{"id":303865,"date":"2026-02-18T07:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T07:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/303865\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T07:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T07:13:08","slug":"radio-free-asia-says-it-resumes-broadcasts-to-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/303865\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio Free Asia says it resumes broadcasts to China"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Radio Free Asia<\/a> has resumed broadcasts to people in China<\/a>, its CEO said Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America<\/a>, for years had been financed with funding approved by the U.S. Congress and overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM.<\/p>\n

Last year Kari Lake<\/a>, a former news anchor appointed by President Donald Trump<\/a> as acting CEO 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 U.S. adversaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in China in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world\u2019s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages,\u201d RFA\u2019s president and CEO Bay Fang wrote in a post on LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She said the ability to restart the broadcasts was \u201cdue to private contracting with transmission services.\u201d She did not provide details, but added that rebuilding the network would require consistently receiving newly approved congressional funding.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

A bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier this month included $653 million for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets.<\/p>\n

That is down from the $867 million appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but more than the $153 million Trump requested that Congress provide to shut down USAGM.<\/p>\n

U.S. lawmakers of both major parties had said Trump\u2019s drive to dismantle the news outlets diminished Washington\u2019s clout globally at a time when Beijing is expanding its own sphere of influence.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for China\u2019s embassy in Washington declined to comment on what he said was U.S. domestic policy, but accused RFA of having an anti-China bias.<\/p>\n

\u201cRadio Free Asia has long spread falsehoods and smeared China, and they have a poor record when it comes to reporting on China-related issues,\u201d Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said. \u201cWe hope more media outlets in the U.S. can make objective and fair-minded reports on China and China-U.S. relations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chinese state media had praised last year\u2019s cuts.<\/p>\n

Rights activists say that RFA has for decades shone light on abuses by China and other authoritarian countries, raising awareness about the plight of oppressed minorities such as China\u2019s Uyghur Muslims<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Friday, RFA spokesperson Rohit Mahajan said the outlet had contracted with private companies to broadcast to audiences in Tibet, North Korea<\/a> and Myanmar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mahajan said the outlet\u2019s Mandarin audio content currently 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 yet resumed, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its CEO said Tuesday, after Trump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-303865","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}