Chinese Government Cheers Trump’s Shuttering Of Voice of America

Politics can be lofty or comical or comically sad. I wrote once about the horseshoe theory which describes how extreme left and extreme right can converge or mirror each other at the shoe’s two ends. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for instance, both loathed America’s trade deficits with China and favored raising tariffs.

Now, President Trump is once again proving the theory. As a real estate developer-turned right-wing populist President, Trump did something Communist Party chief and Chinese president Xi Jinping really loved — shutting down the Voice of America.

Under his March 14 executive order “CONTINUING THE REDUCTION OF THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY,” he included the United States Agency for Global Media among other agencies to be eliminated.  The Voice of America (VOA) under that agency landed on the chopping block, with its 1,300 staff put on administrative leave.

Launched in 1942 during WWII as a tool against Axis propaganda, it continued through the Cold War as a tool against Communist propaganda, from the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. During the long and oppressive years of the Cultural Revolution, VOA played a big role for millions of young Chinese in learning about the outside world and views other than those forced upon them.

Listening to VOA with a shortwave radio was such an exciting and dangerous act that if caught one could be accused of “listening to an enemy broadcast.” One former high school student sent to work on a farm, now an economist at Stanford, told The New York Times that VOA was his school in that dark decade and how his radio became the evidence of his “thoughtcrime,” for which he was tortured. Still, many listened and also learned English through a special English program of VOA.

In more recent decades and years, with a weekly audience of more than 354 million people in 49 languages, VOA has continued its mission in the “fight against global terrorism, and the struggle for freedom around the globe.”

As CBS’s 60 Minutes reported, it was VOA that told the Chinese people what their government wouldn’t: about the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square against  democracy demonstrators; about re-education camps of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan and the harsh Covid lockdowns around China.

It is reporting such as this that earned VOA the great disdain of the Chinese government. As China’s state media Global Times wrote, VOA is a “lie factory,” “propaganda poison,” “never fair and impartial,” and “a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China.” Its primary function, the government claimed, is “to serve Washington’s need to attack other countries based on ideological demands.”

The Trump White House has evidently agreed, calling Voice of America a “Voice of Radical America.” Elon Musk viewed it the similarly: “…just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

You can imagine how the news of VOA shut down brought cheers in China, where VOA was broadcast in English, Mandarin, as well as Tibetan and Uyghur languages. “This is such great news,” one senior Chinese news personality said, while a national influencer described it as “truly gratifying.” Global Times couldn’t hide its schadenfreude, saying that the VOA was being “discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” and that it would “ultimately become a laughingstock of the times.”

On certain issues President Trump, and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, inexplicably find themselves, wittingly or unwittingly, on the same side of Xi Jinping, acting in the interests of the Communist Party,.