A view of the Voice of America building in Washington, D.C., on March 16.Annabelle Gordon/Reuters
Seven years ago this month, Xi Jinping, fresh from winning a second-term as president and on his way to becoming China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, oversaw the creation of a new umbrella propaganda organization tasked with “properly telling the story of China” around the world.
Officially the China Media Group, its international moniker – Voice of China – made clear Beijing’s ambitions and inspiration.
For decades, China had blocked and censored U.S.-funded broadcasters Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, while looking enviously at their effectiveness in spreading U.S. soft power. In the 2000s, then-President Jiang Zemin issued a call to “let China’s voice broadcast to the world,” and the years that followed saw the rapid expansion of outward facing state media, including broadcaster CCTV (now CGTN) and the China Daily newspaper.
But where VOA and RFA maintained editorial independence from Washington and were governed by strict ethics principles – for all that their critics would denounce them as simply U.S. propaganda – Voice of China is directly controlled by Beijing and its founding charter makes clear its political purpose, to help “strengthen the Party’s centralized establishment and management of major public opinion fronts.”
That job is about to get a lot easier, as the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump moved this month to gut the United States Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent organization, and cut funding to independently-run RFA.
Just as Mr. Trump has frequently repeated Russian propaganda about Ukraine, his image of VOA can also often seem more shaped by how America’s enemies see the broadcaster than reality. In his first term, he sought unsuccessfully to exercise greater direct control over VOA, turning it into something more akin to the propaganda outlet Moscow and Beijing have long denounced it as, while fostering grievances against the broadcaster for its independent reporting on U.S. politics, including Mr. Trump himself.
A White House press release on Saturday accused VOA of producing “radical propaganda” and linked to various coverage in far-right media of alleged scandals involving the outlet. On his platform X, Trump ally Elon Musk praised the move to kill VOA and said “nobody listens to them anymore.”
This is far from the truth. VOA and its affiliates funded by USAGM reach some 420 million people in more than 100 countries each week, in 63 different languages, according to the agency’s most recent annual report.
“VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny,” VOA director Michael Abramowitz wrote on LinkedIn after being placed on leave.
In a statement, RFA President and CEO Bay Fang said cutting off funding to the broadcaster would be 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.”
Shuttering RFA, she added, “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.”
Research by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute found that across 27 countries in Asia, VOA was the number one ranked radio broadcaster by a significant margin. In second place? Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik, with China Radio International also growing its footprint year-on-year.
Lowy’s project lead for its Asia Power Index, Susannah Patton, wrote on Tuesday that “the impact of the cuts in Asia will be twofold: the media environment in many countries will suffer because Voice of America and Radio Free Asia made valuable contributions where free press was limited.”
Chinese media has hailed the impending closure of the U.S. broadcasters. In an editorial, the state-run tabloid Global Times said “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”
“The monopoly of information held by some traditional Western media is being shattered,” the paper said. “The carefully constructed ‘iron curtain of public opinion’ they have built is also on the verge of collapse.”
As more Americans “begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multi-dimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it added.
An offshoot of the People’s Daily, official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, Global Times has grown significantly in influence as Beijing’s most aggressive outward facing propaganda outlet, a bullish alternative to the more staid CGTN – which now operates in more than 160 countries – and China Daily, which largely relies on generous funding from Beijing to offer cut-price subscriptions and pay for inserts in independent newspapers around the world.
The shuttering of VOA and RFA, along with impending cuts to the BBC World Service, another vital international broadcaster, will make Beijing’s voice louder than ever, particularly in developing countries where domestic media has little funding and less will to challenge government narratives.