Radio Free Asia
Radio Free Asia is an American state-funded news service that published online news, information, commentary and broadcasts radio programs for its audiences in Asia until the suspension of its operations in 2025. The service, which provided editorially independent reporting, had the stated mission of providing accurate and uncensored reporting to countries in Asia that have poor media environments and limited protections for speech and press freedom.
RFA operated as a non-profit corporation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with news bureaus and journalists in Asia, Europe, and Australia. RFA was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of "promoting democratic values and human rights", and countering the narratives and monopoly on information distribution of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government. It has historically been funded and supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent agency of the United States government. RFA digitally published news articles, photos, videos, and podcasts on its website and social media channels including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X in nine Asian languages for audiences in mainland China, Hong Kong, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.
On March 15, 2025, the United States Agency for Global Media terminated grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia following a directive from the Trump administration. The news service and its staff have defied the executive order and remained on the air while considering legal action to challenge the presidential directive. Since the announcement, RFA's Tibetan, Burmese, Korean, Lao, Cantonese, Khmer and Uyghur language services have shut down. Its news operations were suspended on October 31, 2025.
History
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen led by Jesse Helms and Joe Biden came together and sponsored legislation to create Radio Free Asia. Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich supported Radio Free Asia as a means to press China on human rights. The International Broadcasting Act was passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, officially establishing Radio Free Asia.Radio Free Asia was incorporated in March 1996, and began broadcasting in September 1996. Although RFA directors preferred to broadcast under the name "the Asia-Pacific Network", Republican representatives including Chris Smith and Jesse Helms insisted on returning the name to Radio Free Asia before broadcasting began, to which president Richard Richter complied. Radio Free Asia was forced to change the name in part due to financial pressures from the US government, for although they operated with an independent board, their initial $10 million annual budget came from the Treasury.
In 1997, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, began talks with the government of Australia to purchase abandoned transmission facilities near Darwin, Northern Territory for the purpose of expanding RFA's signal to overcome jamming. Richter personally lobbied in Canberra to support this effort. Although the Australian Government intended to sell the facilities to a foreign broadcaster, preference was given to the BBC over the fledgling RFA due to fears that such a sale would anger China, with Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer stating, "we are certainly not in the game of provocatively damaging our relations with China."
In response to radio jamming efforts from China, Newt Gingrich and House Republican leaders helped to increase the budget of RFA and VOA, with further funding of RFA proposed as a way to combat China's political repression without levying trade restrictions that would anger American businesses.
With the passage of the International Broadcasting Act in 1994, RFA was brought under auspices of the United States Information Agency where it remained until the agency's cessation of broadcasting duties and transitioned to U.S. Department of State operated Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1999. In September 2009, the 111th Congress amended the International Broadcasting Act to allow a one-year extension of the operation of Radio Free Asia.
On June 25, 2010, the US Senate unanimously approved Republican Senator Richard Lugar's legislation to promote the free dissemination of information in East Asia through the permanent authorization of RFA. The House of Representatives passed Lugar's bill S.3104 to grant Radio Free Asia permanent congressional authorization on June 30 and it was signed into law on July 13, 2010.
RFA broadcast in nine languages, via shortwave, satellite transmissions, medium-wave.
The first transmission was in Mandarin Chinese and it is RFA's most broadcast language at twelve hours per day. RFA also has broadcast in Cantonese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer and Korean. The Korean service launched in 1997 with Jaehoon Ahn as its founding director. Broadcasts in Khmer to Cambodia that began under the country's communist regime continue despite the country no longer being communist. In 2017, RFA and other networks, such as Voice of America, were put under the then newly created U.S. Agency for Global Media that also sends representatives to its board of directors.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network credited RFA with uncovering corruption in Vietnam and credited its journalists for risking prison sentences and worse from the regimes that they covered.
In January 2022, RFA announced that it had appointed Carolyn Bartholomew as the new chair of its board of directors. As of December 2023, its board members include: Michael J. Green, Michael Kempner, Keith Richburg, Shanthi Kalathil, and Allison Hooker. RFA receives its funding through annual budget allocations from the USAGM.
In March 2024, RFA announced the closure of its Hong Kong bureau, citing journalist safety concerns from Hong Kong's enactment of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.
List of presidents
Radio jamming and Internet blocking
Since broadcasting began in 1996, Chinese authorities have consistently jammed RFA broadcasts.Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit in June 1998. The Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to the three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to Beijing. The White House and United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip.
The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government from the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed that the Vietnamese-language portion of the Radio Free Asia website was blocked by both of the tested ISPs in Vietnam, while the English-language portion was blocked by one of the two ISPs.
To address radio jamming and Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contained instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies.
On March 30, 2010, China's domestic internet censor, known as the Great Firewall, temporarily blocked all Google searches in China, due to an unintentional association with the long-censored term "rfa". According to Google, the letters, associated with Radio Free Asia, were appearing in the URLs of all Google searches, thereby triggering China's filter to block search results.
Arrests of Uyghur journalists' relatives
In 2014–2015, China arrested three brothers of RFA Uyghur Service journalist Shohret Hoshur. Their jailing was widely described by Western publishers as Chinese authorities' efforts to target Hoshur for his reports on otherwise unreported violent events of the Xinjiang conflict. Much larger numbers of relatives of RFA's Uyghur-language staff have since been detained, including the family of Gulchehra Hoja.RFA was the only station outside China that broadcast in the Uyghur language. It has been recognized by journalists of The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Economist for playing a role in exposing Xinjiang internment camps. In particular, The New York Times has regarded certain RFA articles as part of the few reliable sources of information about Xinjiang.
Xinjiang internment camps
The Economist credited Radio Free Asia with breaking the story on the Xinjiang internment camps. In 2018, after RFA journalist Hoja published an interview with an individual who had been detained in the Xinjiang internment camps, Chinese authorities detained approximately two dozen of Hoja's relatives. Later that year, Chinese authorities forcibly disappeared two brothers and five cousins of an editor for RFA's Uyghur language service.National Review has reported that as of 2021, eight of Radio Free Asia's fifteen staff of Uyghur ethnicity have family members who are detained in the Xinjiang internment camps.