MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Trump administration is gutting a federal agency that funds Voice of America and other government broadcasters - this in the name of cost cutting. For decades, these broadcasters reached audiences the U.S. government deemed autocratic, without free media. That includes China. NPR's Emily Feng has this story about Voice of America's legacy there.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Growing up in China in the 1970s, listener Anna Wang remembers how fellow students would secretly tune into Voice of America's shortwave broadcasts.
ANNA WANG: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: She says listening to VOA was illegal, punishable in some cases by the death penalty.
WANG: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: So, Wang says, later on, even as China relaxed politically, fellow university students surreptitiously listened to VOA under thick blankets in their dorms at midnight.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLIAM HARLAN HALE: The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.
FENG: The VOA was seen as so subversive it was nicknamed the ditai, or enemy channel, in China. It served as a kind of underground transmission for both news and for sharing sounds of resistance, including this song...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG OF THE EDUCATED YOUTH FROM NANJING")
ZHOU LIANG: (Singing Mandarin).
FENG: ...A song about homesickness and hometowns, beloved by students who were forcibly exiled to the Chinese countryside starting in the 1950s. VOA broadcast the song, boosting its popularity, even when the song was officially banned. And as China entered the political foment of the 1980s, VOA's unvarnished reports in English and Mandarin became even more influential.
ZHOU FENGSUO: It was source of a truth of when things are changing rapidly.
FENG: This is Zhou Fengsuo, who became a student leader in mass democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. His student union, at Beijing's Tsinghua University, started broadcasting VOA from its speakers.
ZHOU F: That's the way the news of the protests were shared.
FENG: Because state media refused to cover the protests.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: When Beijing sent in tanks to quell the student demonstrators, these VOA reports on the fatal crackdown in Tiananmen Square were broadcast globally. VOA's focus on highlighting dissent meant it was popular among Republican politicians in the U.S. but invariably despised by authoritarian governments abroad. And with its potential closure, after Trump ordered the agency that funds it to be dismantled...
WU SHAOPING: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: "China's ruling Communist Party must be the happiest people in the world right now," says Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer. By the 1990s, listening to VOA had become less sensitive in China, and more and more Chinese people tuned in to learn English. Lucy Hornby, a longtime China-focused journalist, was teaching in China at the time, and one student of hers in particular loved VOA.
LUCY HORNBY: His English name was Sidney. And he would come to my door, and he would say, this is Voice of America. And that's how I knew he was there.
FENG: Now VOA has come under criticism by Trump allies for being too expensive and, they say, sympathetic to American adversaries. Hornby says the broadcaster positively shaped perceptions of the U.S. abroad.
HORNBY: They had a generally positive impression, not because they were getting all good news, actually. I think they respected that they were getting what felt like real news.
FENG: The impact went both ways. VOA trained generations of Chinese-speaking journalists. They covered on-the-ground news in China to a degree of detail unmatched by other Western outlets. Many who listened saw VOA as a window for people in China to understand the world and for the world to know what was going on in China. Emily Feng, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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