Generations of Chinese, including our columnist, turned to U.S. government-run outlets for an education in democracy, rights and the English language.
In December 1967, when he arrived at a snowy farm on China’s northeastern border with the Soviet Union, Xu Chenggang carried with him an electron tube to help him assemble a radio.
Mr. Xu, a 17-year-old Beijing native, would spend the next 10 years there, living in a horse stable and subjected to re-education and persecution for his anti-revolutionary thinking. One thing that got him through the cold, dark decade was the tube radio that brought him Voice of America programs.
He learned about the Prague Spring, the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, as well as criticisms of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The radio was also used by his peers as evidence of what was called his thoughtcrime, which led them to torture him physically and mentally. But he never regretted it.
“Voice of America was my school,” said Mr. Xu, 74, who attended Tsinghua University and Harvard after the end of the Cultural Revolution and is now an economist at Stanford. The VOA programs beamed into China shaped his worldview, his understanding of constitutional democracy and his values about freedom and human dignity, he said. He also learned English through a special program that provided news and information using a limited vocabulary and slow and clear pronunciations.
Millions of Chinese, me included, learned English through Voice of America and listened to its news reports, which contradicted the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives. Through its programs, we had a glimpse of the world on the other side of the Bamboo Curtain and, later, the Great Firewall, technology China uses to block most popular foreign websites from its citizens. We got to imagine a world where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were held as ideals.
That’s why it came as a shock to many Chinese when they learned that President Trump had decided to dismantle Voice of America and end grants to Radio Free Asia. It’s unfathomable to them that Washington would surrender the battle of narratives by silencing these news outlets, which produce uncensored and factual reporting on countries like China that lack a free press.