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In Hong Kong, a Bureau Evolves With Its City

High-rise properties in Hong Kong, now one of the world’s most expensive places to live.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

For the past two decades, The New York Times had its Hong Kong bureau in a beautiful apartment halfway up the slopes of Victoria Peak, with a view of the harbor that gradually narrowed as more tall buildings were built farther down the hill.

A 20-minute walk downhill was enough to reach many government offices and the Asia headquarters of dozens of multinationals. A nine-minute walk was all it took to reach the famous Peak Tram, pulled by a winch up one of the steepest slopes of any funicular in Asia. Or for some real exercise, which I tried to do several days a week as Hong Kong bureau chief when not on reporting trips, there was a 40-minute walk up many steep switchbacks to the top of the tram tracks, with magnificent views of Victoria Harbor and its skyscrapers in one direction and a glistening reservoir, a verdant valley and the South China Sea in the other direction.

That bureau is now gone – and that’s a sign of growth for The New York Times, not retrenchment. As the city has changed, that little beachhead did too — into an entire Asia newsroom.

In the past 15 years, the journalism was transformed as well. When I arrived as bureau chief in 2002, the city and our news coverage were mostly focused on Southeast Asia. I would write articles in Microsoft Word and email them to New York for editing and publication in a printed newspaper. Photos were often an afterthought, with a photographer sometimes assigned only after a first draft of the article had been filed.

By the time The New York Times transferred me to Shanghai last year, Hong Kong and our news coverage were concentrated on the ever-growing economic and geopolitical muscle of mainland China. I was writing stories in a New York Times online system for editing in Hong Kong and immediate posting to the internet.

The Times has had offices in Hong Kong almost continuously for many decades. Henry R. Lieberman, living at a particularly prestigious address on Peak Road, was the bureau chief in 1952, when he was the founding president of Hong Kong’s famous Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Hong Kong was a safe, well-run British colony then, perched on the almost completely closed border of China, where Mao’s Communists had just won an exhausting civil war and soon after intervened in the Korean War, triggering an international trade embargo against China.

The role of Hong Kong and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club as a base for media coverage of Asia was quickly popularized by an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie in 1955, “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” based on an almost identically titled novel by Han Suyin. The novel and movie also examined the dark side of Hong Kong: widespread racial discrimination by the tiny white elite against the ethnic Chinese majority, a chronic problem that would disrupt the city’s politics for decades afterward.

Joe Lelyveld was the newspaper’s Hong Kong bureau chief in the early 1970s, when China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and so-called China watchers in Hong Kong studied mainland newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts for clues of what was happening in Beijing. Nicholas D. Kristof, now an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, was the Hong Kong bureau chief in the late 1980s. Both exemplified the kind of close students of Chinese politics for which the Hong Kong journalism community was long famous.

“Hong Kong was a glorious mix of British officials, Chinese communists and spies from Israel to North Korea — all in a place with the best dim sum in the world,” Nick wrote to me in an email this week.

Nick closed the bureau at the end of 1987 when he was transferred to Beijing. He and his wife and colleague, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

But with the approach of Britain’s return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997, The Times decided that it needed a bureau there once again. The foreign desk chose Edward A. Gargan, an experienced correspondent who had previously served as bureau chief in Beijing, New Delhi and Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and had closely followed Chinese politics for many years.

An avid jogger, Ed selected Bowen Road, a leafy colonial road near downtown with little traffic. After a year in another apartment on Bowen Road, Ed moved into an aging building next door and converted a four-bedroom apartment into the bureau, with two bedrooms converted into offices for him and for a news assistant and the rest as living quarters. That apartment became The Times’s base as the bureau evolved over the next two decades.

Mark Landler, now one of our White House correspondents, succeeded Ed in the apartment in 1998. An experienced business reporter, he began the evolution of the Hong Kong bureau toward covering more business and economic news, initially with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. The Asian financial crisis was triggering violent street protests when Mark arrived, and he spent much of his first year covering the fiery uprisings that led to President Suharto’s ouster in Indonesia.

“It was always such a relief to come home to that fabulous apartment,” Mark said. “It was like ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ meets ‘The Year of Living Comfortably’.”

When Mark was transferred to become our Frankfurt bureau chief in early 2002, The New York Times transferred me to Hong Kong from Detroit. I had previously covered telecommunications and then airlines in our New York office, international trade and then the Federal Reserve in our Washington bureau, and then the auto industry of course in Detroit. But moving to Hong Kong posed new challenges, of which the biggest was how to start covering the fast-growing mainland Chinese economy.

When I arrived a week before Mark’s departure, it was still almost impossible to get a journalism visa to mainland China from Hong Kong. Business executives and tourists could cross the nearby river to the mainland, but journalists almost never could because the Chinese Communist Party was and remains extremely wary of critical reporting. Some reporters even resorted to flying to Bangkok to apply for visas, because the Chinese embassy there had a somewhat more generous reputation — but even the embassy in Bangkok was chary of granting journalism visas.

Oddly enough, it had become easier to get a journalism visa to live and report in Beijing or Shanghai than to visit China for even a single day from Hong Kong. This was partly because Guangdong province of mainland China, next to Hong Kong, had become fed up with critical reporting from Hong Kong-based foreign correspondents who came briefly across the border, and had discouraged the further issuance of visas. Many news organizations began moving correspondents from Hong Kong to Beijing or Shanghai, and The New York Times itself was expanding its presence on the mainland, particularly in Beijing.

The Chinese foreign ministry initially refused to talk to me about the broad subject of journalism visas, saying that its sole authorized interlocutor was the Foreign Correspondents’ Club — a designation that the club did not know it had. I organized a campaign by the club for more visas, and tried to enlist top Hong Kong government and business leaders in the effort. Mark had very graciously introduced me to Hong Kong’s top government officials, and I told them that if Hong Kong ceased to be the place to learn about China, I would likely be the last Times correspondent assigned to Hong Kong. The Times would then join a broad move by other publications in posting journalists only to the mainland. That would undermine Hong Kong’s role as a place to get information about China and its role as a financial center — a prospect that dismayed Hong Kong political and business leaders alike.

China’s foreign ministry agreed in November, 2002, to issue more visas. I then joined the club’s board and had myself named as the visa policy negotiator, a role I held until I left last year. The ministry started issuing visas allowing a single entry to China, then several years later with two entries, and then, shortly before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, with multiple entries for a month or even three months.

I ended up with well over 100 visas over the years. Each visa was a thick piece of paper that filled a whole page of my passport, and was then canceled with a stamp on the opposite page. I was also traveling regularly to places like India for the Mumbai hotels attack in 2008 and to the Philippines for coverage of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. So my passport would become as thick as a paperback novel before I had to replace it.

Halfway around the world, The New York Times was buying out The Washington Post’s stake in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune in 2003. The following year, The Herald Tribune opened an Asia newsroom in the North Point neighborhood of Hong Kong. Initially a handful of editors, that operation has grown and grown in the years since then, mainly adding editors but also correspondents specializing in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and mainland China. The International Herald Tribune has been gradually integrated into The New York Times’s operations over the years. The Hong Kong newsroom, now with a staff of several dozen, edits the printed edition of what has become the international edition of The New York Times, as well as editing our coverage from most of Asia for our website and for printed editions in the United States. Journalists in the Hong Kong newsroom also write about events across the region.

When the opportunity arose last year for me to become Shanghai bureau chief, I took it. The Chinese foreign ministry had become far more cautious once again about issuing journalism visas in Hong Kong, partly because of the Umbrella Revolution protests in Hong Kong in 2014 and partly because of mainland China’s steady shift toward greater caution in dealings with the West.

We gave up the apartment on Bowen Road, as it was no longer needed. The venerable title of Hong Kong bureau chief disappeared, as it no longer made sense to have such a position. Philip Pan, our Asia editor, now oversees our Asia operations from the North Point newsroom.

“Hong Kong is more important to the Times than ever, part of a global, 24-hour digital operation that also includes newsrooms in New York and London,” Phil wrote in an email.

The timing, as it turns out, may have been lucky: the faded apartment building where my predecessors and I had lived and worked for so many years is about to undergo an extensive rehabilitation for 18 months. Scaffolding has already appeared at its base, and the building’s gurgling pipes, drafty windows and creaky elevators will all be replaced.

Like Hong Kong: the building is being renewed and remade. Mainland Chinese have been moving to the city by the hundreds of thousands, buying up apartments and taking many high-paid jobs but also displacing many longtime residents, who find themselves struggling for employment and affordable housing.

While working in the past two weeks on an article on the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, it was hard not to look occasionally up the hill with more than a little nostalgia at the aging building that for so many years housed our bureau.

Follow Keith Bradsher on Twitter, @KeithBradsher

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: In Hong Kong, Constant Evolution. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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