Why Should We Care About Why Journalists are Leaving China? | with Yoko Kubota

The day her BYD rideshare driver told her the dashboard screen was a “national secret” … that's when Wall Street Journal correspondent Yoko Kubota knew China had really changed, and maybe it was time to think about leaving.What does the world lose when fewer foreign journalists are reporting from inside China? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell (35-year military veteran) and Jim Carouso (former senior U.S. diplomat) sit down with Yoko Kubota, who spent eight years in Beijing before leaving China and writing a striking farewell column about a society growing alarmingly suspicious of outsiders.From that small, telling BYD moment, Yoko traces how a tightening espionage law, national-security messaging, and rising nationalism seeped into everyday life. As a Japanese reporter for an American paper, she also describes the anti-Japanese sentiment she and her family encountered, from a parents' school chat group to the phrases her young son began repeating, and how the 2024 attacks on Japanese children in Suzhou and Shenzhen deepened her fears.The conversation also digs into her business beat:Why on-the-ground reporting from inside China still matters and what we lose as it dries upWhy China can be both increasingly confident and deeply wary of outside scrutinyHow China's EV industry went from a punchline to a global powerhouse, and the "zombie" carmakers left in its wakeWhy the race for self-driving cars may come down to regulation as much as technologyWith the press corps thinning – underscored by the recent expulsion of New York Times reporter Vivian Wang – this is an on-the-ground account of an increasingly inaccessible country that still, as Yoko puts it, "won't go away from our lives."Subscribe for your weekly Indo-Pacific briefing.Follow Yoko Kubota on her page at the Wall Street Journal, on LinkedIn or on X, @Kubota_Yoko Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn, or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLightFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific