In his hovel of a home we met the man in question – and the elderly mother, disabled brother and young son he had to support. He had had to make ends meet when his wife died, he said, and stealing other people’s children was the only way he knew how. Without a hint of shame he told us how he would befriend poor country girls who had babies and take them to the city promising to find them jobs. When they went out to work he would disappear with the baby and sell it to child traffickers. He seemed completely amoral. But there was even worse to come. Not long before, he had also sold his own son. Not his first choice. He had wanted to sell the older one, he said, but no one wanted him. His cuter, younger brother was worth more. The baby-snatcher had got £500 for the three-year-old. All he now knew of the little boy was that he had been trafficked to Inner Mongolia and that he would never see him again. He hung his head as he revealed what he had done. “I felt awful,” he said, “but feeling awful doesn’t solve your problems. I had debts to pay.”

As we began the drive back with our former executioner, we discussed what we had filmed and worried about it. We had a scoop and one with an unexpected disturbing twist, but was it just too disturbing and, frankly, too strange for viewers back home? For me, that is one of the biggest challenges a journalist faces in China. In many ways, at times it feels like another planet, so isolated has it been from us in the West for so long. And for the viewer it can be too unfamiliar, obscure and alienating to relate to in just a few minutes of television news.

We had a solution with this story, but obtaining it posed another challenge. We were in contact with a handful of some of the thousands of parents who had fallen victim to China’s plague of child-snatching. Fuelled by a traditional preference for baby boys and China’s “one child” policy, the country’s baby trade is increasing at an “alarming rate”, according to the United Nations. All the children of the parents we met had been snatched from right under the parents’ noses as they played in the streets outside their homes, or in the markets where they worked. In other countries the disappearances would have caused public outrage. Here they had led to a police crackdown, not against the kidnappers, but against the parents themselves. Embarrassed by their failure to help the parents, the police had ordered them not to make a fuss and not to put up “missing” posters.

They risked a lot

We had used various precautions to evade police surveillance when arranging the meeting and it paid off. We were not disturbed and the parents’ heart-wrenching interviews, however disturbing, would without any doubt connect the viewer to this story. Their anguish and impotent fury was deeply moving and something any parent would relate to, even via the fleeting medium of television news.

That fear of a knock on the door, or unexpected and unwelcome company, dogs the China correspondent wherever he goes. China has a formidable media control machine, and tough rules prevent journalists operating with any real freedom. Foreign journalists working there jokingly describe their job as “committing journalism”. A pre-Olympics relaxation of the rules seems to be making life a little easier, but provincial police will still detain journalists before central government intervention secures their release. And in the further-flung parts of China, provincial authorities are often acting in collusion with big business or organised crime to protect whatever local industry they depend on for revenue. Sometimes the distinctions between all three are hard to define. When we exposed the practice of animals being skinned alive to supply China’s enormous fur industry, we were held by police for ten hours while they terrorised our Chinese driver to find out where we had hidden our tapes. In the background all day were fur industry people pressuring the police to find them.

It does not require a gang of goons to wreck a good story of course. Sheer bureaucratic obstruction, or inertia, can be just as effective. Enter the waiban – an official, highly skilled in both, assigned by each province’s foreign affairs department to “help” the visiting journalist. Technically you are meant to employ their services whenever you are on the road in China. Sometimes they are a necessary evil for the journalist, but only as a last resort, one that pre-dates the communist era of media control. In 1933 travel writer Peter Fleming described his waiban in his book, One’s Company. “The tactics of Mr Tu were delightfully unobtrusive,” wrote Fleming. “When the car was ready to start, Mr Tu would be found to have disappeared. If a long meal looked like ending Mr Tu would make another speech... The process of being delayed was almost painless. It was affected by traditional methods. No reasons were advanced, no excuses given; it simply came to pass.” Seventy years on, little has changed.

Among the waiban’s obstructionist armoury is the ability to multiply. We wanted to visit a valley in a remote part of southern China famed for the longevity of its inhabitants. The one waiban who met us at the airport was joined by two more that evening over supper and the figure had doubled by the time we were on the way the next morning. En route we had acquired more officials intrigued by our visit, so by the time we arrived in the village we were a sizeable delegation. Making matters worse, there was no sign of the army of centenarians we had been promised. The one woman collared to talk to us seemed too alarmed by our number to do so. A few more were eventually mustered, but only in time for the local party boss to turn up in a small motorcade, with several more officials and two camera crews in tow. Our tranquil remote village, where we had hoped to film the ancient key to long life, had been invaded by a circus of officials expert at wandering into every one of our shots.

I am now working in Israel and still discovering the challenges here. But after three months it is hard for me to imagine a location more different to my previous beat. Above the luggage carousel in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport is a satellite photograph of Israel, inviting the question many visitors ask on first arriving here: How did a patch of earth that small become the focus of so much trouble and so much world attention? The over-exposure of the Middle East story poses particular problems. Whereas in China the challenge was to engage viewers’ interest in somewhere unfamiliar and alien, here, it is keeping them interested in somewhere they find over familiar. Rock throwing, suicide bombs, helicopter gunships, funeral rallies and weeping relatives – they have seen it all before, time and again.

More mortal dangers

On a more every-day level, the big difference is availability of information. In China, breaking news is banned. In fact a proposed new “Law on Response to Contingencies” will require government approval before any news of “sudden events” can be broadcast – a particularly Orwellian innovation even for China’s authoritarian regime. The morning ritual for journalists the world over of checking the wires for news that broke overnight is really not that useful in China.

By and large the most interesting stuff is not being reported because the country’s media is so tightly controlled. Dissent is taking place – tens of thousands of protests every year, according to the Government’s own figures, but they are rarely reported. And you can generally forget about getting any pictures of the more interesting events, or obtaining useful information. If you want it, you have to go out and find it, cultivating contacts who often take a risk simply giving it to you. The work is as frustrating as it is rewarding.

In Israel you are bombarded with information. I am still getting used to my mobile phone beeping several times an hour with the latest text relaying every development, every rocket launch, every terror alert. Old hands warn the newcomer of a blizzard of opinion and information, much of it designed to bamboozle your journalistic instincts, and also to beware that everyone here has something to say, a viewpoint to pitch. After China, it’s like walking out of the darkness into blinding sunlight. There, political opinion is rarely expressed, for obvious reasons. It is either dangerous to do so, or not worth wasting breath. But in the kaleidoscope of Middle Eastern politics there are myriad agendas. Nothing is black and white. Every story has a background of hundreds of years of conflict remembered in detail.

In China you feel like you are working in a dark void, where you know you are being watched but there is always silence. Even the hardest-hitting, most critical pieces we did provoked very little comment from the Government. You know they are checking your emails, listening to your mobile phones and probably bugging your office and even your home. But their preference is for tight controls on newsgathering, preventing your acquiring material in the first place. We always assumed they rarely complained about broadcast reports partly because it would be an admission of failure on their part, a loss of face.

In Israel, there are no such inhibitions. On my first week here, the Israeli military dropped artillery shells on a street in northern Gaza, killing many members of one family. At the start of the day I reported what the wire services had told me. Witnesses claimed houses had been shelled and were blaming the Israel Defence Forces. The minute I left the studio the phone rang. It was the IDF spokeswoman. “Why are you saying we are shelling homes?” she barked. In contrast to the eerie silence of operating in China, that kind of attention is – so far, at least – strangely reassuring.