Exiled Chinese in Japan encounter the long arm of Beijing

When her father died, "D" said her overwhelming emotion was relief. Living in exile in Japan, she had only been able to communicate with her parents in China using web cameras for several years out of fear that she would be arrested if she ever set foot in her homeland.

D only wants to be referred to as a letter of the alphabet because she lives in constant fear of Chinese authorities.

"I was relieved because he did not have to worry about me any more," she told DW. D said her father, who was a dissident author, had been ostracized, punished "and suffered all his life" for standing up to the Chinese state.

"In a normal world, parents want their children to come home," she said. "But my father knew that he could not protect me. He had no choice but to tell me not to go home. I could not see him in person. I could only cry on video."

But the Chinese government has ways of exerting pressure on its critics — even those living in exile.

Beijing's agents leave written messages in mailboxes and make silent phone calls. They send messages on social media, they suggest their target might want to make a brief trip back home and, most insidiously, they threaten exiles' families who have remained in China.

These tactics are regularly used against Chinese nationals who have fled to the relative safety of Japan, many of whom keep up their campaigns for freedom and democracy.

Chinese exiles 'harassed'

A report released earlier this month by the Tokyo office of Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that dozens of Chinese, including people from ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, are being systematically "harassed" by Beijing.

The report said the harassment is "aimed at deterring members of the diaspora from protesting against the government or engaging in events deemed politically sensitive."

Despite living in Japan, D describes herself as being part of the "Tiananmen Generation" of young people who demanded democracy in the summer of 1989, only to see their peaceful protests brutally suppressed. She was not in Beijing at the time, but it has helped shape her.

Now in her 50s, D is a writer, poet, translator and researcher in Japan, working at a university translating dissident Chinese authors' works and publishing Japanese language versions of their books.

In 2007, she met author Liu Xiaobo in Beijing and subsequently translated several of his works.

"Around this time, I only had a distant interest in politics, but I was worried about Chinese writers who could not speak out," she said.

Liu Xiaobo was arrested in December 2008 for his involvement in the "Charter 08" manifesto on human rights.

D's translations of Liu's works into Japanese came out the next year and Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

China's most famous political prisoner, Liu was granted medical parole in June 2017 after being diagnosed with cancer and he died a few weeks later.

Pursued for writing poetry

But D's connections with Liu had consequences, along with her translations of poetry critical of the regime, interviews with the Chinese "underclass," and books on Tibet and massacres in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution.

"To the Chinese government, these writers are all 'anachronisms.' Therefore, I have also become an 'anachronism.'"

In the intervening years, her family has been "harassed," D said. This has included threatening calls and heavy-handed knocks on the door from secret police. During one brief visit to see her parents some years ago, security officials stopped by to "drink tea" and quiz her.

"In June, the authorities sent three people to my 87-year-old mother's house to ask me, through my mother, 'not to make friends with people who are not good at what they do and not to write articles that are not true,'" she said. "Their purpose was to force me, by threatening my mother, to stop writing."

"I have not directly criticized the Chinese government; I am a writer, not a politician, and I only have a remote interest in politics," D said. "But my friends in China are either dead, in prison, or have been forced to leave their hometowns. Too many."

What can Japan do?

The HRW report makes it clear that many other Chinese living in Japan are subject to the same pressures.

According to "AB," an ethnic minority Mongol quoted in the report, public security officials visited his family in Inner Mongolia after he took part in a demonstration in Tokyo, and that his relatives now live in fear.

The family of "RS" has also been targeted after he was involved in protests in 2009 in Xinjiang. The pressure has taken "a mental toll on his family," the report said.

"JK" was contacted on WeChat and pressured to provide information on other Chinese living in Japan, including by taking photos of them.

Teppei Kasai a program officer at HRW in Tokyo, said the Japanese government should do more to protect the rights of dissidents living in Japan.

Japan's Foreign Ministry declined to comment for this report and the National Police Agency did not respond to a request for information on the measures it had implemented to protect Chinese nationals in Japan.

"Japan should review its policies to establish support mechanisms to help those facing Chinese government harassment," Kasai said in a statement issued to DW. "Japan should promptly establish a national system to investigate cases of transnational repression.”

D admits that she lives in a constant state of concern.

"I say I am not afraid because I have trust in Japan and the democratic state, but Japan is geographically close to China and the penetration overseas of the Chinese Communist Party is deep," she said. "The tactics that they use are cunning. I cannot say that Japan is a safe place."

And that is why she says she wants to remain unidentified.

"I ask you not to use my real name, even though it is a sign of cowardice and fear," she said. "It is very sad."

Edited by: Wesley Rahn