In December 1967, when he arrived at a snow-snow farm on China's northeastern border with the Soviet Union, Xu Chenggang carried him an electronic tube and helped him build the radio.
Xu, a 17-year-old from Beijing, lives on a stable horse and spent time there, where he was reeducated and persecuted due to counter-revolutionary thinking. One of the things he went through through a cold, dark decade was tube radio that brought him a program of American voices.
He learned about the Prague Spring, the Watergate scandal, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and the criticism of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Radio was also used by his companions as evidence of what he called his thoughts, which led him to torture both physically and mentally. But he never regretted it.
“Voice of America was my school,” said Xu, 74, who attended Tsinghua University and Harvard University after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The VOA programme shaped his worldview, which was shining in China, his understanding of constitutional democracy, and his values ​​about freedom and human dignity, he said. He also learned English through special programs that provide news and information using limited vocabulary and slow, clear pronunciation.
Millions of Chinese, including myself, learned English through Voice of America and heard the news reports, contradicted the story of the Communist Party of China. Through that program, we got a glimpse into the world on the other side of the bamboo curtain. And since then, the great firewall technology China has used it to block the most popular foreign websites from its citizens. We have come to imagine a world where the pursuit of life, freedom and happiness is held as ideals.
That's why it came as a shock to many Chinese when they learned that President Trump had decided to dismantle the US voice and end the subsidies to Asia, which had no radio. It is immeasurable for them to have Washington abandoned the story's fight by silence these news outlets.
It is the decision to “make your loved one hurt and please your enemies,” as the Chinese proverb says. The nationalist Chinese celebrated the news. “The so-called beacon of freedom, the VOA is now dumped like a dirty rag by its own government,” wrote the Global Times, a Communist tabloid, in an editorial.
Beijing has long disliked the US Chinese press, reports on persecution of Uyghur and Tibetans, protests in Hong Kong in 2019, radical “zero-covid” measures during the pandemic and slowing the country's economy. “Almost all malicious falsehood about China has VOA fingerprints on top,” the editor said.
I interviewed and exchanged emails with 12 Chinese people, including some in their 20s and 30s. They expressed sadness and disappointment over the closure or weakness of these institutions. Other than Xu, they all asked for anonymity or for me to use my name alone, fearing retaliation from Beijing or Washington.
Over the past decade or so, Beijing has killed independent journalism. The first is China, and more and more in Hong Kong. This makes institutions like VOA some of the few reliable institutional news that Chinese-speaking world people can turn to.
“Without independent reports of the VOA and RFA, Beijing and other authoritarian actors could have more easily flooded information spaces with provincial propaganda and presented a view of reality to both national and international audiences,” wrote Hong Kong journalist Chris Chen.
Chen, like his over 1,000 peers, was forced to leave the house and has been building freelance from London for VOA since 2021.
The US government needs a media organization that conveys America's values ​​to the world, said a 35-year-old biotech worker in the San Francisco Gulf region began hearing the voices of the United States while at a high school in China.
“The US considers China to be its biggest competitor, so there should be tools like this in the toolbox,” he said. He is scheduled to become a naturalized citizen next month, and we evoked the Declaration of Independence on our video call. He said he supported President Trump but did not expect the administration to dismantle these agencies without a backup plan.
In a statement on the White House website, the Trump administration listed reasons behind Trump's executive order, including a report from the right-wing website, Daily Coller, which stated that several VOA reporters had posted anti-Trump content on social media accounts. Radio-free Asia and some VOA employees are challenging the administration's efforts in court.
In February, Elon Musk posted to X, “Just talking to yourself while torching US taxpayer money for $100 million a year, they're just radical and difficult people.”
That's not true.
Voice of America reaches over 361 million people a week worldwide with a budget of $268 million annually. The UK YouTube channel has 3.7 million subscribers. Its China channel has 2.3 million subscribers. Many of the episodes of that program were viewed 5.1 million times, including an hour-long viewing by Stanford economist Xu. The weekly commentary program by Cai Xia, a retired professor at the Communist Party Central School, has become a party critic and has earned hundreds of thousands of opinions on each episode of YouTube. They and some other regular commentators about VOA and no radio Asia are far from the radical left.
Radio Free Asia is broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, English, Khmer, Korean, Laos, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur and Vietnamese. The annual budget is $60 million, reaching 58 million a week. “The cost is insignificant compared to the value of news that challenges the narrative of a dictatorship,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote last week.
Xu said the East War ended when Europeans living in the eastern bloc countries changed their mindset. “It may not be as cheap as spreading an idea,” he added.
Institutions such as the VOA and RFA were created to use uncensored information to fight communism and promote democratic values. Like traditional media, they are forced to adapt to the digital age. In 2020, Radio Free Asia launched an online news magazine called Whynot, targeting young Chinese speakers. He quickly gained traction in 2022 by reporting on the white paper's protests.
The US government has given up on telling its story to the world while China is getting better by shaping its narrative and promoting its geopolitical goals.
In a 2023 report, the State Department said Beijing had invested billions of dollars to build an information ecosystem to promote China's propaganda. “Unconfirmed” and the report states that “PRC's efforts will reconstruct the global information environment.”
In an interview, the Chinese showed us how Asia without American voice and radio changed their lives.
Jill, in his 30s, began listening to VOA during his family's breakfast because his father didn't like the Chinese government. Zilu hummed the opening music for the Morning News program to me. In 2001, at age 12, they were applauded by their classmates in the September 11th terrorist attack. Why aren't they reading now?
Another Chinese I spoke to, Xuanyi, 29, began listening to the voices of America in high school to learn English. The news program concluded that his government had done something bad and refused to admit the mistake. Now a government worker in northern China, he fears that without US government coverage, Chinese people who circumvent great firewalls will find the non-Chinese internet is full of misinformation.
“They may lose interest and quickly retreat within the great firewall,” he said.
