Is that just paranoia? Perhaps. But recent history provides plenty of examples of government intrusion into the affairs of overseas journalists and their employees. It was only in 2007 that Zhao Yan, a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times, emerged from three years of detention after he was convicted of fraud. The unrelated accusations that led to his arrest — that he had revealed state secrets — were based on a Times article that correctly predicted the impending retirement of a senior Chinese leader. The state secrets charge, which was far more serious than fraud, eventually was dismissed, but not before the prosecutors introduced documents that had come from a desk in the Times office — an indication that we were never truly alone.

Even now, Western news organizations complain when their employees are called in for tea-drinking sessions with security personnel who ask about the stories they are working on.

The antagonism and surveillance, by most accounts, have become less harsh and blatant over the years. The nadir may have been in 1967, when one of the first foreign reporters allowed into the country, Anthony Grey, a British correspondent for Reuters, spent more than two years confined to a room of his Beijing home. Accused of being a spy but never formally charged, his detention was widely thought to be retaliation for the arrest of Chinese journalists in Hong Kong, then a British colony. They had been detained during a protest, and were released long before he was.

When the author and journalist Orville Schell arrived in 1975, in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution, fear effectively deterred Chinese citizens from having any meaningful interaction with foreigners, whose reputations had been thoroughly maligned by a decade of extravagant anti-Western propaganda. Mr. Schell said that the few times he wandered away from his minders, security officers would find him and escort him back to his hotel.

On one occasion, after he managed to chat up a man tending an apple orchard in Shanxi Province, Mr. Schell was pronounced sick and locked in his accommodations, which at the time happened to be a cave. Even when he managed to pose questions to pedestrians, his queries were often waved away or ignored. “People were almost completely standoffish and unreceptive,” he said. “We foreigners lived in a bubble.”

Restrictions and attitudes relaxed during the reforms of the 1980s but then tightened up again after the student-led protests of 1989 ended in a violent crackdown. Nicholas Kristof, then the Times Beijing correspondent along with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, recalls early morning jogs shadowed by a small caravan of vehicles. “Sometimes they weren’t very subtle,” he said. “We had lists of all the license plates of the cars that were following us.”

Although Mr. Kristof said they learned to evade some of the monitoring by sneaking out of their building through a stairwell or speaking in code to arrange interviews, he was devastated to find out that one of his closest friends, a Chinese journalist, was actually working as a government spy. “We didn’t really get used to it,” he said of the surveillance. “We were always terrified that a Chinese friend would get into trouble and we had some close calls.”