The day I landed in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, China brought the Great Firewall down on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Despite my colleagues’ long history of uncovering Chinese government influence operations abroad and its growing authoritarianism at home, the mastheads had been spared China’s online censors for the past two decades.

Now, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and the ABC, we were blocked. Why? We will never know for certain. The Olympics were about to begin. Perhaps my interview published the day before with Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu accusing China of crimes against humanity was the final straw.

North Asia correspondent Eryk Bagshaw in Mana, near the border between India and China. Credit: Eryk Bagshaw

One thing is for sure, despite its claims it is opening up, China is increasingly shutting itself off from the world. My long-term visa application to be based in China was denied in July 2020, months before the last remaining correspondents working for Australian media, Bill Birtles and Mike Smith, were rushed out of the country. Australian-Chinese TV presenter, Cheng Lei, had been detained days earlier.

Australia’s relationship with China had plummeted to historic lows. The Australian government had blocked Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei and implemented foreign interference legislation over national security fears. Then Australia became the first nation to call for an inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s anger triggered $20 billion in trade strikes on half a dozen industries and its list of 14 grievances. All ministerial contact between the two countries was cut off for more than a year.

The only way back into China was on a month-long visa issued by the International Olympic Committee. Hours after I landed on that beautiful but freezing winter’s day in February 2022, a six-metre-wide barrier and three Chinese police stood between me and a dear friend in downtown Beijing.

We yelled over the barricades. Shouts of normalcy about the weather and what we had for breakfast punctured an otherwise absurd situation. His daughter went ice skating. Then his wife went to church. I was in the Olympic bubble. Beijing was experiencing a brief reprieve from Xi Jinping’s land of COVID-zero, where Draconian restrictions had locked millions in their apartments to stop the spread of the deadly disease.

The restrictions would last for three years. In the end, they would only be broken by the “A4 revolution”, named after the blank pieces of A4-size paper thousands held up in cities across China because they had nothing left: no food, no work and no freedom to express themselves.