US broadcaster Radio Free Asia (RFA) said on Wednesday that it will stop all of its news operations effective as of Friday, October 31.
It will be the first time the international broadcaster has completely gone off air since it was founded nearly 30 years ago.
RFA is one the few reliable sources of news in regions of Asia where authoritarian governments limit people’s access to information.
Suspension of news comes after deep cuts
RFA had already drastically scaled back its news programming earlier in the year.
It laid off almost 90% of its US-based workforce after President Donald Trump axed most money to federally funded media back in March and had already stopped programming in Tibetan, Burmese, Uyghur and English in May.
Radio Free Asia is now unable to continue its editorial operations, RFA’s president Bay Fang said on Wednesday, because of the “funding uncertainty” due to the ongoing federal government shutdown.
Fang said the broadcaster would close down overseas bureaus, formally lay off furloughed staff and pay severance to those staff members.
Important source of independent news
RFA, which produced news in multiple Asian languages, was founded in 1996 to report on China and other Asian countries with limited press freedom, including North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.
It provided one of the world’s only independent news services in Uyghurlanguage, reporting on China’s systematic persecution of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province.
Back in 2017, it was the first to report on the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in internment camps.
“China’s propaganda will fester without a potent and effective accountability check,” RFA’s executive editor Rosa Hwang wrote in an editorial published on Wednesday.
Harvard Kennedy School professor Nicholas Burns, a former US ambassador to China under Joe Biden, said that shutting RFA was a “major mistake.”
It “will prevent us from telling the truth to the Chinese people and countering Beijing’s propaganda,” he wrote on X.
Can Radio Free Asia be saved?
Prominent human rights activist Yaqui Wang, currently a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, called for alternative funding for RFA.
“Those who care about independent journalism — who care about telling the stories of human rights abuses and the struggle for freedom and dignity — must step up and support this vital work,” she wrote on X.
The European Union gave Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, whose public funding was also slashed by Trump back in March, a €5.5 million ($6.39 million) emergency injection in May.
The news of RFA’s shuttering comes as Trump is to meet China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea.
Radio Free Asia has long infuriated China, which accuses it of “false news.”
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko
