China is one of the biggest stories in the world — and one of the most complex. That’s why The New York Times has always tried to have correspondents on the ground who can get under the surface and report out the nuances.
But the Chinese authorities have long been wary of foreign journalists. They restrict their access, surveil their movements and sometimes expel them outright. My colleague Vivian Wang, our brilliant China correspondent, recently had her visa revoked.
During her time in the country, she talked to a cross-section of Chinese society — migrant workers, academics, college students, retirees. Today, Vivian tells the story of how the Chinese authorities expelled her, what in her reporting made them unhappy and why being on the ground matters.
In February, I left my home in Beijing for a work meeting in Seoul. It was supposed to be a quick trip. I packed just a few days’ worth of clothes.
At the airport for my flight out, a border control officer looked at my passport, then at her screen, then back at me. She summoned another colleague, who asked me to follow him into a screened-off area.
There, he informed me that my visa had been canceled by order of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. I could get on my flight to Seoul, he said, but I could not come back.
It all took just a few minutes. I walked to my gate, stunned. I had been expelled from China.
There are some topics Beijing is obviously sensitive about: the personal lives of top leaders, for example, or large-scale human rights abuses, like the repression of ethnic minorities. I have reported on some of these issues, but they were by no means most of what I wrote about. My focus as a correspondent had been the lives of ordinary Chinese people, and how they processed the huge changes happening in their country.
But that reporting also got me in trouble. The Foreign Ministry had been threatening me for months, making false accusations about my reporting practices after I wrote about people’s experiences with surveillance or coronavirus lockdowns. I had been followed or physically blocked from doing interviews — even for totally innocuous stories, like one about a rock band.
So while my expulsion stunned me, I wasn’t totally surprised. The Chinese government is opaque. We don’t know exactly why it chose to cancel my visa. But what became clear throughout my time in China is that the old assumptions about what is “sensitive” no longer apply.
Big Brother is watching
I moved to Beijing in 2022, after waiting two years for a visa and reporting on mainland China from afar. I was thrilled to finally be on the ground. The stories I get most excited by are hard to report from the outside. I wanted to meet sheep herders making a living by livestreaming, recent graduates crashing in youth hostels while job hunting and young women discovering feminism while the government tried to suppress it.
I wanted to show the diversity and complexity of China, a country where huge progress and creativity sit side by side with intense inequality and authoritarianism.
I quickly learned that just about any story could be contentious. When I interviewed an organic farmer who moonlights as a rock star, local officials insisted on sitting in on the entire interview, interjecting whenever they felt he was about to say something negative. (In one case, it was just an observation that many of his neighbors still used pesticides.) Other times, police or plainclothes officials followed me as I tried to talk to people on the street, scaring off potential interviewees.
They could do that because of a system of extensive surveillance, which allowed the authorities to track whom I was messaging and where I was traveling. Sometimes, officials would already be waiting for me when I got off a flight or train.
Usually, these officials didn’t give an explicit reason for their interference. But the central government has made it increasingly clear that certain broad topics are off limits. As the economy has slowed, the government has warned that people who point that out might be national security threats. Censors have even targeted people who are “excessively pessimistic.”
So I was always deeply grateful to the people who still shared their stories with me. There was little upside for them — except helping others better understand their country.
Not black and white
In May, the Chinese government briefly let me back in to pack up my home, which had been unoccupied for four months. During my few weeks back, I was reminded of all the details of daily life that you just don’t see when you’re not in China — retirees watching A.I. anchors on the evening news, or taxi drivers complaining about being squeezed by ride-hailing platforms.
Without those details, outsiders might only look at China through the prism of its competition with the United States. Or they might only see the takes of influencers on how China is a futuristic wonderland of high-speed trains and skyscrapers. Neither of those stories is wrong — but they’re incomplete.
And I know that readers are hungry for a fuller picture. My stories always got people asking for more, precisely because the narrative about China has become so black and white.
My colleagues and I will still be trying to report those stories, though most of us are now outside the country. I’ll also be writing about Chinese people outside China and Beijing’s global influence. But there’s really no substitute for being there.
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That’s it for today. See you tomorrow! — Katrin
Vivian Wang was our guest writer today.
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