As a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, my job is to go places, meet people and ask them questions. Getting to know people and to learn about their lives and their work is the greatest privilege of the job. It can also be challenging; people don’t always want to talk, and it is often the details they don’t share that are the most interesting and newsworthy.
Occasionally, doing the job can feel like an impossible task. I am currently the Shanghai bureau chief responsible for covering China, but until March of this year, I had not been able to travel there for nearly five years. It’s not because I don’t want to. And it’s not for lack of trying—I have applied for a visa to get me back at every opportunity.
Four years ago, Chinese officials kicked out most of my colleagues and my peers working for American publications. Since the expulsions, the New York Times has received only one visa for a position in Beijing.
I do my job as best I can, interviewing people who have everything to lose and little to gain by talking to a foreign reporter. It’s difficult and often it’s frustrating. Communicating with people online can be tricky because the authorities monitor social media platforms.
For now, I work from Hong Kong, where I have lived for six years. But reporting in Hong Kong has also become much tougher since the summer of 2019.
That was when deep unrest brought more than a million people into the streets, worried that their way of life would change as Beijing began to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, a former British colony that had mostly operated with semi-autonomy after the British handed it back to China in 1997.
It had been an arrangement that set Hong Kong apart from the rest of China, affording its residents freedom of speech and assembly, and a boisterous and free press. It also allowed journalists like me to report freely.
Then a sweeping national security law enacted by Beijing in 2020 changed everything. It silenced dissenting voices. Many prominent protesters are now in jail or awaiting trial. The law has created an environment, just like in mainland China, where fewer and fewer people see any reason to speak on the record.
And yet, in spite of all the challenges, China remains one of the most important stories of this century. So when I finally got a short, two-week reporting visa in March, I hopped on a plane to Beijing, and then a train to Shanghai, where I spent every waking hour reporting.
Before I left, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It had been so long and much had changed since my last reporting trip in 2019. I shouldn’t have been worried. When I got there, I found that people were just as willing as before to share their stories.
Photos by Maud Boudoukian
