Bursar’s Review ISBA Annual Conference 2019

A global perspective KEYNOTE ADDRESS 18 China and the BBC have both played a huge part in Carrie’s life. Straight out of university, she spent a year teaching in provincial China where the students of 1985 were hungry for contact with the world after the isolation and paranoia of the Mao years, and they were as fascinating to Carrie as she was to them. Once home, she joined the BBC as a trainee journalist, learned her craft and embarked on a Chinese degree at night school. But by the time she returned to China as a reporter in 1991, the mood had darkened; the Tiananmen Square democracy movement had ended in a massacre and the ruling communist party was determined not to go the same way as those in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Despite routine surveillance and police harassment, China was still a gripping place to be for a young reporter. So gripping that Carrie stayed for most of the ‘90s but, by then, she had two small children and decided to return to the UK to bring them up. She worked as a TV presenter on the BBC News Channel, hosted an interview show on BBC World Service and made annual reporting trips to check up on China. Gradually, what had long been clear to Carrie became clear to her bosses in BBC News, that China’s rise was one of the biggest stories of our time but also one of the hardest to tell. In 2014, the BBC created a new role as China editor and asked her to take up the post. She has been a BBC journalist for 30 years and has an abiding fascination for China. You won’t be surprised to hear that Carrie says that leading the BBC’s China coverage for four years has been the greatest privilege of her career. Carrie Gracie has been a BBC journalist for 30 years and has an abiding fascination for China. www.theisba.org.uk