Shortly after midnight on March 18, a phone call awoke Steven Lee Myers in his Beijing apartment. The call was followed by a flurry of messages: WhatsApp, text, email. Friends and colleagues were asking him questions: What is going on? What does this mean? What are we going to do? Myers had been appointed The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief just three months prior. Now, dazed and half-asleep, he was learning that the Chinese government would require American journalists with soon-to-expire press credentials at three American newspapers—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—to hand in their press credentials and prepare for deportation from the country. The organizations had 10 days to comply.