One nationalist influencer called it \u201ctruly gratifying.\u201d Another said he was laughing his head off. And a state-media editorial hailed the demise of what it called the \u201clie factory.\u201d <\/p>\n
Chinese nationalists and state media could hardly contain their schadenfreude after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia (RFA) and other US government-funded media organizations that broadcast to authoritarian regimes. <\/p>\n
For years, the Chinese government and its propaganda apparatus have relentlessly attacked VOA and RFA for their critical coverage of China, particularly on human rights and religious freedom. <\/p>\n
And now, the Trump administration is silencing the very institutions that Beijing has long sought to undermine \u2013 at a time when China is spending lavishly to expand the global footprint of its own state media. <\/p>\n
In an editorial Monday, the Global Times, a pugnacious Communist Party-run newspaper, denounced VOA as a \u201clie factory\u201d with an \u201cappalling track record\u201d on China reporting. <\/p>\n
From its coverage of alleged human rights abuses in the far western Xinjiang region to reporting on South China Sea disputes, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the coronavirus pandemic and the Chinese economy, \u201calmost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA\u2019s fingerprints all over it,\u201d the editorial claimed. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,\u201d it added. <\/p>\n
VOA\u2019s China coverage stretches back decades. During the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, its Chinese-language radio broadcasts became a critical source of uncensored information for the Chinese people. (VOA discontinued its Chinese radio broadcasts in 2011 but its Chinese language website remained online as of Monday.) <\/p>\n
RFA, founded in 1996, broadcasts to China in English, Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan-language services, catering to ethnic minorities whose freedoms the Chinese government has long been accused of suppressing. <\/p>\n
RFA CEO Bay Fang called the US grant cutoff \u201ca 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
On Chinese social media, nationalist influencers celebrated the demise of VOA, which has placed all 1,300 staff on administrative leave, and of RFA, which said it may cease operations following the termination of federal grants. <\/p>\n
\u201cVoice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!\u201d wrote Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the Global Times and prominent nationalist commentator. <\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost all Chinese people know the Voice of America, as it is a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China,\u201d Hu wrote in a post on microblogging site Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers. \u201c(I) believe that Chinese people are more than happy to see America\u2019s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.\u201d <\/p>\n
Another nationalist commentator accused VOA and RFA of being \u201cnotorious propaganda machines for color revolutions,\u201d referring to protests of the 2000s that toppled governments in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m laughing my head off!\u201d they said. <\/p>\n
Others cheered Trump, who during his first term in office was nicknamed \u201cChuan Jianguo,\u201d or \u201cTrump, the (Chinese) nation builder\u201d by the Chinese internet, in a mocking suggestion that the US president\u2019s isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda was helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage. <\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, Comrade Chuan Jianguo and Elon Musk, please take care and stay safe,\u201d a Weibo user said on Monday. <\/p>\n
Musk, the billionaire adviser to Trump who has been spearheading sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis news marks the end of an era,\u201d said another comment on Weibo on Sunday. <\/p>\n
The White House defended Trump\u2019s executive order in a statement Saturday, claiming it \u201cwill ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.\u201d <\/p>\n
But as the US-funded stations dial down, China is busy amplifying its own messages to the world. <\/p>\n
Under leader Xi Jinping, China has drastically expanded the reach and influence of its state media outlets as part of its push to gain \u201cdiscourse power\u201d in a world it sees as unfairly dominated by the Western narrative. <\/p>\n
In 2018, Beijing announced the creation of a giant media conglomerate by merging three existing state-run networks aimed at overseas audiences to better combine resources. Its name? Voice of China. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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