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NYT has actually got blocked and unblocked back and forth several times. A funny case was that in an interview a reporter asked former president Jiang Zeming why NYT was blocked and Jiang said he would personally look into what was going on. Soon after that, it got unblocked.

For prominent and mostly-seen-as-neutral English-language sources, they seem to only selectively block specific articles, or temporarily block them entirely only around sensitive events or anniversaries where they're worried about what might be published. The English Wikipedia is generally treated like that: you can't read its articles on the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square, but you can read articles that don't trigger a sensitive-topic block. My dad spent some time in China on work and was also able to watch the BBC News most of the time, except that a handful of stories were abruptly cut out, and the entire channel was occasionally unavailable around sensitive dates.

the reason they dont block it is because then on the front page of the site they will report NYT website blocked by china and their reports will ask all the chinese officials why they are blocked. Instead they get blocked on article by article basis. This article was blocked almost instantly in china. The whole NYT website is now currently blocked in china

Yes, I had that thought about why it wasn't blocked too, but now it's become history... About this article, it's now a big news in China...