Q&A with Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

"From China’s Communist Party’s point of view the work of foreign journalists is no longer welcome – unless it’s to further their agenda."

Poppy Sebag-Montefiore is a writer and journalist. She’s the editor of forthcoming weekly podcast about China, The Drum Tower, from the Economist.  She writes for Granta magazine and The Guardian Long Read, and has made podcasts for Tortoise Media. Earlier this year, we spoke to Poppy - a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022 - about her shortlisted work, which ranges from a podcast on the Chinese education system, to a long-read on the impact of the Savile scandal at the BBC.

What originally drew you to China - and how has the situation for journalists has changed since you first visited? What obstacles did you face getting to these stories?

I grew up in a London suburb. It was the kind of community where the things that families knew about each other seemed to be fairly manicured details. Even the gossip and scandals had a gleam to them. It was the eighties. Keeping up Appearances was the hit comedy tv show at the time. Adults around me seemed confident and convinced that this place they’d landed: suburban, late-capitalism, was a peak destination in Western civilisation. To me, as a teenager, this confidence seemed potentially overzealous and misplaced. I thought it all felt a bit empty and hollowed out, as if maybe even inside these homes there was little space for much hidden depth, or different textures. Somehow alongside the opulence and convenience of filling a shopping trolley at an edge of town mega-superstore-supermarket, some things had been lost or forgotten along the way. As a teenager I became curious to discover different ways of organising, culturally, socially and politically. China had a mostly separate history, hadn’t been under much British influence, and was on the rise. I decided to go to China to teach English in a secondary school and find out more.

When I arrived in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1999 it was palpably different from where I’d grown up.  Family lives and dramas took place out in the open.  The streets were where people brushed their teeth, cooked, ate, played board games. People were curious about the outside world, often troubled about where their country had come from, and uncertain about where it was heading. People were open about their intimate lives and political ambivalences. It felt like a creative time and place. People told me their stories, invited me into their homes, and once I started working as a journalist out there people confided in me about political issues. Some relied on us at the BBC Bureau to take on injustices that were a step too far for the domestic media. The more journalism I did, the more I discovered the dark side of life in a one-Party state, and so the more grateful I felt for the system I’d left behind in the UK – the independent judiciary, the multi-party democracy – however flawed it was. 

“People were curious about the outside world, often troubled about where their country had come from, and uncertain about where it was heading.”

There were dangers to reporting in China at that time. We always had to be incredibly careful to protect our sources. We were followed, our calls were listened to and we’d get detained for a few hours at a time until we signed a confession and apology. But the dangers to us seemed relatively mild as the Foreign Ministry at least respected that the journalism visas they’d issued to us gave us a right to be there and to do our work. Foreign journalists at that time were seen by the CCP as a nuisance that needed careful management, but we were also understood to be a part of the international system of engagement of that time.  

Now all that’s changed. It feels like from China’s Communist Party’s point of view the work of foreign journalists is no longer welcome – unless it’s to further their agenda. Many foreign reporters have left, some after being harassed. I work on China now from London and focus on social media stories. Over the last two years I’ve found that people in China increasingly don’t want to talk to me at all. It’s too risky for them. 

The CCP have put out a lot of propaganda that foreign journalists are ‘hostile foreign forces’. Nobody wants to be branded an agent of one of those. People in China understand that it’s a very sensitive time for the regime until November this year when Xi Jinping tries to extend his term as Party Chairman beyond the established ten years. People don’t want to get into trouble with authorities, or be trolled by nationalists online, or perhaps to be the one who knocks their nation’s ‘stability’ off course. Who knows what will happen beyond November?

For now it’s very difficult to do reporting which takes us to the heart of a story in China. But just like so many people inside China who live with CCP censorship, it means trying to find creative ways around it, and chiefly ways that won’t get anyone inside China into trouble. And so this was the approach we took when I was working on School 49 and China’s Missing Tennis Player.

Your first shortlisted piece describes the risks two BBC journalists, Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, took to expose the Jimmy Saville story. How would you make the organization more accountable to its own reporters? 

Ideally the BBC would become a more democratic organisation internally. I can’t think of any other way for it to become more accountable to its reporters. It is a very top-down organisation. Liz MacKean described the wedge of managers at the top of the BBC as an ‘officer class’. And yet, I don’t know where else I could have got such a rigorous on-the-job training in public service journalism. I don’t know if there’s anywhere else like it for really learning how to work as a journalist in that spirit, and that’s partly because of the license fee. The license fee is a really clear reminder that you’re working on behalf of a collective public interest, and to have that at the centre, and really try to think about what that is.

What did you make of the recent Netflix feature? Some have suggested that Liz MacKean got written out. 

I thought the Netflix Savile documentary was really well done. I was pleased to see Meirion Jones’s work on the Savile investigation so thoroughly told. Meirion’s strand is such an important part of the story. He was the journalist who’d been trying to tell this story for decades and never let it go. It’s not that I felt that Liz had been written out, but I think the significance of her impact on what happened was potentially out of the scope of the story that the documentary makers set out to tell. And also perhaps the story of how she helped create a seismic impact on the culture was quite piecemeal and subtle.

She and Meirion worked together on the Newsnight Savile investigation, but they were up against the fact that their editors, and perhaps many others in the UK press and British establishment at the time couldn’t really see past the idea that this kind of story was a salacious celebrity sex scandal. For Liz and Meirion it wasn’t about Savile, it was about the people he’d abused and the institutions that had allowed that to happen. But somehow it was impossible for them to get their bosses to understand this, or even to get their editor to listen to their interviewee speak on tape. When Newsnight refused to run their story Liz and Meirion both secretly handed their material over to ITV, and Liz leaked to the press the fact that the BBC had cancelled their film. She was appalled that her interviewees were still being silenced and side-lined and determined that the BBC should be held to account.

When the ITV documentary on Savile came out a year later, the fact that the BBC had covered up the Newsnight investigation became a national scandal. The BBC denied that there was anything wrong with Newsnight not publishing the Savile story. Newsnight doesn’t normally do celebrity sex exposes, was one of the arguments the Newsnight editor publicly made defending his decision.

Liz and Meirion appeared on BBC One’s Panorama and criticised their boss’s refusal to broadcast their story, and this attitude among their editors. This Panorama programme had the equivalent audience share of an England football game. The nation was gripped. And a voice of authority, a BBC Newsnight reporter, was criticising the attitudes at the top of her own organisation, attitudes that many people had probably unwittingly gone about with. Liz and Meirion were able to explain to the nation that their Savile investigation wasn’t just about Jimmy Savile or his private life, it was about powerful institutions that had allowed him to get away with abuse. And it was about his victims whose lives had been irrevocably affected, and had then been silenced.

I think that Panorama was also a mirror for the audience. Because we all too had heard rumours about Savile, but rarely, probably, had we considered that there might be women whose lives would be at the other end of those rumours. Suddenly the centre of the story shifted. People could now see that these kinds of stories weren’t tabloid exposes of a celebrity’s perversions, but revealed the power imbalances that protected and enabled establishment figures to commit abuse, and keep victims silenced and ignored.

“The Netflix documentary had a lot to get through just telling how Savile got away with it while he was still alive. Liz’s role, alongside Meirion’s, helps us to understand how and why Savile almost got away with it even after he’d died.”

Women now began to speak – on phonelines, to their GPs, their family members, to police, old cases of historic abuse that had been dismissed were being re-opened by the courts. Liz and Meirion helped to bring about a turning point. The culture of listening to women on these issues began to change. And I think it’s here where Liz’s role is critical, because not only did she understand the importance of telling the Savile story from the beginning, but also she understood the importance of risking her career to ensure that the truth was understood about the BBC refusing to publish it. The Netflix documentary had a lot to get through just telling how Savile got away with it while he was still alive. Liz’s role, alongside Meirion’s, helps us to understand how and why Savile almost got away with it even after he’d died.

Has being shortlisted for an Orwell Prize has contributed to widening the audience for your work, or changed how it is viewed in the newsroom? What, ultimately, does Orwell mean to you?

I remember when I was in China and came to understand the thought control and fear that many people live with, I couldn’t believe that I’d already read about this described in another place and another time and in crystalline, universal terms in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I remember on a visit home to London I bought a copy for a close Chinese colleague as I wanted to share this with him. But when I was back in China I hesitated and didn’t give it to him. I thought it might be depressing for him – after all he was living this. I rang him the other day, to thank him for all the ways he’s helped me understand and think about what’s going on in China, and I told him about this book by Orwell that I’d bought for him once but hadn’t given him. He told me not to worry, he’d already read it anyway at university. I asked him what he thought of it. ‘It’s China!’ he said. 

“He told me not to worry, he’d already read [Nineteen Eighty-Four] anyway at university.”

Just a few months ago when I was stuck on how to tell a particular story and I turned to reading Orwell again for inspiration and sustenance. So for my work to be included on this shortlist means so much to me. And as a freelancer, pushing against the grain, sometimes it’s easy to forget that there’s a whole tradition of this kind of work in the UK, and so many others working in this vein. So I can’t tell you what it’s meant to be shortlisted alongside these other journalists and writers and to be reminded that this kind of work is a deeply rooted part of British life, and for my work to be included in it.