Last December, when Alice Su touched down in Xinjiang, in northwest China, she was immediately picked off her flight by the police. 

Su wasn’t exactly surprised. As the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, she was used to having government minders harass her as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to blunt foreign reporting. Su certainly expected it in Xinjiang, where she aimed to report on the Party’s mass detention and surveillance of Uighurs, an ethnic minority. With international outrage over the situation in Xinjiang growing, Su knew her movements would be closely watched. 

When she was eventually allowed to leave the airport, minders trailed her everywhere, interrupting her interviews and even manhandling her in the street.

Some level of interference has come to be commonplace for journalists in China, but the stakes for Su on this trip were higher than ever. Su is one of the few American reporters left with on-the-ground access to the world’s most populous nation and its second biggest economy. An escalating tit-for-tat between Washington and Beijing over journalist visas had nearly wiped out the American press corps in China in the past year. And as she watched her peers forced out, Su says her priorities changed. 

“I better go for the big stuff,” she says. “Feeling like I have limited time, I may as well make the most of it.” 

Su evaded her minders on that December trip by slipping out before dawn one day. She visited the home of an Uighur intellectual, who, like many of his colleagues, hadn’t been heard from since 2017. The man was reluctant to speak, but eventually detailed to Su how his family had endured detentions in government-run camps — including one daughter who had been rounded up simply for making a phone call abroad. Su’s story revealed the fear, despair, and forced separations that are playing out across China’s far northwestern reaches — a human rights atrocity that China denies and that outside governments and companies have been slow to recognize. 

“It is so important to remind people that what is happening in Xinjiang is real,” says Su. “It is important to show up.”

For decades, the Chinese government made “showing up” difficult for foreign reporters by monitoring and harassing them and placing unusual restrictions on overseas news organizations, like barring them from certain parts of the country or putting pressure on interview subjects. This can be explained, in part, by Beijing’s dim view of journalism and a free press. China censors its own media, after all, and web access to the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg News, and The Guardian has been blocked in China for many years.

But last year, with the U.S. and China increasingly at odds over trade, geopolitical differences in the South China Sea, and who is to blame for spreading Covid-19, reporters working for Western news agencies saw detentions, expulsions, and harassment intensify. Their repeated attempts to investigate the treatment of the Uighur population — reported in all major news outlets — turned China into a most unforgiving host.

I better go for the big stuff. Feeling like I have limited time, I may as well make the most of it.

Alice Su, Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times

“It used to be that everything could be finessed — it just depended on flexibility and personal relations,” says Andrew Browne, editorial director of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum and the former China editor at The Wall Street Journal. “But all of that has collapsed now. The expulsions have blinded all of us to what is happening in China.”

The spiral of expulsions began in February 2020, when the The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed entitled “China is the Real Sick Man of Asia” that pointed out the economic risks tied to Covid-19. The Chinese government was enraged by the headline, which some considered racist. Even though that title was added by an editor in New York, China expelled three of the Journal’s Beijing-based reporters.¹In 2019, China effectively expelled Chun Han Wong after he wrote an article about a cousin of Xi Jinping being linked to an investigation in Australia. Beijing can expel a reporter by not renewing their press credentials, which is typically done annually. He is now reporting from Hong Kong. 

The Trump administration criticized the move and soon after announced it would limit the number of U.S. visas given to China’s own state-run media, from around 160 to 100. Weeks later, China retaliated by expelling about a dozen reporters from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — about half of the journalists working in China for those news organizations. Today, the three big American papers have a total of five reporters on the ground.²Sui Lee Wee of The New York Times is expected to return to Beijing and two Washington Post reporters are awaiting visas The Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio are each down to a single correspondent.³(Last week, China pull the BBC World Service off the airwaves in the country after regulators in London barred Chinese state-run television from broadcasting in the U.K.)

Wire services including Bloomberg News, Reuters, and the Associated Press still have large bureaus in Beijing and Shanghai. They produce mostly breaking news and business reporting, which are considered less politically sensitive. But those outlets are also under increased pressure and harassment by Chinese authorities. A survey on media freedoms conducted by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China found that 82 percent of respondents had experienced interference, harassment or violence while reporting in China. 

The tensions came to a head this fall after a cascade of chilling incidents. Cheng Lei, a well-known Australian reporter for CGTN, a Chinese state media network, was detained in August on “national security grounds.” (Cheng, a mother of two young children, was formally charged last week with supplying state secrets overseas.) Two other Australian journalists working for Australian media, Michael Smith and Bill Birtles, rushed to flee the country soon after being visited by state security services. They were the last reporters in China working for an Australian news outlet.

In December, Haze Fan, a Chinese business journalist working for Bloomberg News was detained for “endangering national security,” which signaled that the Chinese staff at foreign outlets were also a target in Beijing’s clamp down. By law, Chinese nationals are not supposed to act as journalists doing their own reporting for foreign media. They are only supposed to engage in “auxiliary work,” such as translating and paperwork. But given their language ability, local contacts and experience, many Chinese reporters, typically referred to as “researchers,” are invaluable to foreign reporting operations.

It is apparent that the door is closing on what some have called the golden age of reporting on China — and the whole world will be forced to deal with the consequences.⁴Some years ago, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times even pushed into building Chinese language web sites on the expectation that China would open further. Many observers, inside and outside of journalism, say that without foreign journalists gathering facts on the ground, understanding the economic, political and social issues unfolding in one of the world’s most consequential countries will be difficult. Propaganda is a poor substitute.

“We need to understand what China is doing because of the shared importance of the Chinese economy to the rest of the world,” says Lingling Wei, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal who left China in May after she was expelled. “A lot of international businesses rely on American journalists. They are not relying on Chinese state media. We need to have more windows in.”

Greg Gilligan, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, says that U.S. businesses are already suffering because of the absence of robust news reports. “Businesses make investment decisions based on information, ideally combining information from numerous credible sources,” he says. “The free flow of commerce and the free flow of information are inextricably linked.”

A lot of international businesses rely on American journalists… We need to have more windows in.

Lingling Wei, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal

Indeed, when China first opened to outside commerce in the 1970s, journalists were an integral part of the equation. Mike Chinoy remembers the heady if uncertain times. The former CNN Beijing bureau chief — and creator of the “Assignment: China” documentary series at University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute — recalls that the Chinese government essentially used foreign journalists to get out the message that it was open for business. One by one, the news outlets were allowed in to set up offices and travel to parts of China never before seen by outsiders. “The central tension,” Chinoy says, “has always been the desire for American journalists to penetrate beyond what the Communist Party wants them to see. That’s the central dynamic, but it has played out in different ways.” 

OUR CORRESPONDENT IN CHINA

When Fox Butterfield of The New York Times arrived in January 1979 to open the paper’s Beijing bureau, he was the first Times correspondent based in the country since F. Tillman Durdin, who had covered the Nanjing massacre in 1937 and the Chinese civil war in the mid 1940s. 

The 39-year-old Butterfield had been stationed in Hong Kong, the British colony that served as a key listening post for American media outlets trying to get information about the Communist country. But a diplomatic breakthrough that had begun with Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972 paved the way for the U.S. and China to normalize relations in 1979. And a byproduct of those talks was an agreement that allowed American journalists, after a three decade-long absence from China, to set up news bureaus in the capital, which was then called Peking.⁵The exchange of journalists was part of the cultural and other exchanges discussed by Deng’s team and the Carter White House. See here

“There was a mutually agreed-to exchange — the Chinese journalists could go to Washington, and we’d go to Beijing,” Butterfield told The Wire, referring to a deal that granted American news organizations access to China. “The normalization of relations was the key.”

Butterfield was joined in Beijing by Linda Matthews of The Los Angeles Times, and her husband, Jay Matthews, of The Washington Post. Frank Ching opened The Wall Street Journal’s bureau; Richard Bernstein — who had studied Chinese at Harvard — opened a bureau for Time magazine; Melinda Liu set up Newsweek; and John Roderick, who had reported from China in the 1940s, returned to the country to set up a bureau for the Associated Press.⁶Butterfield and Jay Matthews also studied Chinese at Harvard under the legendary China scholar John King Fairbank. 

Gathering the news, however, was not much easier than it had been from Hong Kong. Beijing considered the reporters a nuisance, even spies, and placed tight restrictions and surveillance on their activities. Journalists, for example, were barred from leaving Beijing’s city limits, and needed permission to travel to other parts of the country. Some of their sources were jailed and even sent to labor camps. Many of the journalists suspected their phones were tapped.

“Fox had his official interpreter, who we considered a spy,” says Jan Wong, a Canadian who worked for The Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail in China. “We’d sometimes leave him behind, but we were still followed.”

The living conditions were also less than ideal. At the time, China was impoverished, and the city of Beijing looked as if it had been frozen in a 1950s time capsule. With the capital short of housing, American journalists took up residence at the Peking Hotel, a dingy building located not far from Tiananmen Square that was infested with bats. A small hotel room served as the living quarters, while a second hotel room functioned as a news bureau, staffed by government-appointed minders and interpreters. 

In spite of the difficulties, over the next three decades, the American press corps produced a remarkable body of work that chronicled China’s breathtaking economic rise, and its transformation from a country whose per capita income in 1979 was on par with Haiti to a global superpower outfitted with skyscrapers and high-speed railways.

Some of the most striking work was done by journalists like Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; work that included bicycling to local hospitals to tally up casualties in the aftermath of the bloody massacre that occurred on June 4, 1989. Evan Osnos, of The New Yorker, wrote elegantly about the country’s economic drive, its economists and entrepreneurs, and a new “age of ambition.” Ian Johnson, who was at the Wall Street Journal at the time but later reported for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his depiction of the government’s suppression of the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement. And in 2017, Josh Chin and Liza Lin, wrote some of the earliest stories on China’s surveillance state for the Wall Street Journal. 

A young Matthew Pottinger was a China-based correspondent for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Years later, after serving in the military, Pottinger was named deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House, and influenced by his time as a reporter, promoted tougher policy measures against Beijing.

The American press corps, which would expand to include the major television networks, Bloomberg News and National Public Radio, braved constant government threats and harassment to write about dissidents and human rights activists and other topics that Beijing censored in the local media.

While the authorities gradually loosened restrictions on foreign journalists, they also carried out periodic crackdowns on the foreign press. John F. Burns of The New York Times and Melissa Chan of Al-Jazeera were expelled in 1986 and 2012, respectively; Zhao Yan, a Times researcher, was jailed in 2004 in what appeared to be retaliation for a Times exclusive that revealed some of the inner-workings of Beijing leadership change. Other foreign journalists were beaten, denied visas or forced to leave the country on trumped up suspicions of doing harm to China. But there was a general sense, among foreign press veterans, that reporting possibilities improved, ever so slightly, year by year. China, it seemed, was becoming more open. Until, that is, Xi Jinping came to power.

After Xi was named president in 2013, there was a fierce crackdown on corruption, but also on all forms of dissent and civil society. Lawyers, human rights activists and Chinese journalists were jailed, and in December of that year, Beijing threatened to expel the entire staff of The New York Times in China after its reporting on a decision by editors at Bloomberg News to kill a story about wealth tied to the relatives of Xi Jinping.

Executives at The Times appealed to the White House, and Edward Wong, the Beijing bureau chief, testified to a congressional body. He opened by citing a letter from the Times executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, who warned that the Chinese government had stepped up efforts to “shape news” and suppress reporting in unprecedented ways.

“The situation is the most serious in years and poses an urgent threat to our ability to report freely and comprehensively on the world’s second-largest economy,” Abramson wrote. “Most recently, Chinese officials have halted the regular year-end renewal process for the residency visas of nine Times journalists. If the renewal process does not go forward, these journalists and their families will be forced to leave China before the end of the year. With the first visas expiring in less than two weeks, the Times could be left without reporters in mainland China for the first time in nearly three decades.”

In the end, Beijing chose not to expel reporters on the final day of 2013.⁷Vice President Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping and with a group of American journalists to discuss the situation in Beijing in December 2013. Looking back, the exchanges played out like a dress rehearsal for 2020, when America’s trade war, sanctions and the Trump administration’s expulsions of diplomats and Chinese journalists presented another inflection point. Breaking radically with the government’s longstanding policy of tolerating while still intimidating the press, Xi did more than just threaten.

‘NOT BEING THERE’

On the morning of March 17 — just a few days after the Trump administration declared Covid-19 to be a national emergency — Su of the Los Angeles Times woke up to a flood of text messages saying that her colleagues at the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post had been thrown out of the country. There had been warning signs, but Su, along with the whole media community, was shocked.

With a new sense of urgency, Su hit the road, traveling to Inner Mongolia to write about ethnic crackdowns, to Xinjiang to write about the ongoing genocide, and to Yan’an, the stronghold of the Communist Party during the Chinese civil war, to profile Xi Jinping himself. 

The stakes are also higher for those journalists covering China without a visa. Sitting at their desks in Taipei, Seoul, Hong Kong, or even Washington, D.C., many reporters are using resources like open source documents and satellite imagery to replace in-person coverage. “If I still had access within China, of course it would be better. But the reality is that mobility in Xinjiang is limited anyway,” says Megha Rajagopalan, BuzzFeed’s former China bureau chief who was denied a visa in 2018 but continues to report on Xinjiang with satellite imagery investigations. “I wish I hadn’t lost my visa, but I am happy I have found other ways to report.”

I miss getting on a plane or a train, despite the harassment. That is what journalism is all about… You miss something by not being there.

Steven Lee Myers, the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times who is now reporting from Seoul

The editing operations of the major news outlets have also experienced upheaval. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have large editing operations in Hong Kong, which historically has had better press freedoms. But with Beijing’s power ever encroaching in the special administrative region, culminating in last summer’s passage of the National Security Law, The Times has announced plans to move its Asia news hub from Hong Kong to Seoul.

“I miss getting on a plane or a train, despite the harassment. That is what journalism is all about,” says Steven Lee Myers, the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times who is now reporting from Seoul after being forced to leave China in April. Recalling the words of the late R.W. Apple Jr, a distinguished New York Times editor and correspondent, Myers adds, “In his gruff way, he would say, ‘Always go to briefings.’ You miss something by not being there.”

And what’s missing is critical to understanding China, many journalists say. “From abroad, you can still cover the big picture politics,” says Bill Birtles, the reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) who fled China in September. “But the big problem is that China is not just a political story, there is a human element that you see everyday.”

This distinction may seem subtle, but Covid-19 provides a perfect illustration of the benefit, and necessity, of on-the-ground reporting. “Think back a year about the coverage coming out of Wuhan — there was great stuff about what life was like,” says Marcus Brauchli, the former executive editor of The Washington Post and a longtime Wall Street Journal editor and correspondent who served in China. The New York Times’ Chris Buckley, for example, slipped into Wuhan before the city was sealed off. He told the story of Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor who tried to warn the world about the virus. Buckley also documented shortages of medical equipment in the besieged city and reported on how residents were coping with the first no-holds-barred lockdown. “Now, all they can do is try to cobble together reconstructions from the outside,” Brauchli adds.

The saga of Jack Ma, for example, has riveted the global business community, and left many observers scrambling for hints to what has happened to the most famous face of corporate success in China. In November, Ma was forced to cancel the highly anticipated IPO of Ant Group after his public criticisms of Chinese regulators drew the ire of Xi Jinping. Ma subsequently disappeared from public view, leaving many in the business, political and even academic communities wondering about his fate and what his punishment means.

“That is the kind of thing that foreign journalists could get,” says Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and chair of the 21st Century China Center. “Even though the nature of the political system in China makes people scared to leak, if journalists were on the ground, seeing people face-to-face, it would be easier. And it is really so significant, because the Jack Ma episode may have gotten caught up in elite politics.” 

While there is certainly more to the story, The Wall Street Journal’s Wei has been publishing scoop after scoop about the Jack Ma case from New York by relying on sources that she spent years cultivating while in China. “It is such a fascinating, epic battle between the state and an entrepreneur,” Wei says. “And it is too amazing of a story for me not to pursue.”

But what happens for the next big story? As reporters like Wei spend more time outside of China, sources on the inside will be harder to come by. And if the situation remains the same in years to come, the next generation of foreign journalists covering China, who never accumulated sources in the first place, will be in even more of a bind.

Local Chinese journalists, who have bravely reported for foreign outlets with little recognition, may also be less likely to do this work, especially after incidents like Haze Fan’s detention. “You can’t underestimate what a difficult and gutsy thing it is for them to do,” says ABC’s Birtles of the Chinese reporters and researchers working for foreign news organizations. Without them, foreign reporters will be even more handicapped.

So how do we prevent the situation from getting to that dire point? Though many reporters and media outlets are critical of the Trump administration’s crude approach, and are hopeful that the Biden administration will offer some solutions, few agree on how to push past a stalemate. 

The only way to go forward is to say, ‘We get 150 reporters and you get 150.’ To go back to an unreciprocal situation would be idiocy.

John Pomfret, the author and former Washington Post reporter who served as Beijing bureau chief between 1997 and 2003

“Frankly the U.S. government miscalculated and misplayed their hand. They seemed to think that this strategy would force China to treat foreign correspondents better, but it only gave them the green light to kick them out,” says Steven Butler, the Asia program coordinator for Committee to Protect Journalists. “Hopefully there will now be a rational approach that sets realistic goals.” 

Some hope the new administration will take a page out of the Cold War playbook, when the U.S. struck a deal with the Soviet Union to allot each country an equal number of journalist visas. “The only way to go forward is to say, ‘We get 150 reporters and you get 150,’ ” says John Pomfret, the author and former Washington Post reporter who served as Beijing bureau chief between 1997 and 2003. “To go back to an unreciprocal situation would be idiocy. We are at a moment when we can level the playing field.”

But some worry that a reciprocity framework risks embracing a zero-sum mentality. Though it may work for other issues in the bilateral economic relationship, reciprocity in media access is difficult to achieve. First, it may not be an even trade: American journalists in China dig up far more useful information than Chinese state media journalists do in the United States. And second, the U.S. and China have vastly different ideas about both the treatment of journalists and even who qualifies as a journalist.

Other experts say the U.S. shouldn’t frame it as a media dispute but as a market access issue. American media companies, this argument goes, are competitively disadvantaged if they can’t collect and distribute information in China. “Chinese companies raise money in the U.S., so you can make the case that the SEC has the obligation to make sure we have access to information from journalists in China,” says Brauchli. “We should say, ‘If you want access to our capital markets, you have to give access to our journalists.’ ”

That may be a hard sell, since American journalists don’t just cover business and breaking news but also corruption, human rights and even political unrest. “Why would the Party want pesky investigative reporters running around,” asks Matthew Turpin, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and former U.S. National Security Council’s director for China. “I suspect it would be very tough to convince Xi Jinping to reverse his policies.” 

It is also unlikely to be high on his priority list. Media access is one small part of a large and increasingly thorny relationship between the U.S. and China. And the lack of resolution may be an ominous sign. 

“This is an interesting petri dish for whether we can cooperate on climate change, or nuclear proliferation, for example,” says Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “I don’t see any sign that the Chinese are moving toward a new equilibrium with journalists. And if you can’t solve this, you certainly can’t solve the trade issue.”

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