Bloomberg hits China roadblock over reporting of sensitive issues

Champagne flowed last week as Hong Kong's business elite gathered with top Bloomberg executives at a dinner for 100 guests.

Daniel Doctoroff, the company's chief executive and the steward of the business empire behind the wealth of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, had flown in to toast a corporate milestone. In 20 years, sales of Bloomberg's financial data terminals in Hong Kong had ballooned into a business bringing in more than US$500 million a year.

But behind the celebration last Monday were some troubling developments. The growth of Bloomberg's terminal sales worldwide had actually softened over the past several years, and had dropped significantly in the past year in mainland China, a vast untapped market.

Bloomberg News' tough reporting last year about China had prompted officials to cancel subscriptions for the lucrative terminals, frustrating the company's Beijing sales staff.

And, just blocks from last week's celebratory dinner, at the Hong Kong bureau of Bloomberg News, anxious journalists were still dealing with the implications of a decision by top editors weeks earlier not to publish a hard-hitting article about a Chinese tycoon.

Bloomberg employees had asserted in published reports that Matthew Winkler, the editor-in-chief, had justified killing the piece, citing concerns that Bloomberg journalists would be expelled from China.