Chinese media, Hun Sen celebrate White House order to close US-funded news outlets

Asian dissidents, activists voice dismay over funding freeze to Radio Free Asia.
Radio Free Asia Tibetan service director Kalden Lodoe, right, prepares to present a newscast at the RFA studio, Jan. 18, 2023. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)
Representatives of closed Asian societies without free press on Monday welcomed the U.S. administration’s decision to halt broadcasts by Voice of America and freeze funding to Radio Free Asia, while democracy activists and dissidents expressed disbelief and dismay.
China’s state-backed Global Times published an editorial focusing on VOA which it called “a lie factory” and “a thoroughly biased propaganda poison.”
“The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” it said.
In a Facebook post, former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is Senate president and the father of the current premier, called the closure of U.S.-funded “propaganda” outlets “a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement, and chaos around the world.”
Hun Sen attends a press conference at the National Assembly after a vote to confirm his son, Hun Manet, as Cambodia’s prime minister in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, August 22, 2023. (Cindy Liu/Reuters)
Meanwhile, human rights activists in some of the world’s most repressive countries spoke out in support of what they see as “beacons of hope” and upholders of the truth.
“There’s something I will remember forever … When my mother was told I’d be released after having served my sentence, she was sitting outside on the patio the whole day to wait for me. The first sound of my voice she heard was on Radio Free Asia and that made her cry out loud,” Le Quoc Quan, a Vietnamese dissident lawyer who served 30 months in prison and who now lives in the United States, recalled on Facebook.
‘Significant setback for the democracy’
Another Vietnamese democracy activist, who spent seven years in jail on subversion charges, said RFA and Voice of America had freed his thinking from the strictures of communist rule before he was imprisoned.
“These two stations played a pivotal role in helping me break free from the propaganda and indoctrination of the Communist Party of Vietnam, shaping my beliefs and actions,” Nguyen Tien Trung wrote from exile in Germany.
The discontinuation of RFA and VOA “represents a significant setback for the democracy and human rights movements in Vietnam, China, Asia, and globally,” he wrote.