Radio Free Asia says it resumes broadcasts to China

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Radio Free Asia has resumed broadcasts to people in China, its CEO said on Tuesday, after Trump administration cuts last year largely forced the U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations.

RFA and its sister outlets, including Voice of America, for years had been financed with funding approved by the U.S. Congress and overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM.

Last year Kari Lake, a former news anchor appointed by President Donald Trump as acting CEO of USAGM, terminated their grants, alleging waste of taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias. Critics decried the move, which led to mass layoffs, as ceding ground to China and other U.S. adversaries.

"We are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in China in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world's only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages," RFA's president and CEO Bay Fang wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

She said the ability to restart the broadcasts was "due to private contracting with transmission services," without providing details, but added that rebuilding the network would require consistently receiving newly approved congressional funding.

A bipartisan spending bill that Trump signed into law earlier in February included $653 million for USAGM, which oversees RFA, VOA and other government-funded outlets.

That is down from the $867 million appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but more than the $153 million Trump requested that Congress provide to shut down USAGM.

China's embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment on RFA's resumption of broadcasting. Chinese state media had praised last year's cuts.

U.S. lawmakers of both major parties had said Trump's drive to dismantle the news outlets diminished Washington's clout globally at a time when Beijing is expanding its own sphere of influence.

Rights activists say that RFA has for decades shone light onto abuses by China and other authoritarian countries, raising awareness about the plight of oppressed minorities such as China's Uyghur Muslims.

On Friday, RFA spokesperson Rohit Mahajan said that the outlet had contracted with private companies to broadcast to audiences in Tibet, North Korea and Myanmar.

Mahajan said the outlet's Mandarin audio content currently is online only, with the aim to resume regular broadcasts over airwaves soon. Its Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean, and Burmese radio programming airs over short- and medium-wave frequencies. Previous satellite transmissions via USAGM have not resumed yet, he said.