Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasting to the public in China, its chief executive said Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year forced the largely US-funded outlet to suspend operations.
For years, RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), have been funded by the US Congress and overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Last year, Kari Lake, a former news anchor appointed by Donald Trump to be USAGM’s acting chief executive, canceled their grants, accusing them of wasting taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias. Critics have condemned the move, which has led to mass layoffs, prompting China and other US rivals.
However, Bai Fang, RFA’s president and chief executive, wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday: “We are proud to resume broadcasting in Mandarin, Tibetan and Uyghur to audiences in China, providing the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in local languages.”
The ability to resume broadcasts is “due to a private agreement with transmission services,” she said. She did not provide details, but added that steady funding is needed to get congressional approval to rebuild the network.
The bipartisan spending bill Trump signed into law in February includes $653m for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets. That figure is less than the $867 million allocated to each agency over the past two years, but more than the $153m Trump requested Congress provide to close USAGM.
US lawmakers from both parties say Trump’s drive to dismantle news outlets at a time when Beijing is expanding its own sphere of influence has eroded Washington’s clout around the world.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington declined to comment on US domestic policy, but accused the RFA of harboring an anti-China bias.
“Radio Free Asia has long spread lies and slandered China, and they have a poor record when reporting on China-related issues,” said Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu. “We hope that more media outlets in the US can produce objective and fair-minded reports on China and China-US relations.”
Chinese state media praised the cuts last year.
Rights activists say the RFA has shed light on decades of abuses by China and other authoritarian countries, raising awareness of the plight of oppressed minorities such as China’s Uighur Muslims.
On Friday, RFA spokesperson Rohit Mahajan said the outlet had tied up with private companies to broadcast to audiences in Tibet, North Korea and Myanmar.
Mahajan said the outlet’s Mandarin audio content is online only and aims to resume regular broadcasts on the airwaves soon. Its Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean and Burmese radio programming is broadcast on short and medium-wave frequencies. Previous satellite transmissions by USAGM have not yet been resumed, he said.
