In February 2024, a former journalist with a regional Chinese state-run newspaper left the country with his family of five to join the “run” movement — a mass exodus of people from China following the lifting of pandemic restrictions in late 2022, many of them seeking a life free from ruling Chinese Communist Party surveillance and control.
The journalist, who hails from the eastern province of Shandong and who gave only the pseudonym Xiao Wu for fear of reprisals, told RFA’s Newcomers podcast about the widespread censorship, police harassment and political warnings that led him to bring his young family to make the hazardous border crossing from Mexico to seek political asylum in the United States.
RFA: When did you leave China?
Xiao Wu: I left China in February this year, after the Chinese New Year, and passed through the U.K. and Mexico, and entered the United States from Tijuana and San Diego on the U.S.-Mexico border. That would have been on Feb. 24. I left China on the sixth day after Lunar New Year, and it took me exactly 10 days to get to San Diego. This was a very important journey for me.
Our whole family came: me, my wife and our three kids, two daughters and a son. Our eldest turns 14 this year, the second-born is 8 years old, and the third ... is now 3 years old.
RFA: Why did you decide to do that at the peak of your career, when your children were still very young?
Xiao Wu: I kept a close eye on certain developments in China after the pandemic emerged in Wuhan in 2020. I had about 4 million-5 million followers on various platforms, including Baidu, Toutiao and Weibo, and these accounts have been threatened, harassed and intimidated by the Cyberspace Administration. Posts were deleted, and these accounts were frequently blocked.
There were also phone calls from the local police station and the Cyberspace Administration, which made my family very scared. They kept telling me not to be so outspoken online, but I have always expressed myself online, even when I was still working in newspapers. Freedom of speech is very important to me, so it occurred to me to take my family out of China.
RFA: How did they intimidate you?
Xiao Wu: Back in June 2023, a group of teachers in Guizhou province were washed away by a flash flood and drowned as they were picking up pebbles in the river. A reporter who went out from Sichuan to investigate the incident got beaten up, and we made some comments about that. We started to be targeted by police, who warned us over the phone not to get involved in public events.
Later, I heard they’d warned a large number of people, not just me, via WeChat. I started to fear that if I carried on writing content in China, that I would eventually get arrested.
[The police] told me not to go too far, because the outcome wouldn’t be good for me, and for all of [my family]. What they meant was, if I didn’t toe the line, then there would be further measures taken, and they wouldn’t be so polite about it next time around.
I’ve been subjected to phone and face-to-face interviews like this at least 100 times in the years since the pandemic hit ... sometimes late at night, or in the early morning. They call at any time.
They were coming to our house so often that my family members thought it was very scary thing. We were very worried.
RFA: Why not give up this line of work altogether?
Xiao Wu: My family wanted me to change jobs and support them by doing something else, but I was unwilling to give up the chance to speak out publicly. It’s an impulse I can’t suppress.
When I learned about some of the ways the Chinese Communist Party operates, both before and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, through overseas platforms and overseas Chinese media, I realized that these things aren’t right.
I naturally felt a sense of responsibility ... to tell everyone that the Communist Party is not what it claims to be, and that its entire process is one of deceiving or fooling the people.
RFA: You learned these things by going over the Great Firewall — was that kind of an awakening for you?
Xiao Wu: I was in the fifth grade of elementary school at the time. I had always lived in the countryside and hadn’t been exposed to much media. There were very few TV programs I could watch.
But I went to a junior high school in a town, where there were more sources of information, including [the cutting-edge newspaper] Southern Weekend.
I also bought a shortwave radio and started listening to overseas stations in Chinese like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and the BBC.
I realized that the Communist Party’s practices ran counter to some of the policies it claimed to be following. So, my awakening came fairly young. I already had a clear understanding of the Chinese Communist Party when I was a teenager. It’s a dictatorial regime that relies on deceiving the people to stay in power.
RFA: Did that understanding have any impact on your later life choices?
Xiao Wu: The most important influence was on my choice of career. Salaries in the news industry in China are pretty low, but I still wanted to work in it ... to do some real reporting. I worked in local media groups that were equivalent to the local party newspaper.
RFA: Wasn’t that a long way from your journalistic ideals?
Xiao Wu: To a certain extent, yes, but any publication is controlled by the party in China; there aren’t any newspapers that aren’t.
But when I was there, online platforms were just emerging in China, and I didn’t always follow the newspaper’s propaganda directives.
For example, I used online forums and other channels to spread so-called negative news that they were unwilling to make public. I was punished many times for this when I was working at the newspaper.
RFA: So, you left state media behind and started to work as a content creator — did you jump, or were you pushed?
Xiao Wu: I was constantly being criticized, both in propaganda directives and in person at general meetings of all employees. After a while, my colleagues started to look at me differently, which made me feel uncomfortable. When they can’t fire you or make you redundant, they can ignore you and marginalize you.
RFA: Did things improve after you left?
Xiao Wu: The good thing about content creation is that I decided everything from how to gather information to disseminating and presenting the work. This degree of freedom and discretion was great for me.
At the beginning, I felt very free. But later, when I started reporting on certain negative aspects of Chinese society, they didn’t want that stuff exposed, and so I no longer felt very free.
All these platforms have reviewing mechanisms and procedures, and it’s very easy for self-censorship to creep in, if you dare not criticize the Chinese Communist Party or the system directly.
You have to be more careful, and the self-censorship thing runs very deep.
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RFA: Was your family income affected?
Xiao Wu: In 2015, I was in my 30s. I was under a lot of pressure at that time. My kid was in school, and another child came soon after that. But that was around the time of the self-media [content creation] boom in China, and my income was far higher than it had been at the newspaper. I would make in a single month what I had made in a whole year at the newspaper.
RFA: What did your parents think about your plan to leave?
Xiao Wu: When I first told my family that I was thinking of going abroad, to the United States, my wife and my parents were all very surprised.
Their first reaction was not whether it was feasible or not. They thought I was suffering from a mental disorder. They thought that my brain had been affected because I was arguing with people on the internet every day, and “external forces” were interfering with my thinking.
RFA: How did you explain it to them?
Xiao Wu: I told my wife if I could not speak publicly on these platforms in China, our source of income would be cut off, and it would be very hard for us to support our three children. Going abroad was the most sensible move for our family from the perspective of our children’s education and their futures.
RFA: Yet you chose to take a difficult and even dangerous path?
Xiao Wu: I didn’t choose that initially ... but I got rejected for a visa after a two-minute interview with a visa officer ... at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, who didn’t ask me any questions, just issued me a rejection slip.
So, my hopes of going to the United States legally were shattered. I could perhaps have applied again another time, but I didn’t know how likely it was to be successful.
Then, I found out that I could get into Mexico with a two-year multiple-entry visa for the United Kingdom, so I submitted an application for my family. I got that visa because it was based on documents. So we went to the U.K. first on that visa, then to Mexico, where we crossed the border into the United States.
It went very smoothly. Because our children were relatively young, we were slow to get off the plane, and we were already standing at the end of the line. I noticed that the Mexican border officials were very detailed in their review of Chinese people, or Chinese families. I was a little worried, but when it was our turn, the visa officer took our passports and immediately issued a 180-day permit.
We stayed in Mexico City for two nights, and finally decided to go to Tijuana and directly cross the border into the United States from there. I knew that there was a gap in the wall between Tijuana and San Diego where you could get in, but I was a bit worried, because it was all hearsay. I had no personal experience.
Once in Tijuana, I didn’t know what to do next, so I asked some people who had crossed the border before, and they said that you can go to a certain place or hotel, where there are Chinese people like snakeheads [people-smugglers] who can take you to the other side of the border wall.
I looked into it, but the snakehead’s prices were very high, so we didn’t use them. In the end, we took an Uber to the coordinates I’d been told about.
RFA: What was the terrain like? How far was it from the border?
Xiao Wu: When we arrived at the point on the Mexican side and started to climb over the wall, it was already dawn. It was 7 o’clock. I first observed the terrain and found that it was a V-shaped valley. I needed to go down on the Mexican side first, and then climb up after reaching the bottom of the valley.
There are two US-Mexico border walls, but the mountain path between them is steep and winding. I saw that there was no easy way to do it; we had to walk through some of the family dwellings on the border. We startled some dogs, who barked at us, but we got through OK.
I was pretty exhausted from carrying two suitcases, so I threw one away. There was also a stroller, which I threw away because the kid didn’t need it. All of us were exhausted, and we sat down to catch our breath, and that’s where the biggest danger was.
A Mexican guy in his 50s or 60s told us to go back. He said he had a gun, and that we couldn’t get through. Then he said we had to pay US$500. We actually had US$1,000 with us. He said he wanted cash, so I took it all and gave it to him. He still wasn’t happy and didn’t want to let us go, so I just dropped the suitcase and ran, dragging my second kid and telling the rest of the family to run with me as fast as they could.
He didn’t rob us, but threw stones at us. He picked up the suitcase I had dropped, but he didn’t chase us. We crossed over the [second] wall, then walked another five miles to a highway near San Diego. That’s how we got into the United States.
RFA: So you walked five miles?
Xiao Wu: Of course, I was thinking of taking a taxi in the United States? But no one took the job, or they would take then cancel again immediately. So, we just walked along the path, which had been created by a lot of people walking in that direction. There were also some abandoned suitcases and clothing strewn along the side of the path.
We arrived at the highway in San Diego and were very lucky to meet an American couple. I exchanged a few words with them, and I also told them what I was doing in China, that I was a reporter in China, and that I came to the United States in search of freedom.
The couple said they could give us a ride to an airport or a station, so we got on their pickup truck, and they took us to the city. We were quite lucky. We got across the border wall and avoided the ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] patrols, so we avoided having to go to [ICE detention].
RFA: Did you feel that you had gained freedom?
Xiao Wu: I always thought I would kneel on the ground or kiss the ground under my feet. But after coming from the border, while breathing a sigh of relief, I felt that the whole journey was so bumpy, and yet I had succeeded, which meant that I felt hopeful. But I was too tired for rituals. I just sat down on the ground.
RFA: How are your children doing?
Xiao Wu: The children are very happy, because they spend much less time in school than in China. We live in a Chinese area, and where more than 60% of the kids are Chinese,so it’s easy for them to make friends.
But my second child still misses China a little, probably because she’s younger, and because she has been indoctrinated with certain ideologies. The way we got here may have given her some psychological issues. She hates to go hiking in hills now.
I’m very grateful to [my wife], who never wanted to settle overseas or come to the United States, and will likely not have much hope of going back to visit family, whether our asylum application is approved or not. She supported me in leaving China with our kids, including such a dangerous border-crossing, and I’d like to thank her for her understanding.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.