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of regulations, many of them unwritten. A 2017 report by the Foreign Correspondents’
Club of China notes that in a survey of 117 foreign journalists based in China,
40 percent felt reporting conditions had deteriorated compared to 2016, nearly half said
they had experienced harassment, interference, and physical violence during their work
in China, while 15 percent said they encountered difficulties during their visa renewal
process and over 25 percent said they had learned that Chinese contacts had been
detained and otherwise hounded by Chinese authorities for speaking with them.52

China has also moved against Western media outlets on many fronts. Both Chinese-
and English-language websites of the New York Times have been blocked in China since
2012 following a story detailing the wealth of the family of China’s then premier Wen
Jiabao.53 The English- and Chinese-language sites of the Wall Street Journal and Reuters
are also blocked, and those belonging to the Financial Times and the Economist are
blocked on an intermittent basis.

The Chinese government has also made it difficult for resident foreign reporters to
obtain and renew journalist visas. Following the New York Times’ report on Wen’s
family money, China did not approve a new journalist visa for a Times reporter for
three years. While the situation has improved somewhat since 2015 for resident
journalists, the Chinese government still delays visa applications for journalists and
uses the threat of expulsion from China as a way to pressure Western media outlets
to soften their coverage of China. This is especially true of freelance journalists or
independent documentary filmmakers who are dependent on onetime visas to carry
out a specific assignment. Here delays and outright refusal to process visas in a timely
manner have been common.

There is some indication that China’s pressure tactics have paid off. In 2013,
Bloomberg News was preparing to publish a report detailing connections between one
of China’s richest men and members of the Politburo—the top organ in the Chinese
Communist Party, when Bloomberg spiked the story. The outlet’s editor in chief,
Matthew Winkler, was quoted on a conference call likening the decision to censorship
of foreign news bureaus that wanted to continue to report in Nazi Germany.54 Other
observers noted that the real reason Bloomberg News killed the story involved the
company’s substantial business interests—especially in “Bloomberg Boxes” selling
access to financial information—in China. Indeed, the organization’s founder
recently doubled down on China and now even headlines a new forum focusing on
China’s global influence with a state-owned Chinese partner.55 (Interestingly, the

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