Ensuring the US has a voice
Mark Landler’s favorable report on changes to the US government’s broadcasting policies (“Voice of America struggles to retool for a new era,” June 10, page 9) was much too credulous toward would-be innovators in the turbulent world of international media. The report also omitted crucial details and background about the proposal by the Broadcasting Board of Governors to substantially reduce Mandarin Chinese services at Voice of America (VOA).
The severe cuts proposed for Chinese-language news could cripple the biggest and most experienced division at VOA, making it difficult to cope with the continued demand for quality Chinese-language news on the Internet and other still developing outlets. Of the 44 languages in which VOA broadcasts, the only other language to face similar cuts is Croatian. In addition, this selective targeting would save taxpayers just US$8 million, or 1 percent of the board’s annual budget. A more ill-considered budget cut can hardly be imagined.
Pulling the plug on VOA’s radio and TV broadcasts in Chinese comes at the same time Beijing is spending billions of US dollars worldwide to expand into print, radio and TV broadcasting, especially in English. Instead of moving incrementally and cautiously, exploiting the synergy among various media outlets and retaining skilled and dedicated personnel, this drastic reduction in services is a lurch backward.
The apparent rationale for such recklessness is that short-wave radio is old technology and does not reach a significant audience. However, the 0.1 percent figure for audience share cited in Landler’s article is not an accurate measure. It is well known that market survey data for VOA listeners in China vastly underestimates its reach and influence and are therefore unreliable. Few Chinese admit to listening to foreign broadcasts, a punishable offense in the recent past.
Comparative surveys, which are more credible, show that VOA has the largest audience of any foreign broadcaster in China, reaching influential levels of society that value the integrity and fairness of its reports. Now that Britain’s BBC has eliminated its Mandarin short-wave services, VOA remains the most influential foreign news source. Radio Free Asia, which also broadcasts in Chinese, currently reaches a much smaller audience and lacks VOA’s reputation for fairness and accuracy.
The proposed cuts in Chinese-language satellite TV broadcasts have also not been adequately explained. These programs are a smaller part of VOA’s broadcasting, but have been well received and are not jammed. They need to be expanded not eliminated.
Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities are themselves adding short-wave radio capacity to serve their vast population, which still lives mainly in rural areas. Despite hundreds of millions of users being online, most of China’s population has limited or no access to the Internet. Beijing itself relies on radio broadcasts as a primary means of communication and control in times of national crisis or local emergencies. These are precisely the circumstances when VOA’s own broadcasts are most needed.
As for the social media and cellphone services that the board’s innovators say are the future of public diplomacy in broadcasting, neither VOA nor Radio Free Asia has access to these in China. Like the Internet, these media are also heavily controlled and censored. Facebook is blocked and the government has been adept at selectively cutting Internet services to specific service areas, such as the Beijing University campus, to deter protests.
China is not the Middle East, where radio and TV may have yielded to Facebook and Twitter as effective agents of change, especially among young people. At least not yet.
To curtail short-wave and satellite TV broadcasts to China in these circumstances would be short-sighted. It hands Beijing a gratuitous victory in global communications. Already, the state-controlled Chinese press is celebrating VOA’s “retreat” as a sign that Washington is giving up its decades-long commitment to offer alternative sources of information, even as Chinese have pleaded on VOA programs for its broadcasts to continue.
The board may need to catch up with new media technologies, but this is not a one-size-fits-all world. What works in Egypt or Afghanistan may not work in East Asia, at least for now.
The limitations on foreign news providers in China are severe. Fantasizing about the potential role of social media and other digital communications services while abandoning a cost-effective medium that already reaches uncounted millions is simply bad policy.
Retooling is fine, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
JULIAN BAUM
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry