Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its \u200bCEO said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced \u200bthe U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations. RFA and \u2060its sister outlets, including Voice of America, for years had been financed with funding approved by the U.S. Congress \u200band overseen by \u200cthe U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM. Last year Kari Lake, a former news anchor appointed by President Donald Trump as acting CEO of USAGM, terminated \u200btheir 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. “We are proud to have \u200cresumed broadcasting to \u200caudiences in China in Mandarin, \u200bTibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages,” RFA’s president and CEO Bay Fang wrote in a post on LinkedIn. She said the ability to restart the broadcasts was “due to pr
ivate contracting \u200bwith transmission services,” without providing details, but added that rebuilding the network would require consistently receiving newly approved congressional funding. A bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier in February included $653 million for USAGM, \u200bwhich oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets. 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. China’s embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment on \u200cRFA’s resumption of broadcasting. Chinese state media had praised last year’s cuts. U.S. lawmakers of both major parties had said Trump’s drive to dismantle the news outlets diminished Washington’s clout globally at a \u2060time when Beijing is expanding \u200bits own sphere of influence. Rights activists say that RFA has for decades shone light onto abuses by China and other au<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its \u200bCEO said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced \u200bthe U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations. RFA and \u2060its sister outlets, including Voice of America, for years had been financed with funding approved by the U.S. Congress \u200band overseen by \u200cthe U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n