In December 1967, when he arrived at a snowy farm on China’s northeastern border with the Soviet Union, Xu Chenggang carried with him an electron tube to help him assemble a radio.
Mr. Xu, a 17-year-old Beijing native, would spend the next 10 years there, living in a horse stable and subjected to re-education and persecution for his anti-revolutionary thinking. One thing that got him through the cold, dark decade was the tube radio that brought him Voice of America programs.
He learned about the Prague Spring, the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, as well as criticisms of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The radio was also used by his peers as evidence of what was called his thoughtcrime, which led them to torture him physically and mentally. But he never regretted it.
“Voice of America was my school,” said Mr. Xu, 74, who attended Tsinghua University and Harvard after the end of the Cultural Revolution and is now an economist at Stanford. The VOA programs beamed into China shaped his worldview, his understanding of constitutional democracy and his values about freedom and human dignity, he said. He also learned English through a special program that provided news and information using a limited vocabulary and slow and clear pronunciations.
Millions of Chinese, me included, learned English through Voice of America and listened to its news reports, which contradicted the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives. Through its programs, we had a glimpse of the world on the other side of the Bamboo Curtain and, later, the Great Firewall, technology China uses to block most popular foreign websites from its citizens. We got to imagine a world where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were held as ideals.
That’s why it came as a shock to many Chinese when they learned that President Trump had decided to dismantle Voice of America and end grants to Radio Free Asia. It’s unfathomable to them that Washington would surrender the battle of narratives by silencing these news outlets, which produce uncensored and factual reporting on countries like China that lack a free press.
It’s a decision that “pains one’s loved ones and pleases one’s enemies,” as a Chinese saying goes. Nationalist Chinese celebrated the news. “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, wrote in an editorial.
Beijing has long loathed Voice of America’s China coverage, especially its reporting on the persecutions of Uyghurs and Tibetans, the protests in Hong Kong in 2019, the draconian “zero Covid” measures during the pandemic and the country’s economic slowdown. “Almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial said.
I interviewed and had email exchanges with a dozen Chinese, including some in their 20s and 30s. They expressed their sadness and disappointment about the closing or weakening of these agencies. Other than Mr. Xu, they all asked for anonymity, or that I use only their first names, for fear of retribution from Beijing or Washington.
Over the past decade or so, Beijing has killed independent journalism, first in China and increasingly in Hong Kong. That makes agencies like VOA some of the few reliable institutional sources of news that people in the Chinese speaking world can turn to.
“Without VOA and RFA’s independent reporting, Beijing and other authoritarian actors could more easily flood the information space with state propaganda, presenting a distorted view of reality to both domestic and international audiences,” wrote Kris Cheng, a journalist from Hong Kong.
Mr. Cheng, like more than 1,000 of his peers, was forced to leave home and has been freelancing for VOA out of London since 2021. “This would be a strategic victory for the Chinese and Hong Kong governments.”
The U.S. government needs media organizations that convey American values to the world, said a 35-year-old biotech worker in the San Francisco Bay Area who started listening to Voice of America when he was in high school in China.
“Since the United States views China as its biggest competitor, you should have a tool like this in your toolbox,” he said. He is set to become a naturalized citizen next month and invoked the Declaration of Independence in our video call. He said he supported President Trump but had not expected the administration to dismantle these agencies without a backup plan.
In a statement on the White House website, the Trump administration listed reasons behind Mr. Trump’s executive order to shutter Voice of America, including a report by The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, that said multiple VOA reporters had posted anti-Trump content on their social media accounts. Radio Free Asia and some VOA employees are challenging the administration’s efforts in court.
In February, Elon Musk posted on X that the agencies were “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
That’s not true.
Voice of America reaches more than 361 million people a week around the world on an annual budget of $268 million. Its English channel on YouTube has 3.7 million subscribers. Its Chinese channel has 2.3 million subscribers. Many of its programs’ episodes had millions of views, including an hourlong one by Mr. Xu, the Stanford economist, on China’s economic troubles, which was viewed 5.1 million times. A weekly commentary program by Cai Xia, a retired professor of the Communist Party central school turned critic of the party, garnered hundreds of thousands of views for each episode on YouTube. They and some other regular commentators on VOA and Radio Free Asia are far from radical leftists.
Radio Free Asia broadcasts in Burmese, Cantonese, English, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur and Vietnamese. It has an annual budget of $60.8 million and reaches 58 million people a week. “The cost is inconsequential compared to the value of news that challenges the narratives of autocratic regimes,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote last week.
The Cold War ended partly because the thinking of Europeans living in Eastern bloc countries changed, Mr. Xu said. “There might be nothing cheaper than disseminating ideas,” he added.
Agencies like VOA and RFA were created to use uncensored information to fight communism and promote democratic values. Like any traditional media, they have been forced to adapt to the digital age. In 2020, Radio Free Asia launched an online newsmagazine, called WHYNOT, aimed at young Chinese speakers. It quickly gained traction with its coverage of the White Paper protests in 2022.
The U.S. government is giving up on telling its story to the world while China is getting better at shaping narratives and promoting its geopolitical goals.
In a 2023 report, the State Department said Beijing had invested billions of dollars to construct an information ecosystem to propel China’s propaganda. “Unchecked,” the report said, “the P.R.C.’s efforts will reshape the global information landscape,” using an abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China, the country’s official name.
In interviews, Chinese told me how Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had changed their lives.
Zilu, who is in their 30s, started listening to VOA during family breakfast because their father didn’t like the Chinese government. Zilu hummed the opening music of the morning news program to me. In 2001, at the age of 12, they were appalled that their classmates clapped at the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks. Now they read WHYNOT.
Another Chinese person I spoke to, Xuanyi, 29, started listening to Voice of America in high school to learn English. Its news programs led him to conclude that his government did bad things and refused to admit its mistakes. Now a government worker in northern China, he is worried that without U.S. government news outlets, Chinese who circumvent the Great Firewall will find that the internet outside China is full of misinformation.
“They might lose interest and retreat back inside the Great Firewall quickly,” he said.
