Radio Free Asia (RFA) has resumed broadcasts to China, its CEO said on Tuesday, after US President Donald Trump’s administration last year cut funding, forcing it to cease operations.
RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), had for years been financed with funding approved by the US Congress and overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Last year Kari Lake, a former news anchor appointed by Trump as acting CEO of USAGM, terminated their grants, alleging waste of taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias.
Photo: Reuters
Critics decried the move, which led to mass layoffs, as ceding ground to China and other US adversaries.
“We are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in China in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages,” RFA president and CEO Fang Bay (方貝) wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
She said the ability to restart the broadcasts was “due to private contracting with transmission services.”
She did not provide details, but added that rebuilding the network would require consistently receiving newly approved congressional funding.
A bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier this month included US$653 million for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets.
That is down from the US$867 million appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but more than the US$153 million Trump requested that Congress provide to shut down USAGM.
US lawmakers of both major parties had said Trump’s drive to dismantle the news outlets diminished Washington’s clout globally at a time when Beijing is expanding its own sphere of influence.
A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington declined to comment on what he said was US domestic policy, but accused RFA of having an anti-China bias.
“Radio Free Asia has long spread falsehoods and smeared China, and they have a poor record when it comes to reporting on China-related issues,” Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu (劉鵬宇) said.
“We hope more media outlets in the US can make objective and fair-minded reports on China and China-US relations,” Liu added.
Chinese state media had praised last year’s cuts.
Rights activists say RFA has for decades shone light on abuses by China and other authoritarian countries, raising awareness about the plight of oppressed minorities such as China’s Uighur Muslims.
On Friday, RFA spokesman Rohit Mahajan said the outlet had contracted with private companies to broadcast to audiences in Tibet, North Korea and Myanmar.
Mahajan said the outlet’s Mandarin audio content currently is online only, with the aim to resume regular broadcasts over airwaves soon.
Its Tibetan, Uighur, Korean and Burmese radio programming airs over short and medium-wave frequencies.
Previous satellite transmissions via USAGM have not resumed yet, he said.
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