Despite squalls, I had watched China’s news media climate steadily improve since I first arrived there in 1980. I expected, and ultimately still expect, that trajectory to continue. Besides, The New York Times’s main website hadn’t had a problem in China since that meeting with President Jiang in 2001. That’s how I responded to worries from senior management that the China project might founder amid stiff political headwinds. None of us foresaw the authoritarian retrenchment that has since been enacted by the new president, Xi Jinping.

Phil and I set off on a mad dash that January, renting office space and hiring editors and translators and a tech team that would build the site to carry New York Times content to the Chinese world. It was fun and exciting. On June 28, 2012, we huddled around a computer as our tech team turned the site on.

The response from readers was heartening. Traffic soared, and fans on Sina weibo, the dominant social media platform of the day, grew even faster. But within hours we faced a harbinger of things to come: Suddenly the weibo account was blocked and soon it disappeared.

Things took a turn for the worse four months later when David Barboza published his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on the family finances of China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. The article, which came just ahead of the Communist Party Congress, infuriated the incoming administration as much as the outgoing one. Access to both the Chinese-language and main English-language New York Times sites was immediately blocked in China.

We embarked on a yearlong lobbying effort, hoping to get the block overturned. We met repeatedly with the State Council information office and the Foreign Ministry; we worked with the head of Xinhua news agency (a ministerial-level position) and the head of People’s Daily (another ministerial-level position); we spoke with Rupert Murdoch’s former government relations director, who has family ties to the Central Propaganda Department; we even tried back-channel negotiations with a series of intermediaries who claimed influence with people around President Xi. Of course, we tried at every opportunity to meet with President Xi himself, hoping for a repeat of the success with President Jiang.

The effort wasn’t without raised voices. At one point a young Foreign Ministry official sat forward in agitation and shouted to me, “I love my Party!” Nor was it without sarcasm. A State Council elder with bottle black hair asked if I was due a bonus if the sites were unblocked (I was not). And there were many corny conversations filled with metaphors about bridges.

None of it worked — and, as months turned to years, my initial, guarded optimism that we were witnessing a cautious new administration’s short-term consolidation of power gave way to resignation that we had been an early victim of a larger policy of information control that extended well beyond China’s borders.