Tag Archives: RFA

NGOs Call on the Trump Admin: Do Not Close Off Chinese Access to Global Info.

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    Women’s Rights in China(WRIC)

Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB)

Visual Artists Guild (VAG)

3-19-2025

 

 

President Trump has signed an executive order to revoke and drastically reduce the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and its affiliated media organizations, including Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Marti (broadcasting to Cuba), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), which include broadcasts in Tibetan, Uyghur, and 48 other languages worldwide. We believe this will deeply shock and frustrate at least 500 million listeners around the world who lack freedom of speech. It means that the rare window through which they seek to understand the outside world and be understood by it will be closed. NGOs Women’s Rights in China (WRIC) and Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) strongly urge President Trump to reconsider the decision to revoke USAGM. USAGM plays a crucial role in our country and the world. This soft power of international media is highly effective in countering propaganda in China and Hong Kong, where freedom of speech is suppressed.

 

Government-funded international medias, through the news, interviews, music, and educational programs, bring hope to countless people seeking freedom. Journalists thus become targets of dictators, with some frontline reporters being humiliated and detained during interviews. The awakening of generations of Chinese people over the past half-century owes much to VOA and RFA.

 

We understand that the agency has issues that need addressing. However, USAGM’s commitment through its soft diplomacy is also crucial to international human rights and U.S. leadership. The careers of dedicated journalists who risk their lives should not end here.

 

Dismantling these organizations not only harms American values but also ignores the urgent need of hundreds of millions of people worldwide for alternative media services like RFA, OCB (Radio Marti), RFE/RL, MBN, and OTF (Open Technology Fund). Without RFA’s critical role in translation services, the world would have even greater difficulty understanding the suffering of millions of Uyghur people in a timely manner. Especially as the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship aggressively expands its global propaganda apparatus, cutting these media outlets is detrimental to U.S. national interests. It is like handing a gift to America’s enemies or dictators.

 

Senior Beijing journalist Gao Yu, who has long been under surveillance, said upon learning that over a thousand VOA journalists were ordered to stop working, “The thought that VOA’s Chinese website won’t be updated the next day is more than just regret; it’s heartbreaking.” She posted on X on March 16, “This American action is like self-strangulation, giving way to Chinese state media and its external propaganda. For the vast majority of Chinese listeners who watch VOA over the Great Firewall, this is tantamount to building an impenetrable frozen wall in front of them.”

 

Renowned Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said, “It’s very regrettable. Since 1989, listening to the Chinese programs of overseas media like VOA has become my habit. Back then, there was no internet or mobile phones; we bought shortwave radios to listen to ‘enemy stations’ because freedom of the press is crucial…”

 

Ms. Chen, a WRIC volunteer in Yunnan, China, said, “It’s unbelievable. After all, VOA and RFA are the most convenient media for directly conveying our voices to the international community and governments. Especially in countries without freedom of speech, we desperately lack honest media to tell us the true outside world.”

 

In stark contrast, the propaganda machines of the Chinese Communist Party’s external propaganda apparatus immediately rejoiced, saying, “VOA, you’ve met your day!”…

 

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is using state power to launch a massive “Telling China’s story well” propaganda offensive in democratic countries like the U.S. Xinhua News Agency’s overseas social media editorial department (Hai Mei Shi 海媒室) is using deep media integration with various overseas forces to aggressively promote the CCP’s international influence, aiming to dominate as a powerful, new, all-encompassing international media. In 2023, “Hai Mei Shi” was awarded the “National Pioneer Worker” honorary title by the CCP. The CCP also uses foreign propagandists and AI to spread rumors and sow discord on online social platforms, and employs infiltration and transnational repression to lure, induce, threaten, and intimidate politicians and Chinese dissidents in Western democratic countries.

 

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2024 World Press Freedom Index ranks China 172nd out of 180 countries and regions, making it one of the least free countries for press freedom in the world. Hong Kong ranked 70th in 2018, but in the four years since the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kong’s Press Freedom Index has plummeted to 135th.

 

China remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists, currently detaining 119 journalists, including 10 from Hong Kong. Since 2019, dozens of Hong Kong’s free media outlets and pro-democracy groups have been forced to close.

 

In conclusion, we strongly urge the Trump administration to carefully consider the disposition of media outlets like VOA. They are one of America’s active and advantageous soft power tools. The U.S. needs to use this soft power to undermine and divide hostile forces, and to allow the people of dictatorial countries to hear the American voice, see the world beyond the firewall, and understand the values of human rights, democracy, and freedom. Only then can America’s core values be promoted, and America remain invincible.

 

 

Ye Bing, a Beijing-based reporter for Voice of America (VOA) Chinese, and his assistant Allen were detained by Chinese police in 2018 when they visited retired professor Sun Wenguang in Jinan city Shandong China. VOA reporter Ye Bing visited China during the two sessions in 2018. (VOA data)

 

 

The picture is from the CCP party media “Qizhi Net” (旗幟網).

 

‘I Am Not Optimistic About The Rights of Chinese Women Under Xi Jinping’

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WRIC founder Zhang Jing interviewed by RFA. This is a summary of the interview

 

CCP Politburo standing committee NO one was female since 1921. （Photo by internet)

 

When President Xi Jinping unveiled his newly reshuffled Politburo standing committee after the 19th national congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party closed last month, not one was female. This was less surprising than it might have been given that there has never been a woman in the all-powerful committee, and that less than quarter of congress delegates were female. There is only one woman on the 25-member Politburo. U.S.-based activist Zhang Qing, who founded the group Women’s Rights in China, told RFA’s Mandarin Service about the challenges women face in getting to the top in Chinese politics:

 

RFA: What do you think the new leadership says about women’s status in China’s political life?

Zhang Jing: The Chinese Communist Party has a handful of men on its Politburo standing committee handle all of the research and implementation of policy and laws. It’s the same with family planning policy. In the 1950s, they told women to have more children, then they told them to only have one. Now that has been relaxed to two children. A handful of men came up with all of this. On the surface, men and women are equal, but in reality, women are underrepresented in the job market and in education. Also, women in China are forced to retire at the age of 55.

 

RFA: Do you see this as something that comes from the top?

 

Zhang Jing: [President Xi wants] the husband to go out to work and the woman to stay home to support him and to bring up the family, to take the responsibility of educating the children. There has been an initiative to promote Confucianism across the whole country in the past few years, and some women believe in this idea too. There’s a famous Chinese academic who told women they should get back in the kitchen. So all of this shows you the lack of respect for women on the part of Chinese men, who pay no attention to women’s rights, whether they are high or low-ranking.

 

RFA: What are your thoughts about the detention of the Feminist Five ahead of International Women’s Day, 2015?

Zhang Jing: All they did was to speak out against sexual harassment, and advocate for women’s rights. It had very little to do with politics. It’s not as if they were trying to overthrow the Communist Party. But the Chinese Communist Party ruthlessly suppressed them. The United States may not have had a female president, but at least there is justice in its laws, and the proportion of women in politics is higher. There are also NGOs and members of Congress elected by the people who have to listen to the people. In China, however, the National People’s Congress is just there for decoration. And there is even less attention paid to women, children and other vulnerable groups. Even the recent Marriage Law and the Domestic Violence Law are unfair to women.

 

RFA: Do you see any improvement during the Xi era in the status of Chinese women?

Zhang Jing: Women are more than capable, with their deep social sensitivity, of running a country, and they are very good at mobilizing. But at the current time in China, their lack of participation in politics is something to be ashamed of. Taiwan is tiny, but it has a female leader. The chief executive of Hong Kong is also a woman … and yet we have never had a woman on the Politburo standing committee in China, ever. I think it’s very hard to see how there could be an improvement in women’s rights during the Xi era.

 

RFA: What do you see happening in the next five years?

 

Zhang Jing: I think the next five years are going to be quite tragic for women, especially if Xi Jinping continues to make constitutional changes and governs for a very long time. It will be piling layer upon layer of tragedy, because, based on everything Xi Jinping has said about his views on women, he really doesn’t concern himself with them at all … The oppression of women under Xi is worse than it was under [former president] Hu Jintao. I don’t think the new administration will do much at all for women. I’m not optimistic that there will be any improvement in women’s rights at all.

 

Reported by Han Qing for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

 

（http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/zhuanlan/fuyouluntan/women-10272017121230.html）