Longtime New York Times China reporter Chris Buckley traveled to Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, on the day the city went into lockdown. It was January 2020.
“In retrospect, it sounds crazy,” Buckley said. He went prepared with masks and a healthy sense of caution, but he never predicted that what he saw during those weeks would still grip the world three years later.
“It was a big story, and I like to cover big stories. It’s exciting. It’s fulfilling. And I hope it didn’t make me reckless,” Buckley told VOA. “I wanted to be part of what was going to be a big story.”
His visa was about to expire, and the Chinese government had already told him they wouldn’t renew it. That meant the start of the pandemic was among the last big stories Buckley was going to be able to report from inside China before he left that spring.
Beijing has expelled or declined to renew visas for several foreign correspondents in recent years. China in 2020 said it was responding to the previous U.S. administration decision to cap the number of visas for staff at state-run Chinese media and designate their outlets “foreign missions.”
When Buckley got off the train in Wuhan, he didn’t find any more security than normal — which made some parts of the assignment easier than he had expected.
“It was difficult reporting, but it wasn’t constrained by being followed or anything like that. It was constrained by people being worried [about the virus],” he told VOA from Taiwan, where he currently lives.
Buckley, who has covered China for over two decades, is among the correspondents whose stories from the 1940s to today make up a new book — Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.
“If we want to understand China, we should care about who is reporting about China,” said Katherine Wilhelm, who reported in China for various outlets between 1987 and 2001 and is also featured in the book. “How do they experience the process of gathering information on a day-to-day basis? It helps to see how the sausage is made.”
Assignment China was written by CNN’s first Beijing bureau chief Mike Chinoy.
“The way in which journalists for the American media have covered China has had a huge impact in the way most Americans understand or misunderstand China,” Chinoy told VOA. “The American media organizations’ coverage of China has had a disproportionate impact in shaping perception of China all around the world.”
Chinoy wanted to help readers better understand what he sees as the “particular challenges of trying to cover a story as challenging and complicated and as hugely important as China is.”
That goal was important to Chinoy in light of tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Chinoy served as CNN’s Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to 1995. It was a period that “went from relatively relaxed to extremely repressive during and after Tiananmen Square, to becoming relatively relaxed again,” Chinoy said.
“On the night of the [Tiananmen Square] crackdown, my live reporting was all done on a telephone line that we kept open on the balcony of the Beijing Hotel because we didn’t have a cellphone,” Chinoy said. Following the 1989 crackdown was a period of intense restrictions that made it harder to report until 1992, he said.
The most promising period for foreign reporters in China, according to Melissa Chan, was in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Chan began reporting in China in 2006 and worked there as a correspondent for Al Jazeera until 2012, when she was expelled from the country.
She was the first foreign reporter to be told to leave the country in over a decade.
“It was pretty big news at the time,” Chan, now an independent journalist based in Berlin, told VOA. “Today, we’ve lost track of the number of reporters who’ve lost their credentials and have had to leave.”
China’s Washington embassy did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson, however, has previously dismissed claims of a closed media environment, saying, “as long as foreign journalists abide by the law and do reporting in compliance with the law and regulations, there is no need to worry.”
Even before Chan was forced to leave, the relative freedom that foreign journalists briefly enjoyed had begun to decline, she said.
During a 2011 reporting trip to the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where Beijing is accused of genocide against Uyghurs, Chan was tailed by two cars the entire time.
“It was becoming unbearable, particularly for TV crews,” she said.
Those difficulties strike at the heart of the book, Chinoy said, which is “the never-ending struggle between American journalists seeking to penetrate the veil of secrecy that has enshrouded China for so long, and get a better understanding of Chinese reality.”
For Wilhelm, who now leads the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University’s law school, reporting in China gave a sense, “all day, every day, that you were swimming upstream, or swimming against the tide, trying to find out things in a system that really didn’t want you to find them out.”
Despite the barriers, which have multiplied in recent years, Buckley said that for media to cover the news on China effectively, they need to be inside China.
Reporting from the countryside is one of the things Buckley misses most about being based in China. But that’s become harder to do, he said.
“Ultimately it means people abroad don’t get that more textured sense about what life is like in China,” Buckley said. “And that’s a loss.”
In the short term, the Chinese government may be relieved to have fewer foreign journalists, especially from American outlets, said Buckley. But those potential benefits won’t last forever.
“Longer term, if readers, if audiences are deprived of a fuller understanding of what’s happening in China, that space where information can’t be shared is going to be filled with distortions and rumors and more misunderstandings,” he said.
