A story about the wealth of the Chinese President Xi Jinping's family helped precipitate a ban on new visas for journalists from the New York Times and Bloomberg News. Photograph by Feng Li / Getty

Last Wednesday, the Times published a front-page story about the movie and real-estate mogul Wang Jianlin, who is the richest man in Asia, worth an estimated thirty-five billion dollars. The former People’s Liberation Army foot soldier has become so powerful that, in 2013, he was able to commandeer Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman to China for the announcement of a new “movie metropolis,” with film studios, hotels, and a theme park. Wang’s success has also allowed close relatives of Communist Party officials to become tremendously wealthy: most notably, a longtime business associate of President Xi Jinping’s sister and brother-in-law holds shares in Wang’s Wanda empire that are now worth about two hundred and forty million dollars. The article was fascinating, and so, too, was its backstory: it had been in the works for three years, at first not at the Times but at Bloomberg News.

For journalists working in China, there is no more sensitive subject than the wealth of the top leadership; it poses more potential problems than anything one could write about Tibet or Taiwan or human rights. Back in 2013, when I was the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, we all knew, or thought we knew, that the families of Politburo members had gotten fabulously rich as the Chinese economy prospered. But we couldn’t prove it, and we couldn’t expect the heavily censored Chinese press to report it. So we were all chasing the money. In 2012, the New York Times published a major exposé on the family of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao, for which the reporter David Barboza won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. A few months earlier, a team of Bloomberg reporters, led by Michael Forsythe, had broken another big story, about the family of Xi Jinping, who was then in line to become China’s President.

The Chinese government responded by blocking all new journalist-visa applications from the Times and Bloomberg. Existing staff members could have their visas renewed (it makes bad headlines to expel reporters), but no new hires would be allowed to reside in the country. This is the reason that readers so often see Hong Kong and Taiwan datelines on stories about China. The ongoing ban on new visas for Times and Bloomberg journalists has become a diplomatic issue, raised by both President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joseph Biden during recent visits to Beijing.

While reporting the story about Xi Jinping’s family, Forsythe and his colleagues at Bloomberg stumbled upon a skein of financial ties between Politburo members and Wang Jianlin. They were preparing to publish a story on the connections in late 2013, but it was reportedly spiked. According to a widely publicized account of a conference call between Bloomberg offices in New York and Hong Kong, Matthew Winkler, then the editor-in-chief, likened the decision not to publish the story to the self-censorship of foreign news bureaus that wanted to continue reporting in Nazi Germany.

“If we run the story, we will be kicked out of China,’’ Winkler told the reporters on the conference call, according to the Times, which trumpeted the story of Bloomberg’s capitulation to the Chinese Communist Party on its front page on November 9, 2013. A few days later, as the story was making headlines around the world, Forsythe was suspended, in part for leaking details of the Bloomberg deliberations. Bloomberg editors didn’t explain Forsythe’s suspension or comment much other than to say that the story was still “active,’’ implying that it needed more work.

Nobody knew exactly what was in the unpublished story, beyond that it was about the movie tycoon and Xi Jinping, but it became legendary among journalists. (As a member of the press corps at that time, I know most of the people involved.) As Howard French, a former Times reporter, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, something far larger than Bloomberg’s reputation was at stake; the controversy was part of “the ongoing struggle between authoritarian China, an incipient superpower, and the international media over control of news in a country that is not only the world’s most populous but will soon be its largest economy.’’

Forsythe, who left Bloomberg in November, 2013, joined the Times early the next year and continued reporting on China. His story this week on Wang Jianlin made no reference to the one he had reported at Bloomberg. People involved say that Forsythe could not use the research he had gathered while working for Bloomberg and re-reported the story, benefitting from the fact that Wang’s companies had recently filed I.P.O.s on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

“Michael [Forsythe] both reported and wrote that story during the time he worked for the Times. It is one of several pieces he has done on related subjects since joining the Times a year and a half ago,’’ Joseph Kahn, the Times foreign editor, wrote in an e-mail, in response to a question about the story.

Forsythe said he is not permitted to comment about the original story because of confidentiality agreements he signed during his departure from Bloomberg. But on Twitter, as @PekingMike, he thanked former Bloomberg colleagues who had worked on the spiked piece.

“3 more bylines on the Wanda story belong to my former Bloomberg colleagues,’’ he tweeted on April 28th.

The Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet said that the company declined to comment.

The Times story—carefully written and edited and no doubt well-lawyered—simply says that as Wang got rich, so did his early investors, who included close relatives of several Communist Party officials. It does not allege that officials granted Wang special favors or that he paid them bribes. The most interesting investor was Xi’s sister, Qi Qiaoqiao, who with her husband, Deng Jiagui, acquired Wanda shares for $28.6 million in 2009 that are worth two hundred and forty million dollars now. Qi and Deng transferred the shares to a business associate in October, 2013, around the same time that Bloomberg reporters were requesting comment on the story.

For Xi Jinping, who has made an anticorruption drive the central feature of his Presidency (as described in this magazine by Evan Osnos), the revelation that his sister and brother-in-law were major investors in Wang’s companies is an embarrassment. As he climbed the ranks of the Communist Party, Xi was known to dissuade officials from letting their relatives engage in suspect-looking business transactions. “Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends, and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain,’’ he told officials during a 2004 conference call, according to a story Forsythe wrote for Bloomberg. Indeed, Qi and her husband began selling off or transferring millions of dollars’ worth of investments in 2012, as Xi was about to be elevated to general secretary of the Communist Party, the Times suggests, in order to reduce his vulnerability.

The entire episode of the Wang Jianlin story was devastating to Bloomberg’s investigative team. At least five Bloomberg reporters and editors resigned as a result. Shortly after the controversy, Michael Bloomberg finished his third term as New York City mayor and returned to the helm of Bloomberg L.P. According to people familiar with Bloomberg's efforts, he made expansion in China a priority for the company and asked well-connected friends to advocate for the company in China on his behalf. In one of his last interviews as mayor, Bloomberg told Forbes that his plans for the year ahead were to play golf in New Zealand and Hawaii and to “end up in China to give some speeches on behalf of the company.”

Whatever efforts Michael Bloomberg made appear to be paying off. Shai Oster, a prize-winning Bloomberg investigative reporter who worked with Forsythe on the Wang story, received a temporary reporting visa from China in April. At least two other Bloomberg reporters have told colleagues that they expect to get visas to relocate to Beijing. So far, no relief appears in the offing for the Times. The animosity between the Times and Bloomberg News over the episode has been so intense that editors from the two media organizations have rarely attended meetings together over the visas.

Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, who has been working on the visa problem, said that this animosity has prolonged the blockade. “It is unfortunate that media outlets have not found a way to stand together on these issues,’’ Schell said.