The president of Brussels-based Foreign Correspondents Association, of which I am a part of, issued a statement voicing solidarity with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, whose funding was terminated by the Donald Trump administration last Saturday as part of the broader cuts to the US Agency for Global Media.
I argued in a column in 2011 that it makes no sense for Voice of America, a sister broadcaster of RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia, to exist today because it was created in 1942 during World War II and had its heyday during the Cold War years. Its parent body, the USAGM, is an arm of the US government information/disinformation campaign.
The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. So when European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas sounded nostalgic on Monday about RFE, which she said she listened to decades ago, she inadvertently admitted that it was a thing of the past and irrelevant today.
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Unlike during the Cold War, there are no confrontational political blocs in Europe today. Russians can travel freely around the world. Their travels have been restricted in recent years only due to the anti-Russia policies of some EU member states.
For China, there has been a sea change over the past decades. The National Immigration Administration reported 291 million exits from and entries into the country by Chinese nationals in 2024. According to UN Tourism, Chinese people's expenditure on overseas travel hit $196.5 billion, compared with $150 billion by US citizens, in 2023.
If the United States, and the EU member states further facilitate and expedite their visa approvals, the number will skyrocket as many Chinese are looking forward to traveling abroad for leisure and for business.
These people are best suited to tell the real stories about China and what they see abroad. If the Chinese government were afraid of its people knowing the truth about the world as some critics claim, it would not have allowed its citizens to travel abroad in such large numbers. That almost all those Chinese people who traveled abroad have returned to China means they didn't feel "persecuted" at home as those critics claim.
The hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying abroad and who chat with their family members in China on WeChat are also much better messengers of China and the world than VOA and its sister broadcasters.
Unlike my first trip to the US in the early 1990s when cars and high-rises were scarce in China, and Beijing boasted the country's only subway, today's China has caught up with, and in some cases overtaken, the Western world.
It's absurd to claim that VOA/RFA/RFE/RL practice "unfettered", "independent journalism "and provide "accurate, impartial and fact-based reporting", for they are simply US government propaganda tools.
The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, better known as the Smith-Mundt Act, had long forbidden VOA and others to broadcast directly to US citizens to protect them from the propaganda spread by their own government. This speaks volumes of the nature of propaganda they were spreading.
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Although the USIEE Act eased the restrictions in 2013, I am yet to see balanced reporting on China by VOA, because it is part of US government smear campaign tool making China look bad.
In a world where mutual understanding is critical to world peace and prosperity, VOA and its sister broadcasters have been busy promoting misunderstanding by telling one-sided stories and false narratives about some countries.
Those who argue that the latest US government move will create a vacuum for China and Russia forget the hard truth that Western media outlets, not those from China, Russia or other Global South countries, dominate the global landscape.
It makes more sense for the US and the EU to admit more tourists and students from those countries that VOA/RFA/RFE/RL have been targeting, so they can tell the real stories of their countries. It also makes more sense for US and European people to visit, study and work in China to see the country with their own eyes, rather than being misled by VOA, and form their own opinion about China and the Chinese people.
The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.
