Chinese state media is gloating about drastic budget cuts to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, U.S. government-funded media outlets that have for decades drawn protests from Beijing over their coverage of human rights abuses in China.
Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had long transmitted news into countries where access to accurate information from the outside world was severely limited. Radio Free Asia, for instance, broadcasts in Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur, Tibetan and other languages.
In China, where the ruling Communist Party has railed against the influence of America and its Western allies on global opinion, state media outlets and nationalists hailed the troubles faced by the U.S.-funded outlets as vindication of their complaints. The authorities have for years jammed Voice of America and Radio Free Asia radio transmissions.
The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, denounced Voice of America as a “frontline propaganda tool” and a “lie factory.”
“Almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial on Monday, citing what it described as biased reports about Taiwan, unrest in Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.
The news outlets and their ability to operate is in question after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday calling for the dismantling of the Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that oversees them. At Voice of America, hundreds of employees in Washington were informed that they were being put on paid leave. Radio Free Asia said the federal grants that funded it were terminated on Saturday morning.
The Chinese government has argued that the dominance of American soft power, in the form of these news sources, has undermined China’s security at home and its economic and geopolitical interests abroad. This insecurity has only sharpened under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has pushed for China’s voice, more specifically that of the party’s, to be heard more loudly.
“Against this backdrop, the actions of the Trump administration are cause for enthusiastic celebration,” said David Bandurski, the director of the China Media Project, a research organization. “In a matter of weeks, Trump seems to have slit the throat of American influence.”
For decades, Chinese listeners tuned in to Voice of America for news that was censored — coverage that included the toll of natural disasters and crackdowns on pro-democracy protesters. Its programs on politics and culture also shaped the thinking of a generation of intellectuals and liberal thinkers in the 1970s and ’80s, when the country gradually reopened after years of isolation.
In 1989, Voice of America expanded its Mandarin service to cover the pro-democracy movement that swept across the country and the government’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square. The network’s correspondents were among the foreign journalists expelled from China that year.
Radio Free Asia stood out as a crucial news source about Xinjiang and Tibet, where foreign journalists have limited access, and about dissidents elsewhere in the country. Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur service’s reporting in recent years was noted for exposing the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang and publishing the first accounts of deaths in the camps.
In the past decade, the Chinese authorities have repeatedly sought to retaliate against Uyghur journalists working with the broadcaster. It detained more than 50 relatives of journalists on staff in Xinjiang in 2021. One journalist, Gulchehra Hoja, a Uyghur American working for Radio Free Asia, said in 2018 that two dozen of her family members had been detained in Xinjiang.
James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University and an expert on Uyghur issues, said that he has served as an external reviewer for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur service and was familiar with the broadcaster’s work. “I know the pains they take to make their stories accurate and appealing to the global community they serve,” he said. “All of this has been accomplished by a small staff at a tiny cost.”
“To cancel it willy-nilly as Trump has done, possibly without even knowing he was doing so, is foolhardy and needlessly cruel to people who the U.S. is supposed to be supporting,” he added.
Bay Fang, the president and chief executive of Radio Free Asia, said in a statement that the termination of the federal grant that funds the outlet was a “reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space.” Ms. Fang said the organization planned to challenge the order.
In a social media post on Sunday, Hu Xijin, the former editor in chief of Global Times, celebrated the “paralysis” of the news outlets, calling it “very gratifying.”
While noting that political tensions within the Trump administration had ultimately led to its problems, he said he believed all Chinese people would be pleased to see “the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within and scattered like birds and beasts.”
