Radio Free Asia resumes broadcasts to China after Trump cuts forced near closure

Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its chief executive said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the US-funded outlet to cease operations.For years, RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), had 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 Donald Trump as the acting chief executive of USAGM, terminated their grants, alleging waste of taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias. Critics decried the move, which led to mass layoffs, as ceding ground to China and other US adversaries.However, Bay Fang, RFA’s president and chief executive, wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday: “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.”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 consistentfunding to be approved by Congress.A bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier in February included $653m for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets. That figure is down from the $867m appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but more than the $153m Trump requested that Congress provide to shut down USAGM.US lawmakers of both 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,” the Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said. “We hope more media outlets in the US can make objective and fair-minded reports on China and China-US relations.“Chinese state media had praised last year’s cuts.Rights activists have said that for decades RFA has shone light on abuses by China and other authoritarian countries, raising awareness about the plight of oppressed minorities such as China’s Uyghur Muslims.On Friday, the RFA spokesperson 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 is online only, with the aim to resume regular broadcasts over airwaves soon. Its Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean, and Burmese radio programming airs over short and medium-wave frequencies. Previous satellite transmissions via USAGM have not resumed yet, he said.