Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese state media and pro-China commentators have welcomed the de facto shutting down of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) following the latest budget cuts by the administration of United States President Donald Trump.
“The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” the Global Times, which is known for its nationalistic commentary, said in an editorial over the weekend following Trump’s defunding of the news outlets.
The daily tabloid described VOA as a “carefully crafted propaganda machine” whose “primary function is to serve Washington’s need to attack other countries based on ideological demands”.
The comments were echoed by former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, who described the dismantling of the outlets as “really gratifying” in a post on microblogging site Weibo.
Nury Vittachi, a Hong Kong-based writer who has written for state-run outlets, including China Daily, also welcomed the demise of the “US propaganda operatives”.
“These groups issue ‘news’ in 62 languages to influence the minds of 350 million people around the world to take a pro-American slant – and poison people’s minds against Chinese, Russians, Iranians, and other people Washington sees as rivals or ‘adversaries’,” Vittachi said on X.
While declining to comment directly on the Trump administration’s domestic policies, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning on Tuesday described VOA as a “lie factory that stirs up conflict” with a “notorious track record in their China coverage”.
VOA and RFA have been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party for decades, broadcasting news and commentary that challenged Beijing’s stance on sensitive topics such as Taiwan and the Uighur ethnic minority.
China was one of VOA’s first target audiences upon its establishment in the midst of World War II, according to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) parent agency.
Over the decades, the outlet expanded its coverage to 49 languages, eventually claiming a global audience of 361 million people.
The smaller RFA, founded in 1996, relied on a network of on-the-ground contacts across Asia to shed light on regions off-limits to most Western journalists, including China’s Tibet and Xinjiang.
“Both RFA and VOA do something that basically no one else does, which is reach audiences inside China through non-internet means,” Bethany Allen, head of the programme for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera.
“VOA TV broadcasts and RFA radio reach people who otherwise would not have access to independent information. Many censorship circumvention tools are now illegal in China and thus risky to use, and they are also too complicated for people who aren’t internet savvy,” Allen added.
RFA generated global headlines in 2017 when its Uighur-language service became the first news outlet to report on the widespread detention of Uighur Muslims in so-called “vocational education and training centres” in Xinjiang.
Subsequent reporting about the treatment of the Uighurs by BuzzFeed News and Business Insider was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 and 2022.
RFA has also been “exceptional” in “covering stories unfolding on the ground in China that otherwise are not covered”, David Bandurski, director of the Taiwan-based China Media Project, told Al Jazeera.
VOA has been “hugely influential over its history”, Bandurski said.
“I have met many Chinese journalists and editors over the past 20 years who remembered listening to VOA on their shortwaves in the 1980s … It was a liberalising force,” he said.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of USAGM “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”.
As of Saturday, some 1,300 VOA staff members, almost the entirety of its workforce, had been placed on leave.
Trump’s gutting of USAGM, whose 2024 budget stood at $886.7m, also spells the likely end of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – founded during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda – the Middle East Broadcasting Network and the Open Technology Fund.
Trump and his allies have long railed against VOA and other publicly funded US media, accusing them of liberal bias and overly sympathetic coverage of US adversaries.
While Trump’s order has been broadly condemned by press freedom organisations and mainstream journalists, VOA and its sister networks have also received criticism over their journalistic standards.
In 2013, former VOA journalist Gary Thomas wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that the “politically incorrect secret” at the outlet was its “wildly inconsistent journalistic acumen of the language services”.
“Some possess a wealth of journalistic expertise; others are woefully bereft,” Thomas wrote.
“The disparity is explained by the simple fact that it is difficult to find people who are fluent in a given language, and also have experience in the kind of rigorous journalism VOA has traditionally required.”
On Monday, Tracy Wen Liu, a former VOA journalist based in the US, said in a post on X that some of the network’s “capable and ambitious” Chinese-language reporters internally raised concerns about the “lack of professionalism” in the newsroom only to find themselves shut out from promotion.
“The leadership of both Voice of America and Radio Free Asia’s Chinese departments lacks the neutrality that journalists should have, and they fail to appoint people based on merit. The guests they invite have become increasingly biased. And now, things have reached this state,” Liu said.
