There are fewer U.S. journalists working in China now than at any point since the two countries normalized relations in the 1970s. Today, the New York Times has one reporter in the country, the Wall Street Journal two, soon to be one, and the Washington Post none.
Features editor Tom Mitchell and reporter Eliot Chen return to the podcast to discuss Eliot’s investigation into why the journalist population in China has struggled to rebound. While Beijing doesn’t seem to mind this turn of events, the dearth of reporters on the ground in China means the world knows much less about what happens there — a challenge we aim to overcome here at The Wire China.
Transcript
Tom: Hello and welcome to the Wire China podcast. I’m Tom Mitchell, The Wire’s Features Editor.
In the podcast, we aim to take you behind the scenes of the stories we cover in our weekly magazine. This week, I’m joined by our staff writer Eliot Chen in Toronto. Eliot writes about the decline and fall of the foreign correspondent corps in China. When Donald Trump arrives in Beijing on May 14th, there will be far fewer foreign correspondents based in the Chinese capital than there were on his last visit there in 2017.
When I worked in Beijing from 2013 to 2020 for the Financial Times, the major U.S. newspapers and wire services had anywhere from half a dozen to dozens of reporters working in China. Now the New York Times has one reporter in the country, the Wall Street Journal, two, soon to be one, and the Washington Post, none. The wires, too, are struggling to obtain visas for their journalists.
Later in this episode, we’ll hear a clip from our Q&A conversation with Sebastian Mallaby on why the U.S. should be ready to abandon its semiconductor export controls if doing so can help secure an AI safety deal with China. Sebastian Mallaby is a longtime financial journalist and a fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
As ever, you can read these stories and much more on our website, thewirechina.com. But first, Eliot. Hello, Eliot.
Today, we’re discussing your article on the foreign correspondent crisis in China, although the Chinese government probably doesn’t consider fewer foreign reporters working in the country to be a crisis by any means. The article will go online this Sunday, May 10th, around 5 o’clock New York time. To get this story and the rest of our issue in your inbox this weekend, you can sign up for our free newsletter via the subscribe link in the episode description.
So, Eliot, what happened? The best reporters flock to the best stories, and China, I’ve always believed, is one of the best stories of the century. But the number of foreign correspondents there has fallen dramatically over the past five, six years.
Eliot: Tom, like you mentioned right at the start, the number of foreign correspondents in China has fallen to record low figures, driven in large part by the decline of the number of people reporting there for American newspapers.
As you mentioned, among the big three newspapers, the Times, the Journal, and the Post, they will collectively soon be down to just two reporters in China, the lowest number since relations between the U.S. and China were normalized in the 1970s. The quick background to this is that there was a collapse in the number of reporters in China in 2020 during COVID, after the U.S. and China launched a set of tit-for-tat expulsions towards the tail end of the first Trump administration. Then there was this very brief replenishment in 2022, when the two countries under Biden reached a deal to admit nine reporters each back into each other’s countries.
But now, four years later, thanks to attrition and a lack of new approvals, those numbers are even lower than they were at that point during the pandemic. The consequence of this is that, of course, it affects the quality and the type of coverage of China that the rest of the world gets to read. For this piece, I spoke to seven current or recently departed China correspondents, all of them agreeing to speak on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the topic, and also because they didn’t have approval from their employers.
But I tried to get a sense from them of what is so important about being in China and what gets lost from not being there. And while it is true that there is just less you can do on the ground in China these days as a reporter, access is harder to get by, fewer people are willing to talk to you, but nonetheless, reporting there still offers more than just color for your story. I spoke to one correspondent who was saying they were, for example, in recent weeks, initially inclined to write one of the many pieces that we’ve seen online, talking about how China is winning the Iran war.
But then they went to Guangdong and spoke to factory workers who are getting absolutely crushed by the rise in prices for materials due to the increase in fuel costs. And that totally changed their perspective on whether China is really winning from this conflict. That’s the kind of story that reporters with visas in China can do. And that’s what’s important about being there and what’s getting lost.
Tom: Let’s go back to early 2020, because the first thing that happens then is the Wall Street Journal runs an opinion piece with a headline that the Chinese government and a lot of Chinese readers found offensive. The Chinese government responded to that by expelling three Wall Street Journal news reporters who had nothing to do with this particular column.
But that seemed to be kind of a one-off thing. I think also not accidentally, the three reporters it expelled were very good reporters, all very good Chinese speakers, all really kind of threats to the regime, as it were. But then the Trump administration did something pretty remarkable, right? What did the Trump administration do to Chinese reporters working in Washington?
Eliot: So there were two big things that happened in sort of rapid succession in the early part of 2020.
And I suppose if you’re not in the news industry, if you’re not following China closely, of course there was so much else going on during this time that it got somewhat overshadowed. But they were a big deal for China and for the U.S. press corps nonetheless. So the first one was that the State Department designated five Chinese media outlets, including Xinhua News Agency, CGTN, their main TV station, China Daily, People’s Daily, and one other, as operatives of the Chinese state.
And what that means is that they’re saying these are not just regular newspapers with regular reporters conducting journalism, but rather they are working on behalf of the Chinese government, exerting influence on behalf of the Chinese government, and potentially conducting intelligence operations in the U.S. Now, some of this stuff is well known, and there is evidence to sort of support some of these claims. But nonetheless, the decision to do that was incredibly inflammatory, no doubt really angered Beijing. And the second thing that they did was that a month after this designation, they cut the number of Chinese journalist visas that could be issued to these five outlets from 160 total to 100, and then sort of said to the five outlets, like you figure out among yourselves after this cut who you want to take out of the U.S. Again, the justification for that was in part due to these, you know, alleged concerns around influence and intelligence operations.
But also the State Department said it was supposed to be a move to punish China for impinging press freedoms of foreign reporters in China. And so there’s some questionable logic here that others have sort of disputed about whether punishing China for apparently hurting press freedom in China will let them, lead them to open up a bit more, and in retrospect they did not. But long story short, these two actions resulted in retaliation from Beijing.
And we saw this tit for tat response where China expels about a dozen reporters from The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Post, which has a far greater effect on the number of U.S. reporters in China, because that basically halved their numbers. And so that was the sort of instigating action that resulted in the lower number of reporters that we see today.
Tom: Yeah, I actually think the Chinese government was, well, at least some people in the Chinese government were really happy when the Trump administration did this because it gave them an excuse to expel a lot of very good reporters working for American media organizations in China.
You also write in the article about the recent expulsion of a New York Times reporter from China. Who was that and what happened there?
Eliot: In February of this year, the Chinese government expelled a New York Times correspondent from China, the first expulsion of a U.S. reporter since those tit for tat expulsions in 2020. So the reporter in question is Vivian Wang, and I spoke to six people who are familiar with this issue, who sort of confirmed this expulsion.
And Wang was one of two remaining Times correspondents in China until earlier this year. And so the cited reason, apparently, for why the Chinese government expelled her was because the New York Times, in its Dealbook Summit, which is organized by an entirely different group of folks from the China team, invited the Taiwanese president, Lai Ching-te, to an interview at the summit in December of last year. So the background to this is that in the last few months, the Chinese authorities have escalated retaliation against foreign media outlets that have engaged with Lai.
So the Times is not the only one that this has happened to. I also spoke to folks who are familiar with what’s gone on that say that the government retaliated against AFP, the French headquartered newswire, after it interviewed Lai in March, denying it access to cover the two sessions meetings that same month. But that all being said, and perhaps sort of similar to what we saw in 2020, a couple of people familiar with what’s gone on say that the Dealbook justification was probably just a pretext to remove Wang after Chinese officials had just grown unhappy with her reporting over time.
And so they saw this as a convenient reason to push her out. We have approached the New York Times for comment, but have yet to get back from them.
This is also an issue that the Foreign Correspondents Club in China has raised. So they put out a statement last month, unsigned, which was saying that unnamed news organizations are being affected by impingements on press freedom, including one denial, people being denied to official events, but these news outlets are also not speaking out about what’s going on. And in the FCCC’s view, this is actually quite harmful because it prevents people from being able to deter the Chinese government from doing this in the future. I’ve also talked to ex-State Department officials who say that the issue is if the news outlets themselves don’t speak out, the embassy, the government also can’t speak out on your behalf and advocate for you.
And so the news vacuum on this is something that others are also not happy with.
Tom: It seems that the Trump administration doesn’t think that this is a very big problem, but the Biden administration did at least take some steps to address it. What did the Biden officials do in terms of trying to get more American reporters back into China?
Eliot: So for this story, I talked to a former senior U.S. government official who was involved in these negotiations to try and get journalists back into China to try and understand how that 2022 deal came about.
The Biden administration came into office. It had this question, which is one, how do you create leverage in order to get U.S. reporters back into China? And two, how do you create a system that prevents China from sort of picking and choosing its preferred reporters and only allowing sort of quote-unquote safe correspondence to enter the country? The officials looked actually back into history to the Soviet Union and relations between the U.S. and the USSR and how the reporter visa process worked during the Cold War. And they found that there was this model back then that was actually not apparently related to the government or either government at all.
It was self-regulated by the journalists themselves. And of course, the Soviet journalists have connections to the government. But the self-regulating system was one in which visas were issued between the two countries on a one-for-one reciprocal basis in chronological order of application, which is to say it’s sort of first-come, first-served.
The next person in line for a visa gets approved on a reciprocal basis. And in doing so, that sort of ensured that each government could only sort of approve the next person in line rather than picking and choosing which reporter they like more. And so the Biden people looked at that model and said, can we recreate a similar system, not just with China, but then between China and a bunch of other like-minded countries, including, for example, the Five Eye allies, including Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand.
And the reason for that is because even among U.S. outlets, not all the foreign correspondents who work for, say, the New York Times are American. Chris Buckley at the New York Times, currently based in Taipei, is Australian. And so can we bring Australia into the system as well? Because we can’t advocate on behalf of an Australian as the U.S. government.
And so this idea got floated to the Chinese foreign ministry. Apparently, they’re initially receptive. But in the end, the entire process gets bogged down over internal bureaucratic entanglements in both countries.
So on the Chinese side, the security apparatus, the MSS, which is much more powerful than the foreign ministry, was apparently just never thrilled about this idea for perhaps explainable reasons. And then even within the foreign ministry, the team that negotiated this deal with State was slightly different from the information office, which tends to oversee the journalist visa issuance process. And so there are internal fights over there.
Then on the U.S. side, there were disagreements between State and the Department of Homeland Security. And so eventually, just because of a lack of coordination, apparently this whole deal falls apart. In the end, they sort of had to retreat to just a one-off visa deal that saw nine journalists from the U.S. and nine journalists from China approved to each other’s countries.
Tom: And we’re not expecting the Trump visit to lead to any breakthroughs in this area?
Eliot: Some people have been hopeful. It’s certainly one of those things that you could see as a concrete deliverable that the two sides could boast of. But from all of the folks that I’ve talked to to report this piece, there’s no indication that this is something that is on the State Department, on the White House’s radar.
Tom: Eliott, thanks very much. It’s a fascinating subject for us journalists. For more on this story and others, please do go to thewirechina.com. Also in this week’s issue, our cover story is by Taipei-based author Chris Horton on how tensions with China are bringing Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan closer together.
Bob Davis writes about a new China-U.S. Board of Trade that the Trump and Xi administrations are discussing and in the big picture. Savannah Billman, also our podcast producer, profiles AI glasses maker, Lingban Technology Hangzhou Company, aka Rokid.
We’ll leave you now with an excerpt from Sebastian Mallaby on why the U.S. and China need to talk seriously about AI safety. Thanks for listening.
Sebastian: If you can’t get a safety deal with China, the second best thing is to be ahead of China. So I think it’s not simply, oh yeah, we need to speak to China and do a deal.
Yes, that would be the best thing in theory. In practice, can we do it? Not clear. And in the meantime, if we can’t do it, China is competitive bordering on the enemy because it’s not really competing with us.
It’s also taking our intellectual property in various ways. I didn’t say stealing because I’m not sure that distillation is stealing, but it’s taking that intellectual property and using it for both a commercially competitive process and potentially a geopolitically competitive intent.
