Paul Mooney, the journalist who recently was denied a visa for Reuters, doesn’t know when he crossed the line. It could have been his reporting on AIDS or Tibet, or the fact that he worked on the dissident Chen Guangcheng’s English-language memoir. He told me that he didn’t pull his punches in China, simply because he didn’t see the point of being there if he couldn’t write what he wanted. Other Americans advised him to be more pragmatic. “Even over the past year, waiting for my visa to come through, journalist friends, academics and China watchers said to me, stop posting critical things on Facebook,” he said. Many foreign journalists do their Chinese visa applications in December, to get them in before the end of the year. Mooney told me that a European journalist approached him for an interview recently but did not plan to write a story until after his own visa had been renewed. “How many foreign journalists are doing the same thing every year at this time, or are now doing this throughout the year?” Mooney wondered.

Countless Chinese journalists do this all the time. Of course, for them the stakes are much higher: They could end up behind bars. “Self-censorship is in my blood,” an outspoken Chinese Internet dissident once proudly told me. His years of carefully dancing around political land mines kept him out of exile or jail. Murong Xuecun, a writer and an increasingly bold critic, recently admitted: “I often remind myself: Don't engage in self-censorship, and I was confident I had succeeded in this, but so far I have not yet written a single article about Tibet issues, even though I lived in Llasa for three years; nor have I openly discussed Xinjiang issues, even though they are of great concern to me.”

This is not to say that all Western reporters censor themselves in China. Over the past year or so, there has been startlingly bold reporting. Oft-cited examples include David Barboza’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporting on the riches acquired by the family of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and somewhat ironically, Bloomberg’s own investigation into the wealth of the relatives of President Xi Jinping. Those news organizations paid a price for their reporting, but others write on sensitive topics and emerge unscathed. In 2010, Evan Osnos, former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, did a profile of the Dalai Lama, and he didn’t get the boot. Some writers are less fearful of expulsion because they are not career China hands, or perhaps because they are China hands who have just had enough. Jeremy Goldkorn, a Beijing-based blogger and the director of the research firm Danwei, told me, “Every time I apply for a visa or leave the country and come back in, the thought always passes through my mind that maybe this time it’s not going to work. But I've been in China for so long, that I’m thinking it would be a good thing if they kicked me out.”

These examples don’t paint a complete picture of Western writing on China, however. Furthermore, writers who do calibrate their criticism are not necessarily moral cowards with Chinese business interests at heart. Some fear that if they are kicked out of China, they will lose touch with the ever-changing realities on the ground. This makes it harder to accurately convey those realities to the outside world, and to write prose that will resonate with Chinese readers. Today an article by the foreign press can be translated into Chinese and go viral on the mainland, something that was inconceivable ten years ago. A post with a Chinese translation of an article I wrote for this publication, on a sensitive attempted murder mystery no less, soared to #1 on Weibo, where it was retweeted over 125,000 times. Despite a strict censorship regime, the power of social media helps explain why Chinese authorities are so nervous about Western reporting.