found it (I had some comments from that thread saved on reddit fortunately)

it was the "China Director at Human Rights Watch"

Someone asks her

When was the last time you came to China? Can you communicate with local people in Chinese? Are there any threats or surveillance during the communication?

and she responds

I first visited China--Kunming!--for a semester in 1989. I had already fallen madly in love with the language (which is not say my Chinese is great these days...), and then fell just as hard for the country, the culture, the history. And I've had many opportunities to study and work in other cities, including Nanjing and Beijing. But for HRW, working there has always been difficult for security reasons, and under Xi Jinping's tenure, Orwellian state surveillance is now the norm. So we have to be careful and creative.

people pressed her further, since she didn't actually answer the "last time you came" question, but I think there were no further responses (although a bunch of the stuff in the thread has been deleted, so I'm not sure if those were among them)

it was apparently a pretty disastrous AMA altogether, the top-rated comment in the thread is "Has OP been added to Victims of Communism's official tally for getting bodied so hard ITT?" :data-laughing: