Chinese journalist Gao Yu has been a thorn in the side of China’s authorities for decades. Jailed three times for her work — I covered one of those jailings, in the 1990s, as a foreign correspondent in China — Gao is now 81 and subjected to a different punishment.
She is banned from Chinese social media. Her Beijing apartment is periodically under surveillance, its internet and phone service cut off.
To her, that made it all the more necessary to file a declaration this month supporting lawsuits in U.S. federal court to prevent the Trump administration from shutting down Voice of America.
On Tuesday, one of those suits won a preliminary injunction allowing VOA employees to return to work. More than 1,000 journalists and others had been placed on administrative leave last month as President Donald Trump moved to demolish the government-funded news service and its affiliates.
While the news was encouraging, the fight to preserve VOA is far from over.
In her declaration to the court, Gao wrote that VOA’s coverage of her plight has encouraged her and others fighting for freedom of speech and “helped the world understand the severe and often unimaginable human rights abuses in China.”
As Gao knows, a less-informed global public is good for autocrats, who want people uninformed. Russia, Iran and above all China cheered on the Trump administration’s move against VOA last month.
Having spent 25 years as a journalist in China for the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal, I see the shuttering of VOA and the cutoff in funding for its affiliated broadcasters as especially damaging to the United States in its competition with China’s communist government.
For years, Beijing has worked hard to expand its sway worldwide, translating that influence into contracts for Chinese businesses, votes at the United Nations and basing rights for the Chinese military. The government counts on well-funded state media to amplify its voice.
During the Cold War, VOA bolstered positive perceptions of the United States overseas and exposing autocratic oppression. It has served a similarly vital role on the front line in what Chinese leader Xi Jinping describes as a struggle with the democratic West to shape global narratives.
During my time in China, Communist Party leaders faced the rise of a powerful challenge to their rule: the freer access to news and other information that the internet and cellphones brought the Chinese people. Unemployed workers, civil rights activists, underground Christians and others found the means to communicate and organize.
Threatened at home, Beijing constructed an extensive filtering system to block unwanted information from reaching Chinese citizens. It also looked outward, spending billions of dollars to extend the overseas reach of its biggest media organizations to build what it calls “discourse power.”
By contrast, VOA and Radio Free Asia, a government-supported platform the Trump administration also throttled, operate on modest budgets — $320 million combined for the past fiscal year. China Global Television Network, meanwhile, has continued reporting from Washington even as VOA was closed.
Whether spreading propaganda overseas or censoring news to Chinese readers, Beijing’s aim is the same: project China as a benevolent power, deflect attention from wrongdoing by Chinese officials and companies, and lessen government accountability.
Chinese media, for example, have whitewashed the mass detention and forced assimilation of Muslim Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region. The State Department considers those actions genocide.
Uyghur reporters at Radio Free Asia have done breakthrough reporting on China’s suppression campaign. VOA has documented China’s efforts to carry that suppression abroad, including by targeting the family members of one of its U.S.-based reporters.
