Chinese state media hails Trump cuts to Voice of America

Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decison affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice Of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.

The White House defended the move, saying it will “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.

Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Although authorities in some of these countries block the broadcasts – VOA, for instance, is banned in China – people can listen to them on shortwave radio, or get around the restrictions via VPNs.

RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.

It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of Covid fatalities has won awards.

VOA, primarily a radio outlet, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognised last year for its podcast on rare protests in 2022 in China against Covid lockdowns.

But China’s Global Times welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “lie factory”.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multi-dimensional China, the demonising narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughing stock,” it said in an editorial published on Monday.

Hu Xijin, who was the Global Times’ former editor-in-chief, wrote: “Voice of America has been paralysed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which has been as vicious to China. This is such great news.”

Such responses “would have been easy to predict”, said Valdya Baraputri, a VOA journalist who lost her job over the weekend. She was previously employed by BBC World Service.

“Eliminating VOA, of course, allows channels that are the opposite of accurate and balanced reporting to thrive,” she told the BBC.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”.

Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.

VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”.

Ms Baraputri, who is from Indonesia but based in Washington DC, first joined VOA in 2018, but her visa was terminated at the end of Trump’s first administration.

She rejoined in 2023 because she wanted to be part of an organisation that “upholds unbiased, factual reporting that is free from government influence”.

The recent cuts have left her “feeling betrayed by the idea I had about press freedom (in the US)”.

She is also concerned for colleagues who may now be forced to return to hostile home countries, where they could be persecuted for their journalism.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has appealed to the European Union to intervene so it can keep Radio Free Europe going. It reports in 27 languages from 23 countries, reaching more than 47 million people every week.

RFA chief executive Bay Fang said in a statement that the organisation plans to challenge the order. Cutting funding to these outlets is 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”, he said.

RFA started in 1996 and reaches nearly 60 million people weekly in China, Myanmar, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In China, it also broadcasts in minority languages like Tibetan and Uyghur, apart from English and Mandarin.

“(Trump’s order) not only disenfranchises the nearly 60 million people who turn to RFA’s reporting on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but it also benefits America’s adversaries at our own expense,” Mr Fang noted.

While Chinese state media has celebrated the cuts, it’s hard to know how Chinese people feel about it given their internet is heavily censored.

Outside China, those who have listened to VOA and RFA over the years appear disappointed and worried.

“Looking back at history, countless exiles, rebels, intellectuals, and ordinary people have persisted in the darkness because of the voices of VOA and RFA, and have seen hope in fear because of their reports,” Du Wen, a Chinese dissident living in Belgium, wrote on X.

“If the free world chooses to remain silent, then the voice of the dictator will become the only echo in the world.”