Carrie Gracie is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster whose father – a diplomat who later became an oil executive – was posted to Bahrain at the time of her birth.
She was educated in Aberdeenshire and Glasgow, and went on to study at the University of Edinburgh before leaving to run her own restaurant for a year.
She ultimately graduated from the University of Oxford in 1984 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.
Her academic pursuits continued alongside her professional life: in 1996 she completed a BA in Chinese, followed by an MA in design for interactive media from Middlesex University.
Her career path was notably varied before broadcasting took hold. In 1985, she travelled to China to teach English and economics at Yantai and Chongqing Universities. Back in Britain a year later, she took on the management of a small film company.
Gracie joined the BBC World Service in 1987 as a trainee producer, working across the Chinese and African Services as well as the current affairs department.
A fluent Mandarin speaker, she served as the Beijing reporter for BBC World Service from 1991 to 1995, returning to China as both Beijing correspondent and bureau chief in 1997.
Two years later she moved back to the UK, taking up a presenting role across BBC News and the BBC World Service – where she also hosted The Interview.
Her years reporting from China yielded some of the defining moments of her career, among them the death of Deng Xiaoping and the handover of Hong Kong, both in 1997.
She was also part of the BBC team covering the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, contributing as a co-commentator across the opening and closing ceremonies.
That same October, she received the inaugural Nick Clarke Award in recognition of her interview with BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who had been kidnapped by the Palestinian Army of Islam the previous year.
The depth of her engagement with China found expression in long-form documentary work. Between 2006 and 2008 – with a follow-up in 2015 – she produced a series of reports for BBC Two’s Newsnight, World News (TV) and BBC World Service (radio), tracing the forces of change reshaping a single south-eastern Chinese village.
The reports examined power shifts, migration, evolving work and educational opportunities, and land redevelopment, with each instalment carrying the village’s name – White Horse Village – in its title.
This body of work fed into her documentary The Fastest Changing Place on Earth, broadcast on BBC Two on 5th March 2012, which explored China’s sweeping transition from an agrarian to an urban society.
Gracie made a relief presenting appearance on BBC Breakfast on 7th May 2001, and from that year until September 2011 she was a familiar presence on the BBC News channel.
For six of those years, from January 2008, she anchored the main morning output on Tuesdays through Fridays alongside Simon McCoy.
Her final broadcast alongside McCoy came on 3th January 2014, after which she took up the newly created role of the BBC’s China Editor.
In 2012, she had briefly stepped back from screens for eight months while undergoing cancer treatment, returning on 17th May 2012.
In January 2018, she resigned from the China editorship in protest at what she regarded as discriminatory pay practices – specifically, the gap between her salary and those of her male counterparts among the BBC’s foreign news editors.
She returned to London and, in February 2018, presented BBC Radio 4’s Today before resuming her work on the BBC News channel.
The following year she was again presenting on the News channel, as well as Dateline London.
In addition to these regular commitments, she made a handful of appearances on BBC One network news: on 1st January 2013, on Bank Holiday Monday 26th August 2019, on Christmas Day 2019, and on the weekend lunchtime editions of 20th June and 18th July 2020.
In June 2018, the BBC formally apologised for having underpaid her and confirmed that the matter had been rectified. Gracie responded publicly:
“I’m grateful to the director general for helping me resolve this. I do feel he has led from the front today. In acknowledging the value of my work as China editor, the BBC has awarded me several years of backdated pay.
“But for me this was always about the principle and not about the money, so I’m giving all of that money away to help women who need it more than I do. After all, today at the BBC I can say I am equal.”
True to her word, she donated the entire back-pay sum – undisclosed in amount – to The Fawcett Society, a charity dedicated to gender equality and women’s rights.
She subsequently took up to six months of unpaid leave at her own request, devoting the time to writing and speaking engagements on China and gender equality.
In 2019 she published EQUAL, a book examining how women can fight for pay parity and how both employers and male colleagues can support that effort.
Her final project at the Corporation was a Panorama documentary examining Wuhan’s early concealment of the coronavirus outbreak.
After 33 years at the BBC, her last on-screen appearance came on 25th August 2020.
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Acknowledgements
PICTURED: Carrie Gracie. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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