One nationalist influencer called it “truly gratifying.” Another said he was laughing his head off. And a state-media editorial hailed the demise of what it called the “lie factory.”
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.
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.
And now, the Trump administration is silencing the very institutions that Beijing has long sought to undermine – at a time when China is spending lavishly to expand the global footprint of its own state media.
In an editorial Monday, the Global Times, a pugnacious Communist Party-run newspaper, denounced VOA as a “lie factory” with an “appalling track record” on China reporting.
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, “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial claimed.
“As 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,” it added.
VOA’s 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.)
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.
RFA CEO Bay Fang called the US grant cutoff “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.”
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.
“Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!” wrote Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the Global Times and prominent nationalist commentator.
“Almost all Chinese people know the Voice of America, as it is a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China,” Hu wrote in a post on microblogging site Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers. “(I) believe that Chinese people are more than happy to see America’s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.”
Another nationalist commentator accused VOA and RFA of being “notorious propaganda machines for color revolutions,” referring to protests of the 2000s that toppled governments in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
“I’m laughing my head off!” they said.
Others cheered Trump, who during his first term in office was nicknamed “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” by the Chinese internet, in a mocking suggestion that the US president’s isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda was helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.
“Thank you, Comrade Chuan Jianguo and Elon Musk, please take care and stay safe,” a Weibo user said on Monday.
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.
“This news marks the end of an era,” said another comment on Weibo on Sunday.
The White House defended Trump’s executive order in a statement Saturday, claiming it “will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”
But as the US-funded stations dial down, China is busy amplifying its own messages to the world.
Under leader Xi Jinping, China has drastically expanded the reach and influence of its state media outlets as part of its push to gain “discourse power” in a world it sees as unfairly dominated by the Western narrative.
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.