About (6): The assistants are sometimes daring individuals. However, some of the CVs journalists receive from job applicants are simply too good to be true. Generally, employees of foreign journalists in China need to be considered as having been compromised.

Overall, there is a up to a handful of minders for each foreign journalist in China.

For good measure, the Chinese embassies abroad collect everything that is published about China in their respective locations and report back to Beijing. Nothing escapes their zeal, everything a journalist has published is in her/his file.

Edged into communists mindset is, that they are besieged by hostile foreign forces. This paranoia is actually an important pillar, lack of which would cause severe cracks in their ideological structure. They absolutely can't conceive, that there is no guiding 'black hand' in the background, totally unthinkable.

On "our" side, journalism has changed. While in the 1980s, when asked what their purpose was, journalists tended to answer 'fair and true reporting'. In the 2000s this changed to 'uncovering scandals'. That is certainly a result of competitive pressures on the media, that was not as strong in the 1980s.

So here we have super-charged media, clashing with a hyper-paranoid regime. This can't go well.

This is not to say, that foreign correspondents should resign themselves to writing only about "lush places" in China, but relations used to be better and may be our media should think about, if there is something they could do to de-escalate, without sacrificing journalistic principles.