Chinese propaganda surges as the U.S. defunds Radio Free Asia
Beijing expanded its state propaganda, including to the persecuted Tibetan and Uyghur minorities, as RFA pulled back.
Two months after the Trump administration all but shut down its foreign news services in Asia, China is gaining significant ground in the information war, building toward a regional propaganda monopoly, including in areas where U.S.-backed outlets once reported on Beijing’s harsh treatment of ethnic minorities.
Cutbacks at Radio Free Asia and other news outlets funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media have allowed China to fill a programming void and expand the reach of its talking points, according to an analysis prepared for a USAGM grantee that, though based on publicly available data, was not authorized to be shared publicly.
RFA distributed its broadcast on 60 shortwave radio frequencies as recently as late March, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding drastic cuts to U.S.-backed media. The news service is not using any of those frequencies anymore, the analysis found. China’s state radio added 80 new frequencies during the same period, jamming frequencies previously used by RFA and increasing its own broadcasting on more frequencies and for longer hours, according to the analysis.
The U.S. decision to shut down much of RFA’s shortwave broadcasting in Asia is one of several cases where the Trump administration — which views China as America’s biggest rival — has yielded the adversary a strategic advantage. The administration gutted the United States Agency for International Development, which once served as a counterweight to Chinese influence in many developing countries. And China has expanded its trading relationships with countries affected by Trump’s tariffs.
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“USAGM once broadcast a huge amount of content globally in so many different languages,” said Steve Palmer, a decades-long veteran of international radio broadcasting who has never worked at a USAGM entity. “With those disappearing, there is evidence to suggest that other countries are stepping in to fill the void.”
Kari Lake, the Trump ally who is serving as a senior adviser to the USAGM, which oversees RFA, did not respond to questions for this story. An agency spokesperson and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.
The U.S.-backed news outlets under USAGM were often the only outside voice in countries that limit — and sometimes criminalize — independent reporting.
In a sign of how verboten RFA is across Asia, in late 2020, RFA reported that authorities in North Korea executed the owner of a fishing fleet in front of 100 boat captains and fishery executives for secretly listening to broadcasts by Radio Free Asia and other unauthorized media outlets.
The media analysis centers on the use of shortwave radio in and around China. Shortwave signals can travel for thousands of miles. In countries with strict internet censorship, shortwave can circumvent restrictions and deliver information to audiences while maintaining listeners’ anonymity and protecting them from reprisals.
In China, the government strictly controls access to independent media, especially in regions like Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, where it has continued its efforts to suppress ethnic minority communities.
Because shortwave radio does not track listeners, it is unclear how many people are affected. But even small inroads can make an impact in areas that are otherwise sealed off. RFA played a significant role in drawing attention to Beijing’s mass internment drive in Xinjiang that detained more than a million ethnic Uyghurs in “reeducation” centers.
For example, RFA is no longer broadcasting to Tibetan or Uyghur audiences. Beijing has added 26 new Tibetan language frequencies and 16 new Uyghur language frequencies since the end of March, the same period when RFA began pulling back. The additions expand the reach of China’s propaganda.
RFA’s retreat closes one of the last sources of media in China that broadcasts beyond the state’s control. Beijing deploys the world’s most sophisticated censorship system, blocking virtually all foreign news and social media, and is investing heavily in expanding the reach of its own radio stations abroad, which are run under the authority of a CCP propaganda bureau.
“It’s a moral imperative that America takes the lead on helping these ethnic groups where their human rights are being trampled, especially by China,” said Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Florida), who sits on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. He acknowledged that the United States has limited resources, but asked: “If the Chinese think these channels are worthwhile, then why don’t we?”
Beijing has long sought to reverse what it perceives as a losing global battle with the West in what it calls “discourse power,” said Maria Repnikova, a professor at Georgia State University specializing in Chinese propaganda and soft power.
“China’s propaganda efforts are extensive and multifaceted and have been increasing in sophistication over the past several decades,” Repnikova said.
Radio Free Asia is one of the news outlets that, until recently, was operating under the umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Voice of America, the oldest of the outlets, was created in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda. RFA followed in 1996, spurred by the Chinese government’s censorship of the bloody Tiananmen crackdown seven years earlier.
RFA’s mission is to deliver uncensored domestic news and information to China, Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, among other places in Asia with little access to independent media outlets and few, if any, free speech protections. All broadcasts were presented in local languages and dialects, including Mandarin, Tibetan, Cantonese, Uyghur, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer, Myanmar and Korean.
But RFA has had to place almost its entire staff on unpaid leave as Lake carried out the executive order. Employees and their unions sued the administration in April, trying to restore funding for the news services. A judge has granted that funding be restored on a monthly basis, but the future of the news organization is still in peril.
Chinese officials have lauded the closure of RFA, which raised particular ire for its comprehensive coverage of Uyghur camps. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that RFA has a “long list of bad records” reporting on China, and that Beijing’s growing number of state radio services improve media literacy.
“In the digital age, misinformation often spreads faster than verified facts … media cooperation between China and relevant countries is conducive to promoting mutual understanding and trust between the people of these countries,” said spokesman Liu Pengyu.
China initially denied the existence of the Uyghur internment facilities, and later described them as “vocational centers.”
The first Trump administration declared in 2021 that China’s treatment of Uyghurs was a genocide, a designation that the Biden administration extended.
The Chinese government essentially eliminated Uyghur broadcasting by imprisoning Uyghur journalists, Uyghur writers and Uyghur editors in internment camps, said Alim Seytoff, director of RFA’s Uyghur service, leaving the region with only Chinese government propaganda. And while China controls all of its residents’ access to media, the Uyghur region is “the most closed, most surveilled, and the most armed region of China,” Seytoff said.
China spent vast sums to try to jam RFA’s Uyghur service, Seytoff added. The broadcasts, available to the more than 11 million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang, brought global attention to China’s repression of Uyghurs. Beijing’s heavy spending supported not only jamming the RFA broadcasts, Seytoff said, but also persecuting the family members of RFA’s Uyghur journalists, surveilling, intimidating and placing roughly 50 of them in detention camps.
The channels that have a growing presence as RFA withdraws are subsidiaries of China Media Group, a state-run conglomerate overseen by the CCP’s propaganda department. Since 2018, CMG outlets — including China National Radio and the internationally focused China Radio International (CRI) — have undergone a polished overhaul, expanding their reach at home and pushing aggressively into new regions abroad, airing content in more than 65 languages.
Officials overseeing CMG units have unanimously described them as a “mouthpiece” for the Communist Party. In 2017, then-CRI chief Wang Gengnian said the broadcaster’s role was also to recruit “foreign mouths and brains” to amplify Chinese policies overseas — particularly Beijing’s sweeping Belt and Road infrastructure push. Popular programming includes state news bulletins and culture-focused segments that consistently cast China in a positive light.
In Xinjiang and Tibetan regions, native-language state radio broadcasts include programs focused on reinforcing national laws and promoting ethnic unity. One such recent Xinjiang tourism segment was titled “How Can We Not Love Xinjiang,” while a Tibetan-language broadcast featured extended readings from President Xi Jinping’s political ideology.
At an event celebrating the anniversary of the Chinese state-run Tibetan radio network last month, a senior official from Beijing’s propaganda department said its ethnic language services should allow the “leader’s thoughts to penetrate the hearts of ethnic people like honey rain.”