Radio Free Asia resumes broadcasts to China after Trump cuts forced near closure | China
Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasting to people in China after Trump administration cuts last year forced the U.S.-funded channel to largely cease operations, its chief executive said Tuesday.
For years, RFA and its sister organizations, including Voice of America (VOA), were funded by funds approved by the US Congress and overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Last year, former news anchor Kari Lake, appointed by Donald Trump as acting head of USAGM, ended the grants, citing a waste of taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias. Critics described the move, which led to mass layoffs, as giving room to China and other US rivals.
But Mr. Fang, RFA’s president and chief executive, wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday: “We are proud to continue broadcasting in Mandarin, Tibetan and Uyghur to audiences in China, providing the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in local languages.”
He said the ability to restart broadcasts was “due to the exclusive contract with the transmission services.” He did not elaborate but added that rebuilding the network would require consistent funding to be approved by Congress.
The bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law in early February included $653 million for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-sponsored agencies. That figure is less than the $867 million allocated to the agency over the past two years, but more than the $153 million Trump requested from Congress to shut down USAGM.
U.S. lawmakers from both parties said Trump’s effort to break up news organizations was diminishing Washington’s global influence at a time when Beijing is expanding its own sphere of influence.
A spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington declined to comment on US domestic policy but accused RFA of having anti-China bias.
“Radio Free Asia has long spread lies and slandered China, and they have a poor record of reporting on China-related issues,” Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said. “We hope that more media outlets in the United States can report objectively and fairly on China and China-US relations.”
Chinese state media praised last year’s cuts.
Rights advocates said the RFA shed light on decades of abuses by China and other authoritarian countries and raised awareness about the plight of oppressed minorities such as Uyghur Muslims in China.
On Friday, RFA spokesman Rohit Mahajan said the channel had struck deals with private companies to broadcast to viewers in Tibet, North Korea and Myanmar.
Mahajan said the channel’s Mandarin audio content is available online only and that its goal is to resume regular broadcasts over the airwaves in the near future. Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean and Burmese radio programs are broadcast on short and medium wave frequencies. He said previous satellite broadcasts through USAGM have not yet been resumed.
