If this revelation is disappointing, that’s because censorship in China remains murky even to those who deal with it every day. Moxley describes being told to write stories that were later rewritten or nixed at the last second, having entire countries banished from the news pages based on political caprice, and generally having no idea what was going on behind the scenes from one moment to the next.

How common was Moxley’s experience? According to David Green, a British journalist who worked at a China Daily supplement around the same time, very.

“The way it was presented to us was that we were going there to advise them on how best to produce a newspaper,” remembers Green, who came to Beijing right out of Journalism school. “But when we got there we realized that we were really just meant to deal with language, and the whole idea of production process and news values, they just didn’t want to hear it.” At government-owned papers like China Daily or Global Times, foreign journalists served mostly as polishers, with little meaningful input beyond grammar and sentence structure. “[A]lthough I’d had hopes of serving in a mentor role to the Chinese reporters, imbuing them with all the vast wisdom I’d gained in journalism school and in my brief career as a reporter, nobody at China Daily seemed especially interested in what I had to say,” Moxley comments in his book. “Foreign experts’ editorial suggestions were routinely ignored; we had next to no input about what went into the paper.”

While this wasn’t universally true for foreigners working at China Daily (Apologies mentions several Westerners who had achieved higher-up status in the organization; “scruple-less yes men,” as Green calls them), Moxley and Green say that English editors were generally shut out of the editorial process. Part of this had to do with the fact that foreigners weren’t allowed to serve as reporters, only as editors who could occasionally pitch stories, but there was a more basic issue: most didn’t speak Chinese, which meant that it was easy for the paper to keep them in the dark.

Cultural issues were also at play when it came to communication (or the lack thereof) regarding what was and wasn’t allowed. “China Daily is the only Chinese place I’ve ever worked at, but my impression is that they’re not huge fans of being super direct,” Moxley says. “I was never told by anyone what I could and couldn’t write … and whenever I did write about something sensitive, it would be changed without anyone talking to me about it, before or after.”

Ultimately, senior editors rely on a keen understanding of what will or won’t pass muster in order to keep the machine running smoothly at publications across China. In other words, self-censorship.

“It was everywhere,” Green says. “We would talk about it amongst ourselves before we’d have pitch meetings about whether things would fly or not.”