Using apps: Articles are published on apps targeting the Chinese-language market that have often been ignored by Chinese censors for weeks or months at a time, before being blocked. Often these apps are openly branded with the “New York Times” name.

Pushing news on social media: The New York Times’ official social-media accounts, as well as its reporters, are blocked by censors. But the company continues to publicize new articles on social-media accounts in China that are repeatedly shut down by the censors and reinvented under new names, in what one person familiar with the strategy described as a “cat-and-mouse game.” A Weibo search for “New York Times” turns up accounts like this one maintained by “Budo movie,” for example.

Syndicating to local websites and newspapers: Several domestic news outlets continue to purchase the rights to run New York Times stories, like QDaily.

At the same time, mainland Chinese readers continue to read The New York Times and other blocked news sites and social-media sites through virtual private networks (VPNs)—software that masks a user’s physical location—despite the government’s recent attempts to crack down on them. “I need to learn more about foreign news,” one 23-year-old university student from Guangzhou told Quartz. He reads the New York Times’ articles through a VPN on his mobile phone, and sometimes goes to the paper’s Facebook page instead of its website. “There’s no good international news outlet” in China, he said.

Times executives would not discuss the technical specifics of the company’s new strategy, except to say that there was one, and that it was working. “The only thing I can say is that we have a very strong tech team that works tirelessly to make our journalism accessible to readers in China,” Craig Smith, the paper’s managing director for China, told Quartz.

More than two years after the block, the New York Times’ online audience in China has rebounded, and is growing fast, Smith said. “We’re now back to about where we were before the restrictions set in October of 2012, and we’re still growing,” said Smith said, speaking specifically of readers of the Chinese-language version of the Times. He would not specify how big that audience was, beyond “millions” of unique users a month. Advertisers are showing interest in the Chinese-language website again, he added.

Figuring out how many readers The New York Times is actually attracting in mainland China is difficult, because so many are probably coming through a VPN. The Times estimates that as much of 80 percent of the traffic coming to its Chinese-language website is from China, based on the time of day that these readers arrive and reader surveys. China is the Times’ fourth-largest online market, Smith said, behind only the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain.