked off shots of the city. So, you could do a time lapse of 2005, all the way through…

Because they built, interestingly, the first big building to be built in this new city was the CDC, the Center for Disease Control because it was just after SARS. So, it’s like they built this big thing. So, we put the camera on top of there. It was like one large building surrounded by fields for quite a long time. And then, gradually, the other tall buildings came up around it and we filmed. So, we had this great macro backdrop of this physical infrastructure. So, you could see the physical landscape changing, and the fields going. And as a viewer by that stage, you become really attached to this hardy-esque world with these beautiful bucolic farmers who were doing their thing, and then they were gonna lose it all. And you felt the ups and downs of that along with those communities. You saw the children grow up, you saw people get married, you saw people die. And so yeah, for me, it was absolutely my favorite project.

Jeremy: So, are you ever gonna get let back into China again with a journalist visa?

Carrie: It’s really sad to say that the Chinese foreign ministry, because they changed, White Horse Village didn’t change, I didn’t change, but they changed under Xi Jinping, and so they ended up not liking White Horse Village. They were just grumbling about it because it wasn’t Xi’s playbook. It just wasn’t shiny and bright enough. And so, in answering the question whether I would get let back in, I’m not sure. We’ll have to kind of put that to the test. I mean, after Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, I was called in before it went to air, and we had lunch, me and the Chinese foreign ministry. And they said to me, “We hear you are producing this series.” When they heard it, they said it was tabloid, but at the point before it went out, they just wanted to stop it.

They were going, “You need to stop this. You need to think again. This is going to have very serious consequences for you and it’s going to have very serious consequences for the BBC. You need to go away and you need to bin your series.” And I said, “Ah, the problem is I’m the BBC China editor, not you. I will take the editorial decisions that are my responsibility in my role. Thanks for a nice lunch, though, by the way. And you must take the professional responsibilities of your role. Now, if your role is to throw me out, we both know that would be a bad idea, but if that’s your job at this point, you must do your thing and I’ll do my thing. But don’t be telling me that you are going to decide that I need to bin my series because I’ve worked hard on it, it’s really good, and it’s going to air.

I went back to the bureau and I thought… I was shaken, not because I wasn’t going to do what I was gonna do, but because I was concerned about the safety of various people, including myself. And so, we made contingency plans for what we would do if any of us disappeared. That may sound melodramatic, but at the time, Peter Dahlin, the Swedish NGO labor activist lawyer had been disappeared for a few weeks a year before. We were going to get foreigners disappearing in various situations, journalists.

Kaiser: Chéng Lěi 成蕾.

Carrie: Yea, poor Cheng Lei. Who knows what’s going on with that case. It was not wrong to think about what happened. So, I said, Daniel, my son, as you pointed out, Kaiser, is in the audience. I spoke to two former producers, Beijing producers for the BBC, not the current team responsible for operationally up the chain because I thought BBC management, if I disappeared, would panic, run around in circles and possibly do something unhelpful. And not bad, not wrong, but just not what I wanted. So, I told two former BBC producers, who both knew my children well. And I said, “Look, what I want to happen is as follows. What will be happening,” this was my prediction of if I disappeared, but I thought it was remote possibility, but I thought it was a possibility. I said, “What will be happening is they’ll be sweating me to get me to write a self-criticism and apology for my wicked crimes. And I will not be doing that. I once did that before, not for a journalistic thing, but I once got sweated in a police cell for the ridiculous crime of having been in my then husband’s grandparents flat when I hadn’t notified some local official that I was there.

And I was just sitting in this police cell hour after hour, and I got so bored that I just thought, you know what? I’m just going to sign the thing. And I was so furious with myself for having cracked over this that I thought, I’m never going to do that again. So, I knew that if I-

Kaiser: Never say never, because I’m going to make you do a zìwǒ pīpíng (自我批評) right now.

Carrie: I don’t mind doing it for my real crimes, which are numerous, but I just wasn’t going to do it for a non-crime. I was kind of saying, they’ll be sweating me. They’ll be making me… I thought, I’m not going to do that. I said to these producers, “Just say to Rachel and Daniel, “It’s fine. Your mom is going to be fine. She’s just sweating it out in the police cell, or whatever cell, or a hotel room.” It might be nicer than the police cell. “And she will be, she tells us, practicing her Chinese through reading the People’s Daily and practicing her meditation, for which she hasn’t had enough time recently, and she’ll be absolutely fine and she will be let out eventually. And she will not be writing a self-criticism, never for her Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel or any other excellent BBC journalist output.

Luckily, it didn’t happen, but that was the plan. Oh, and the other bit of the plan was the two BBC producers that said, “Once a month, I want you to get everyone out of the newsroom for 10 minutes at lunchtime, everyone across the road stand outside the Chinese embassy,” which as we’ve already discussed, is literally just across the road, and say, ”Free Carrie Gracie in a loud voice, and then go back to the newsroom again. And you just need to do it once a month. And you just do that until I emerge.” And, of course, it didn’t happen, so we didn’t need to put, but if anyone needs advice on what to do in the event of an impending disappearance, obviously consult me on that as well as hotel advice for the hilltop outside Chongqing.

Kaiser: Jeremy, shall we sweat Gracie now?

Jeremy: Let’s sweat her now.

Carrie: Very afraid. I mean, guys, surely can be more scary than this.

Kaiser: Oh, we can, but we’re sitting in a wrong position.

Jeremy: Well, you’re on a podcast, so we do have a way of making you talk.

Kaiser: Yeah, Jeremy, you want to bring out the… But seriously, I think, I don’t want you to talk about necessarily your own work or maybe more broadly about the BBC or even about foreign correspondence in China more generally. What sage advice, let’s do it this way, what sage advice would you give to reporters who are just starting out in China? Are there, for example, narrative pitfalls that you see a lot of journalists sort of stumble into again and again that you would like them to steer away from?

Carrie: It’s hard to give this advice because it is hard to be a junior reporter and to feel the weight of your news organization and to feel the expectations of your editors for certain kinds of stories. I remember being a young reporter. I was a young reporter in Beijing just after 1989. I arrived in 1991 as a resident reporter. I remember the expectation, the pendulum swings between we hate China, we love China, we hate China, we love China. And so, at that point, the pendulum had swung obviously to we hate China. Chinese’s leadership has blood on its hands, and the story that we want is dissidents going on hunger strike and all of that. So, it was a real story. But it wasn’t the only story as we all know.

So, it is difficult when you get a de-pixelated newsroom, which is so frenetically obsessed with Brexit and Trump, and other stories that we now know it’s obsessing about, and you’re trying to tell a story about China, and you’re a junior reporter. I’m going to go light on the advice, but I think if I was to give advice, I would say try to have Chinese friends, to treat them with respect. Never ever burn your sources because that would be a moral injury to yourself, which you will be haunted by if you do it. I think, I hope that nobody in China has gone to jail, I hope, as a result of my reporting. I have occasionally had to change work in order to protect people. I have occasionally had to leave things out, but trying, at the same time, not to shortchange the audience for what they need to know.

But at the same time, you have to protect your sources and protect people. And you have to protect people who don’t necessarily know the implications of appearing on an international tv screen. And so, that’s very important, I would say, for reporters. I also think it’s very important in terms of the narrative question. Do tell a story that you believe in. Because for me, that’s what I try to do always in China. And whether it was White Horse Village or Murder in Lucky Holiday Hotel, or all the other stories I told over three or more decades of reporting in China, I think I can say that I told the story that I believed was true. It is a Jedi code of a BBC reporter is to tell the story as you truly believe it to be.

And obviously choosing the story, framing the story, who you put in the story, how you have huge numbers of ethical dilemmas and narrative dilemmas. But you must always tell the truth as you see it. Because if you don’t tell the truth as you see it, you will be a terrible reporter, and you will make yourself mentally ill, as well as corrupt your soul and become one of the dead souls. I’ve seen a few journalistic dead souls as well while we’re talking about those. They’re not just elite Chinese communist dead souls. There are some journalists who’ve become dead souls. So, don’t become one of those. Do the story that you need to tell indeed.

Kaiser: Indeed.

Jeremy: Let’s switch topics slightly. In January, 2018, you left your post as the BBC’s China editor in protest at unequal pay, that is unequal pay for women compared to men. And you published an open letter and gave evidence before a Parliamentary Committee about this, and this one year in apology and pay parity from the BBC. You donated your back pay to The Fawcett Society.

Carrie: You make it sound so easy, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Well, obviously was for you.

Carrie: It was a breeze.

Jeremy: You beat up the BBC, you gave the back pay to The Fawcett Society, which helps low-paid women facing pay discrimination. And you’ve written a book about your battle at the BBC. So, now we’re in the autumn of 2022. How would you rate progress at the BBC and in media organizations generally when it comes to pay parity?

Carrie: It’s been a tough couple of years, obviously with COVID for women in the workplace, as all the women in the audience and the women listening around the world will know. I think it’s only fair because the BBC’s not here. So, I’m going to have to put on my BBC hat to give the BBC right of reply to Carrie Grace without the BBC helm. The BBC would say, and I think fairly that, in the media landscape, they were one of the most equal organizations in the media landscape. And that is one of those really interesting paradoxes that often it’s the organization or the country on the… It goes for nations as well. You get to certain danger points when you’ve enabled and strengthened certain demographics enough that those people take power into their own hands and go for it.

And that’s what happened with women at the BBC. Actually, the BBC is a relatively, is not the worst villain. If you look at gender pay gaps across the media industry in the UK, The BBC is not by any means the worst villain. The BBC is one of the best in broadcast media and is actually far better than most of the print media who are shockingly, have shocking gender pay gaps. Now…

Kaiser: Surely, you can’t mean like the Murdoch properties.

Carrie: Well, not even only them. All these people don’t have right of reply here, so I’m not actually… So, you stop naming them and then I’ll be able to stop defending them. But the thing is, there’s obviously, we have to say here to emphasize to these people that gender pay gaps are not the same as unequal pay. Gender pay gaps are not illegal. They’re due to all kinds of historical, and blah, blah, blah, the factors. But at the same time, in my view, and it is my firm, and I would say pretty well founded on personal experience, but also the experience from the U.K. and around the world. Because what happened was, when I went public, was women from all over the world and women from all over the U.K. started writing to me. And actually, women on the streets and buses and post office queues of London started coming up to me and telling me about their pay battles in the workplace and how they had been crushed in pay battles. And it was that, that convinced me that a book needed to be written about it because it’s not just in media, it’s everywhere.

There are reasons why equal pay doesn’t happen. They are complex, they’re psychological, they’re historical, they’re legal, they’re economic, they’re biological. There’s all kinds of reasons. Pay structures are very backward-looking things. They tend to fossilize. And unless you have an incredibly real time attentive conscious employer who’s looking at it all the time thinking, is this equal? Am I valuing these people according to what they’re bringing and contributing to this organization? You’re going to get those fossilized backward-looking structures. And while we’re on this subject, the BBC is a 100-year-old organization just like the Chinese Communist Party. And that is not the only similarity between these two organizations.

Kaiser: I was going to say, I mean, is it possible-

Carrie: Both of which are quite patriarchal.

Kaiser: Exactly. Is it possible that maybe your experience battling one entrenched patriarchal organization…

Carrie: Well, that was not lost on me, and I became… Jeremy didn’t mention because it’s not really on the public record that we, BBC women, and we wrote that we were hundreds strong by the time we’d finished. If you count many other people who weren’t officially members of our group, we are a thousand strong. We started coming together in the middle of 2017. So, just in the run up to the Communist Party Congress of that year because the BBC had been forced to publish pay figures. Just to spur back a little longer, when I went to China in 2014 as China editor, I’d insisted on equal pay at that point because I had become conscious as a senior woman within BBC News, firstly, that we had not had a great… I mean, again, they’re not here to answer themselves, so I’m not going to be too mean to the BBC right now, but we hadn’t had, throughout my career, let’s put it this way, they hadn’t been putting lots of women into foreign correspondent positions or senior reporting positions. But they knew they had to start.

So, they wanted James Harding, who was heading news at the time, had been a Shanghai reporter for the Financial Times, and for whom I have a lot of time. He really wanted me to go to China to be China editor. “So, we need this done. You’re the only person in the BBC who can do it. Please go and do this job for me.” And as he himself says, he was on two bended knees at the time. I said, it was a terrible time for Rachel and Daniel. It was like they were coming up to important school point. But I felt I needed to… Having been asked to help solve a problem that the BBC needed to solve, which was its China coverage wasn’t good enough in my view. I’d been sitting in London and going out once a year on reporting trips to White House Village and other things, but I hadn’t been on the frontline all the time in China. And I was getting bored being a presenter behind a desk for 11 months of the year. So, I was like, oh, I really want to do this job. It’s not great for Rachel and Daniel. There was various to-ing and fro-ing.

I’d read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and I was thinking, actually, Rachel and Daniel’s dad needs to lean into parenting for once. It’s all very well being a drummer and a composer out in China and leaving me to do all the washing-up and all the kind of teenager wrangling here, but we need to swap these roles for a bit. He had come and lean into parenting and I’ll go out there and lean to China. But my condition to the BBC at the point of departure was, you’re going to pay me equally because this is a very, very tough job. It’s going to impose sacrifices on my family, it’s going to impose sacrifices on me. I will give it my all. I will be the China editor like no other. And there had been no other, so that was a true statement. I went out and I did an amazingly good job, in my view. I certainly gave it my all, and I had nothing for which to apologize, at the point in 2017 when I discovered, along with a lot of other BBC women, that they were paying us a lot less because of these forced pay disclosures.

So, the BBC had been going around telling all these senior women that they were earning roughly the same as the men. I was earning half the North America editor with whom, not that figure, but the previous North America, they had promised me pay parity. And I was like, “Hello, what happened there?” That was a moment of very great rage for me and many others, which then had to be turned into an effective weapon. We tried to turn that into a polite weapon for six months. But like many other employers, the response of the BBC at that point, and you are going to think maybe that your employer’s better than this, I’m going to tell you that it may not be. You would be really, really, really shocked if I told you the names of all the organizations for which women have tried to engage on pay questions and been crushed and run out of town, and gaslit, and just horribly treated.

Is it polite? If you think about the Me Too movement and all that that exposed in terms of NDAs, confidentiality clauses, bullying, intimidation, whistleblower intimidation of all kinds, that’s why where you need to be thinking of this. So, we ask politely for six months for them to, would you look at this seriously? And I was asking from China. We are BBC journalists, it’s like you ask questions, you expect to get sensible answers. And they were just like sticking their fingers there in the ear, in their ears going, “La, la, la, we can’t hear you.” Or, “How about this for an answer? Should I give you five pence more? Should I give you 10 pence more? What about this? This surely accounts for… I knew at that point they are not taking this seriously enough.

And I’m out here doing Chinese Party Congress, getting roundly abused, roughed up by police or just generally having a tough time doing this job, doing a good job. And they’re not taking this seriously. I cannot fight the BBC at the same time as fighting the Chinese Communist Party, and every heavy on the streets of China. So, I’m going to renounce this role. So, I told them, I’m quitting my role because you don’t take it seriously enough to pay me equally, which you said you do. You’re not doing this, so I’m quitting. And they kind of went, “That’s a real shame”. But by that stage, it was a massive systemic problem, and there were hundreds of women involved, and they couldn’t, because I’d already said, I will never sign an NDA. If you pay me equally, which is what you must do, or give me the reasons for why I’m worth less than a him, then I will be telling all the other women in this organization.

And they couldn’t handle that because obviously the backward claims, equal pay means potentially years of back pay. It was this huge potential financial risk to them, so they weren’t gonna do that. Anyway, there’s like, they’re going to lose their China register rather than address their pay structure. Again, they’re not here to answer for themselves. So, if they were here, they’d probably be muttering things going, “Excuse me, excuse me” at this point. There are some things that they could say, but by and large, that’s a fair analysis, I think. So, then it comes to January, 2018, and I am going to publish this letter, as Jeremy pointed out, and I’m presenting The Today program that morning, which is, for those of you not in the U.K., or not familiar with U.K. media, is the BBC’s flagship morning show.

Luckily, I was presenting it, and Sūnzǐ 孙子 would be proud of me because element of surprise is obviously very important in Chinese art of war. And when you are going asymmetrically up against a massive organization for whom the narrative is their business, and they’ve got all the lawyers, they’ve got all the PR people, they’ve got all the MPs on speed dial, and all the media, all the rest of the media on speed dial, you are in a very difficult position. And so, it was a terrifying morning, but I need to cut to the chase, eventually we won. Yeah.

Kaiser: Yeah, you did. All right.

Carrie: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. But what I want to say, coming back to Kaiser’s question, thank you very much for being supportive, everybody. It’s meaningful to me, I mean, it was a really, really tough battle. It’s a tough battle for every woman who undertakes it. It is not good for your mental health because you deal with rage, fear, the disrespect that you’ve suffered. People think it’s about money. It is not about money. It’s about so much more. It’s about your whole career and it’s about… Yeah. Well, anyway, it took another six months for me to win that battle. After six months of the fight behind the scenes that we all did of going politely to the… And then the letter and The Today program, and everything else, and the parliamentary hearing, and the blah blah, blah, I then had to go through several rounds of grievance, appeal against grievance, final appeal, blah, blah internal process.

And then the BBC computer says, no. It says, we finished. Your final recourse is now to go to law. The important thing that I want to say about this experience is that it is the defiance that I learned in China that enabled me to take on the BBC, because I had been forced to think very hard, over 30 years as a China reporter, about what was true north ethically, for me as a reporter. I knew that I would be trashing my entire career in my own heart, which was ultimately the place that mattered if I did not fight that fight at that moment. Because it was like I was at a position in my life, in my 50s, where I’d nearly paid off my mortgage. My kids were grown up. It was like, if not now, then when? I kept asking myself. If not you, then who? Who is going to fight this fight? It’s a terrifying fight, but it’s like it had to be fought. At the point of winning it, what I had to do was lash myself to the mast and not listen to any of their offers.

Because what employers do at this point to women, and the reason you don’t hear about all the equal pay cases and all the other workplace disputes that are being settled out of court is the employer watches you crawl all the way to the steps of the employment tribunal and then they pay you off. I went to see the director general of the BBC, and I metaphorically got him by the scruff of the throat. And I said, “Look into my eyes,” not literally, but he was looking into my eyes, and I was staring at him very hard. And I said, “I am going to see you in court, and you have made me very, very angry, and it’s gonna take us two years to get there. I am going to fight you every day between now and then in the court of public opinion. And we all know, you and I and all your lawyers and all your everything, you know”, because I beat them in the court of the parliamentary hearing, me and an NUJ rep beat the entire leadership of the BBC in… I would claim.

And if you look at the press coverage, I think it will back this up that we beat them in terms of soft power. Not hard power, but we beat them in terms of soft power. I said to him, “So, I will not stop until you pay me every single last penny, which I’m going to give away as you know, because as I keep telling you, and I’ve been telling you for an entire year, I don’t want your money. I want equality. Do you want that? Because now is your moment of choice. You either pay me to the penny or I see you in court in two years’ time and there’s no stopping me.” And he went away and thought about it, and sure enough, he paid me to the penny, and then we gave the money away. And that’s how we won. But that’s how hard you have to fight is what I’m saying to you. This is a world where every woman, and every person of color, and every disabled person, and every person of a different sexual orientation, and every person who didn’t come from a kind of posh or Oxbridge background, everybody needs to be on this and vigilant. So, who are you working for? How readily are they talking about pay? Are they talking about the markers of pay in their organization?

Are they talking about the things that… What is their gender pay gap? Are they doing an ethnic pay gap or race pay gap? What does the leadership of your organization look like? Are they male? Are they female? Is there anyone disabled on that? You need to think about all these questions. I am not talking only to the women in this audience here in the room or globally. I am talking most of all to the men because men often think, in this conversation, that this is a problem for women. But actually, if you are the person of privilege, it is you who have to solve this problem. You have the power more than the woman has the power. And I was dispirited by the extent to which we lack the support of senior men in the BBC. But it taught me something. And when it came to the race conversation, which we then had two years later, just before I left the BBC, after the murder of George Floyd, the BBC had a massive internal conversation about the coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests and about the internal race problems of the BBC.

And it was very uncomfortable for all white people. And I, within the BBC women group, which was a very intersectional group, and we discussed a lot of our intersectional issues of color, of disability, of class, etc. And we had managed to have those conversations in a respectful way during the pay question. When it came to the Black Lives Matter discussion, it was very, very difficult for our black members. Initially, they did not feel supported. I was busy making a panorama about China COVID at the time, and I suddenly looked round, and that was not an easy thing to make. Then I looked round, and on our group chat, I suddenly noticed this really difficult conversation about the race question. I thought, I am a person of privilege in this conversation. I need to step up. Because the men had not stepped up for us in the gender conversation. It made me realize how you long, when you are the under person in the conversation, how you long for the privileged person to stand alongside you and help dismantle that privilege, like stand alongside and do it.

So, it was very important for me to do that. So, you learn from those experiences to… The equal pay fight was a great learning experience for me. And I told them when I went… One last thing and then I really am going to shut up, I told the Chinese farmers, because I had to go back, straight off the parliamentary hearing in January 2018, I had to go back and pack up my staff in Beijing. And the foreign ministry was like, “Oh my gosh, we thought we were annoyed with Carrie Gracie, but oh my gosh, what is this?” “She’s totally just a loose cannon in China. She’s just a loose cannon, full, big full stop.”

Jeremy: Can you make sure that this podcast sounds very good, Kaiser?

Kaiser: Oh, absolutely.

Carrie: And so, they said to me, “What on earth provoked you? What on earth provoked you?” Because I used to have long conversations with everybody in the Chinese foreign ministry about everything under the sun. So, we were used to having long heart to hearts about everything, including all the things we disagreed about vehemently. I said to them, “You know, as well as I do, what happened here. you taught me my values by challenging them for 30 years, and I became clear about them. And then you sent me to defiance gym by giving me such a hard time there all the time.”

Kaiser: Defiance gym, I love it.

Carrie: When it came to the point of needing to stand up for my values, not on the streets of China or over a lunch table with a crisped tablecloth with a foreign ministry, but back in BBC HQ, it’s like, oh, okay, well, which way is journalistic north? It’s like, where are the facts here? Let’s just follow the facts. That’s again, my reporter advice, follow the facts. And at the end of the day, the BBC has a mission and has had for a hundred years, and that is to educate, inform, and to entertain. And I think by means of having a massive top volume argument with my employer for the space of six months, not on my own, with a whole group of other women. I hope we educated, informed, and indeed entertained by all the… Because there were some brilliant moments of the BBC asking to interview the BBC who wouldn’t come on air to be interviewed on the BBC. It was just like so surreal. It was almost as surreal as the Queen’s funeral.

Kaiser: Carrie Gracie, what a fantastic account of this really, really important, brave, and tremendously inspiring story. Thank you so much for sharing that. I am afraid that we have come to the end of the allotted time, and I do want to leave some time for questions afterward. But there is a segment in our show that we cannot ignore, and that is, of course, our recommendations segment. So, let’s get to that. and thank you once more. Thank you so much. Let’s hear it for Carrie. We’re not going to break from our tradition of having Jeremy kickoff recommendations whenever he is on the show. Jeremy, what do you have for us? What’s your recommendation.

Jeremy: Super quick, a very American TV series, and I watch TV like once every 10 years, so it’s a show called Yellowstone, about a family-owned huge ranch in Montana. I got completely addicted to it and binge watched it I think in about 24 hours. It’s wonderful. It must be available on some streaming service in the U.K.

Kaiser: I think the last show you watched was like the Sopranos or something?

Jeremy: Yeah, pretty much, every 10 years.

Kaiser: All right, fantastic. I have not watched that. I mean, even though I watch a lot of tv, but Carrie, what about you? What’s your recommendation for us?

Carrie: Well, we’re in London. We’ve just seen the funeral ceremony for the Queen. It’s very much the month for this country, and indeed the world, to mourn her passing. And she was a very redoubtable figure, so I think we should go to Queen, I wanted it anyway to go to Queen archetypes, but I want to have Chinese queen. So, I’m going to choose Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I know you’ve had on the show before, but Michelle Yeoh, I mean, seriously, a queen.

Kaiser: A queen, absolutely.

Carrie: A warrior queen. I’m sure probably everyone in this audience, here in the room, and globally has watched this. But if you don’t, you have to catch it. It’s so anarchic. At the same time is so endearing, so unpredictable. It’s got a laundromat and it verse jumps. And she is just amazing. Anyway, I won’t go on about it, but if you haven’t, catch it soon. And then, because our dear Queen was such a horse lover, I want to have a second recommendation of a Warrior Queen on horseback, and I have to go for Mulan. I don’t want to go for the live action remake. I want to go for the original animation again. I’m sure everyone here has seen it, but it is my favorite Disney heroine.

Jeremy: Really?

Carrie: Yeah, definitely. She’s got a horse, which Queen Elizabeth II would approve of. And she underestimates, so she’s got a cricket, obviously and a dragon. And she goes on an adventure where she mostly underestimates herself and is underestimated by everybody because she is not playing to what everyone thinks she should be as a woman, but she has to save the day and save China. And she does that by growing into herself and being herself to the max. And I think that is effectively what Queen Elizabeth II did. She was born to greatness, achieved greatness, and had greatness thrust upon her. And Mulan had greatness thrust upon her. Let’s big it up for warrior queens everywhere.

Kaiser: All right. Warrior queens, yeah. Fantastic. I am going to talk about a band that I saw on Sunday night in D.C. at the Anthem, my favorite band in the world, Porcupine Tree, who are from the U.K. led by the redoubtable, Steven Wilson. I just want to make sure everyone understands, they are playing here in, I guess it’s at Wembley on November 11. Hands down, the best rock concert I have seen in a lifetime of attending rock concerts. They are just an amazing band, and it’s probably the last time you’re going to get to see them. Porcupine Tree. They’re also playing November 2 in Paris and November 7 in Amsterdam. So, if you don’t get tickets to the already, unfortunately sold-out Wembley show on November 11, please make sure to see them. It’s worth the trip there for everyone. I mean, it was like, the sound quality was like listening to a $5,000 pair of headphones turned to an optimal volume. It was that clear. You could hear absolutely everything. Visuals, the music, oh, just exquisite. Don’t miss them. And they’re homegrown. They’re a British band, so check them out. All right, thank you very much for coming, and thank you once more to Carrie Gracie. All right.

Carrie: Thanks, Kaiser. Thanks, Jeremy.

Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.