This was the same system China set up several years ago for The Huffington Post, which, in coordination with WorldPost, wanted to station an American reporter, Matt Sheehan, to Beijing. Chinese officials granted Mr. Sheehan a renewable six-month visa, and Mr. Sheehan lived in Beijing until he decided to return to the United States.

The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed had de facto bureaus in Beijing, even if those existed under a system separate from the one under which traditional news organizations operated.

Traditional news organizations generally get a one-year renewable visa for their reporters residing in China and have bureaus officially recognized by the Foreign Ministry. But in recent years, Chinese officials have signaled that they may not renew those visas if reporters write articles that officials deem to be out of bounds.

In December 2015, Ursula Gauthier, a reporter in Beijing for the French newsweekly L’Obs, was denied a renewal of her standard one-year journalist’s resident visa. Foreign Ministry officials had criticized her for writing an article on the plight of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Global Times, a state-run nationalist newspaper, published at least one editorial criticizing her before she was forced to leave. No foreign journalist had previously been rebuked by Chinese officials in such a manner in many years.

After Bloomberg reported in 2012 about the wealth accumulated by the family of Xi Jinping, who became China’s leader a year later, the Foreign Ministry blocked all its applications for new journalist visas. The New York Times also had difficulty obtaining further residency visas for journalists after publishing stories in 2012 about how the family of Wen Jiabao, then premier, grew rich during his leadership.

On a trip to Beijing in late 2013, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. criticized China over the use of visas to pressure foreign media outlets.

Ms. Rajagopalan lived in Beijing and worked for Thomson Reuters from 2012 to 2016. She left China after joining Buzzfeed in July 2016. Buzzfeed editors hired her with the aim of posting her to China, and she reported on Asia for Buzzfeed from Bangkok while the company negotiated with Chinese officials over a journalist’s visa. After China granted the six-month visa, she returned to Beijing in March 2017.

The United States State Department and the embassy in Beijing did not reply to email requests for comment on Ms. Rajagopalan’s forced departure. The State Department also did not reply to a question sent by email on the broader question of visa reciprocity — whether the United States government should engage in tit-for-tat responses when the Chinese government denies visas to journalists.

The visa issue has been under serious discussion among American officials since the Obama administration. In Washington, officials are leaning toward taking harder measures on China on a wide range of matters, from trade to visas to the Chinese military’s actions in Pacific waters.

Ms. Rajagopalan said it was “bittersweet to leave Beijing after spending six wonderful and eye-opening years as a journalist there.”

She wrote that she was moving to a new position with Buzzfeed focusing on technology and human rights and reporting from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“I also want to make clear that though I can’t do it from inside China anymore, I’m not going to stop reporting on and speaking about state surveillance, repression, and incarceration of millions of Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang,” she added.