Trump’s assault on Voice of America and Radio Free Asia celebrated by Chinese state media

Donald Trump’s decision to slash funding for the government-run Voice of America and Radio Free Asia is being celebrated by Chinese state media for “eliminating fake news”.

The president signed an order last weekend ending grants to federally funded news organisations and instructing them to put almost the entire staff on leave. He accused VOA of being "anti-Trump" and "radical".

The cuts were announced by the US Agency for Global Media, the parent company of VOA and similar media entities like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which were set up to counter the propaganda and influence of communism.

VOA immediately put nearly 1,300 staff on leave in the wake of Mr Trump’s order.

The Global Times, the English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, cheered the decision in an editorial, claiming VOA had long spread “malicious falsehood about China”.

"The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag," the editorial said.

The newspaper criticised VOA’s track record when it came to China-related reporting.

From “smearing human rights” in Xinjiang to “hyping up disputes in the South China Sea” and “from fabricating the so-called China virus narrative to promoting the claim of China’s overcapacity”, it continued, “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it”.

"Voice of America has been paralysed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which has been as vicious to China,” former Global Times editor Hu Xijin said. “This is such great news."

The Beijing Daily, another paper run by the Chinese Communist Party, said VOA was “notorious for spreading lies” and rumours about the Uyghur "genocide" in Xinjiang.

Beyond China, former Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen, who ruled his country for about four decades as an autocrat, welcomed Mr Trump's move.

“This is a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement, and chaos around the world coming from the propaganda machine that President Trump has stopped funding," he said on Monday.

Margarita Simonyan, editor of the Russian state broadcaster RT, hailed the “awesome decision by Mr Trump. Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and Sputnik. This is an awesome decision by Trump!”

Ms Simonyan accused the American state-funded media outlets of spreading fake news and brainwashing Russians. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself,” she said on RT’s weekly talk show.

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Clayton Weimers, US executive director of the press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, said that authoritarian regimes were "the biggest winners" of Mr Trump’s decision.

"Many of them, like China, are looking forward to filling the gap left by American leadership in media freedom with their own propaganda," Mr Weimers said.

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, claimed the Trump administration’s move would “severely weaken our ability to compete” with Beijing and “ultimately make us less safe”.

Media outlets funded by the American government “provide real reporting to millions living under authoritarian regimes, countering CCP distortion", Mr Krishnamoorthi said, and allowing Chinese people to "question the CCP's propaganda and aggression towards the US and our allies and partners".

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VOA was established in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II and promote American perspectives around the world. After the war, it was put to use countering communist influence and expanded to operate in around 50 languages, including English, Mandarin, Russian, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and Swahili. At its height, it reached some 360 million people per week.

Radio Free Europe was established in 1949 to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War.

Radio Free Asia was founded in 1996 and focused on countries with authoritarian governments such as China, North Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

It stood out for its reporting on China’s Xinjiang, where authorities were accused of holding more than one million Uyghur Muslims in detention camps without trial.

Beijing denied the accusations of rights abuses and claimed the detention facilities were "re-education camps" for suspected extremists.

Bay Fang, the president and chief executive of Radio Free Asia, said Mr Trump’s order gutting his organisation was a “reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space”.