In May 2025, Radio Free Asia announced massive layoffs after the Trump administration cut funding to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
At the time, the CEO and president of RFA, Bay Fang, said that because the organization could “no longer rely on USAGM to disburse our funds as Congress intended, we will have to begin mass layoffs and let entire language services go dark in the next week.”
This would mean “losing journalists who broke the news about the CCP’s genocide against the Uyghurs, who risked their lives covering a civil war in Myanmar, who exposed human trafficking networks in Southeast Asia, and who brought to light the crackdown on religious freedom in Tibet.”
Sounds like good work, though perhaps Fang oversells it a little. Knowledge of China’s religious repression of Tibet had been acquired prior to the existence of Radio Free Asia. RFA started broadcasting in China in 1996. One pre-1996 report about repression in Tibet, “Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic,” published by the International Commission of Jurists (and just added to our LINKS page), came out in 1960.
Chapter One of this report, “The Evidence Relating to Genocide,” which provides evidence for “The intent to destroy Buddhism in Tibet,” includes “1. Chinese statements from Chinese sources, 2. Chinese acts and statements from Tibetan sources: a) Evidence of a systematic design to destroy religious belief, b) The intention by killing to destroy a religious group, c) Destruction by inflicting grievous bodily or mental harm, d) Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, e) Measures designed to prevent births, f) The forcible transfer of children to another group.”
Of course, the more good reporting on what the Chinese Communist Party has done in the past and is doing now, the better.
New broadcasts
Hong Kong Free Press reports that RFA is back on the air (February 20, 2026).
Radio Free Asia has resumed its broadcasts in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur.
President and CEO Bay Fang announced on LinkedIn on Wednesday that the services were back after US President Donald Trump cut off government funding last year.
“This critical work, which we’ve been able to resume due to private contracting with transmission services, is already making waves,” Fang said. “RFA’s Uyghur Service aired a report over the weekend about how children of detainees in Xinjiang are being forced into manual labor at a young age instead of going to school.”…
RFA’s Cantonese services halted operations last July after 27 years. It is not among the services which resumed.
RFA’s broadcasts in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur resumed after Congress reinstated funding for U.S. Agency for Global Media. President Trump signed the bill that provided the funding on February 3, 2026.
Also see:
Hong Kong Free Press: “New leak reveals how China runs Xinjiang camps” (April 7, 2021)
