China’s crackdown on journalists from The Times and other American news organizations is an unfortunate echo of the Cold War, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. The global spread of the coronavirus demands independent and trusted information from the country where the scourge began.

On Tuesday, China announced that it was expelling correspondents for The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and demanded that these organizations, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the government with detailed information about their operations. The actions were presented as retaliation for the Trump administration’s cap on the number of Chinese citizens working in the United States for five state-owned media outlets, and their designation as “foreign missions.”

The measures were redolent of Cold War clashes with the Soviet Union, when reporters often became victims of tit-for-tat expulsions over matters for which they carried no responsibility and over which they had no control.

The executive editors of The Times, The Post and The Journal all issued statements decrying the expulsion of their reporters at a time when reliable information about the coronavirus was essential to China, the United States and the world. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said it was “critical that the governments of the United States and China move quickly to resolve this dispute and allow journalists to do the important work of informing the public.”