WUHAN, China — When we landed in China early this week, we hadn’t realized that a long holiday, the Dragon Boat Festival, was about to begin. It took us a little while to figure out why traffic was so light in Beijing, and why the offices where we were meeting officials were so deserted.

We were a handful of journalists on a three-city tour that included Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, an industrial city in central China. (The trip was organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, which organizes trips for Western journalists to China a handful of times per year.)

The news about Edward Snowden had just broken, and it was much on our minds. To us, at least, it seemed to scream for a Chinese response. Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, had leaked information about a huge program conducted by the National Security Agency to obtain a record of every phone call made in the United States. He also leaked news of another program, Prism, that gathered information from Facebook, Apple and other tech companies about the cyberactivity of customers. The revelations were astonishing.

Now Snowden was hiding out somewhere in Hong Kong, popping up just long enough to grant the occasional interview. What would China do if, say, Snowden asked for asylum? And what did China have to say about all this spying by the U.S. government?