In 2008, Beijing Felt Like an Open Door. In 2022, It's Closed
said they “were told to leave a place or denied access for health and safety reasons when they presented no risk.”
“The 2008 games were, in effect, the end of the analog era in China. It was a period when the police—and the government more broadly—was on its back foot in terms of dealing with technology,” says. “As a journalist, that meant that we had this vast terrain geographically of places you could go, and also intellectually, a realm of people you could talk to, and be reasonably confident that they would not be getting in trouble for talking to you.
Foreign journalists turned up in droves. I took a train to the provincial capital of Chengdu, where I spoke to a doctor who worked for days on end at a hospital across the street from a school that collapsed. We met at a restaurant outside the city, where we ate bird heads, a local delicacy consumed by holding the head with plastic gloves and sucking the meat off the bone.
I can’t imagine attempting a similar trip today, which is a shame because the need for understanding China has only increased in recent years. Many in the West have looked with increasing alarm at the country’s authoritarian turn under President Xi Jinping, the walk back of democracy in Hong Kong, and an ongoing campaign of surveillance, detention, and cultural assimilation in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang.
, such as when a patchwork of individual credit-scoring systems spiraled into a dystopian all-encompassing social credit system in Western media accounts.
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