Op-Ed: She's Leaving China as Suspicion of Foreigners Grows

A taxi ride in a tricked-out BYD electric car is where Wall Street Journal reporter Yoko Kubota realized just how much China had changed on her watch—and why it was time for her to leave. The driver refused to answer her lighthearted question about the car's digital map, calling it a "national secret," and pivoted instead to lecturing her about Taiwan, she writes in a Journal essay. For Kubota, a Japanese national who was working for an American paper, the incident crystallized a shift she'd felt over eight years in Beijing.

• "An era of openness to international cultures that peaked in years of 'reform and opening' in the 1990s and early 2000s is gone," she writes. "As nationalist sentiments sweep the world, in China, distrust of foreigners has come to permeate more of everyday life."

Kubota traces how Xi Jinping's drive for Chinese self-reliance and national security has filtered down into society and intensified over the last several years. It got to the point where she had stopped speaking Japanese in public because she was worried about her safety. Even as Beijing rolls out a new "friendlier" image with visa waivers and glossy promotion of its brands, Kubota argues that the core anti-foreign messaging is now baked in—and unlikely to be reversed. Read the full essay.