Chinese state media praise Trump’s cuts to the voice of America

Chinese state media have welcomed Donald Trump’s movement to reduce public funds for the media Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, who have long reported on authoritarian regimes.

The decision affects thousands of employees, some 1,300 employees paid in Voice of America (VOA) have been placed Only from Friday’s executive order.

Critics have called the movement a setback for democracy, but the state newspaper of Beijing Global Times denounced VOA for its “terrial history” by informing about China and said that “it has now been discarded by its own government as a dirty cloth.”

The White House defended the move, saying that “it will ensure that taxpayers are no longer in the hook for radical propaganda.”

Trump’s cuts are directed to the Global Media Global Media Agency (USAGM), which has the support of Congress and finances the affected media, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.

They have won international acclamation and recognition for their reports in places where freedom of the press is severely reduced or non -existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.

Although the authorities in some of these countries block transmissions, VOA, for example, is prohibited in China, people can listen to them on the short wave radio or move through the restrictions through VPN.

RFA has often informed about the repression of human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has acclaimed cuts as a “great contribution to eliminate false news.”

He was also one of the first media to report on the “Reeducation Fields” network of China in Xinjiang, where thousands of Uigures Muslims have been arrested, a position by Beijing denies. His reports on North Korean deserters and the alleged cover -up of covid deaths of the Chinese Communist Party have won prizes.

VOA, mainly a radio departure, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognized last year by its podcast in rare protests in China against Covid Lockdowns.

But China’s global times welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “lies factory.”

“As more Americans begin to break their information and see a real world and a multidimensional China, demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will finally become a laughter,” he said in an editorial published on Monday.

Hu Xijin, who was the former editor in chief of the Global Times, wrote: “Voice of America has been paralyzed! And Radio Free Asia has also done so, who has been so vicious to China. This is great news.”

Such answers “would have been easy to predict,” said Valdya Baraputri, a VOA journalist who lost his job during the weekend. It was previously used by BBC World Service.

“Eliminate VOA, of course, allows channels that are opposed to precise and balanced reports,” he told the BBC.

The National Press Club, a leading representative group for American journalists, said the order “undermines the United States long -standing commitment to a free and independent press.”

Founded during World War II in part to counteract Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches about 360 million people per week in almost 50 languages. Over the years it has been broadcast in China, North Korea, Cuba communist and the former Soviet Union. It has also been a useful tool for many Chinese to learn English.

VOA director Michael Abramowitz said that Trump’s order has limited Voa to the left, while “the adversaries of the United States, such as Iran, China and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars in the creation of false narratives to discredit the United States.”

Mrs. Barapputri, who is from Indonesia but based in Washington DC, joined VOA for the first time in 2018, but her visa was finished at the end of the first Trump administration.

He joined in 2023 because he wanted to be part of an organization that “defends reports of impartial objectives that are free of government influence.”

Recent recent ones have let it “feel betrayed by the idea that he had about press freedom (in the United States).”

She is also worried about colleagues who can now be forced to return to hostile countries, where they could be persecuted for their journalism.

Meanwhile, the The Czech Republic has appealed to the European Union intervene so that you can keep the radio free Europe. It reports in 27 languages ​​from 23 countries, reaching more than 47 million people each week.

RFA’s executive director, Bay Fang, said in a statement that the organization plans to challenge the order. Cutting funds for these points of sale is a “reward for dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would not like anything better than its influence is not controlled in the information space,” he said.

RFA began in 1996 and reaches almost 60 million people weekly in China, Myanmar, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In China, it also transmits in minority languages ​​such as Tibetan and Uyghur, apart from English and Mandarin.

“(Trump’s order) not only pre -drawn the almost 60 million people who resort to RFA reports weekly to learn the truth, but also benefit United States adversaries to our own coast,” Fang said.

While the Chinese state media have celebrated the cuts, it is difficult to know how the Chinese feel in this regard since their internet is very censored.

Outside China, those who have heard VOA and RFA over the years seem disappointed and worried.

“Looking back in history, innumerable exiles, rebels, intellectuals and common people have persisted in the dark due to the voices of Voa and RFA, and have seen hope in fear for their reports,” wrote Du Wen, a Chinese dissident in Belgium, in X.

“If the free world chooses to remain silent, then the dictator’s voice will become the only echo of the world.”