After the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen led by
Jesse Helms and
Joe Biden came together and sponsored legislation to create Radio Free Asia. Republican House Speaker
Newt Gingrich supported Radio Free Asia as a means to press China on human rights. The
International Broadcasting Act was passed by the
Congress of the United States and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, officially establishing Radio Free Asia. Radio Free Asia was incorporated in March 1996, and began broadcasting in September 1996. Although RFA directors preferred to broadcast under the name "the Asia-Pacific Network",
Republican representatives including
Chris Smith and Jesse Helms insisted on returning the name to Radio Free Asia before broadcasting began, to which president Richard Richter complied. Radio Free Asia was forced to change the name in part due to financial pressures from the US government, for although they operated with an independent board, their initial $10 million annual budget came from the
Treasury. In 1997, the then
US Deputy Secretary of State,
Strobe Talbott, began talks with the government of
Australia to purchase abandoned transmission facilities near
Darwin, Northern Territory for the purpose of expanding RFA's signal to overcome jamming. Richter personally lobbied in
Canberra to support this effort. Although the
Australian Government intended to sell the facilities to a foreign broadcaster, preference was given to the
BBC over the fledgling RFA due to fears that such a sale would anger China, with Australian
Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer stating, "we are certainly not in the game of provocatively damaging our relations with China." In response to radio jamming efforts from China, Newt Gingrich and House Republican leaders helped to increase the budget of RFA and VOA, with further funding of RFA proposed as a way to combat China's political repression without levying trade restrictions that would anger American businesses. With the passage of the International Broadcasting Act in 1994, RFA was brought under auspices of the
United States Information Agency where it remained until the agency's cessation of broadcasting duties and transitioned to
U.S. Department of State operated
Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1999. In September 2009, the
111th Congress amended the International Broadcasting Act to allow a one-year extension of the operation of Radio Free Asia. On June 25, 2010, the US Senate unanimously approved Republican Senator
Richard Lugar's legislation to promote the free dissemination of information in East Asia through the permanent authorization of RFA. The House of Representatives passed Lugar's bill S.3104 to grant Radio Free Asia permanent congressional authorization on June 30 and it was signed into law on July 13, 2010. RFA broadcast in nine languages, via
shortwave, satellite transmissions, medium-wave (AM and FM radio). The first transmission was in
Mandarin Chinese and it is RFA's most broadcast language at twelve hours per day. RFA also has broadcast in
Cantonese,
Tibetan (
Kham,
Amdo, and
Uke dialects),
Uyghur,
Burmese,
Vietnamese,
Lao,
Khmer (to
Cambodia) and
Korean (to
North Korea). The Korean service launched in 1997 with
Jaehoon Ahn as its founding director. Broadcasts in Khmer to Cambodia that began under the country's
communist regime continue despite the country no longer being communist. In 2017, RFA and other networks, such as
Voice of America, were put under the then newly created
U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) that also sends representatives to its board of directors. The
Global Investigative Journalism Network credited RFA with uncovering corruption in Vietnam and credited its journalists for risking prison sentences and worse from the regimes that they covered. In January 2022, RFA announced that it had appointed Carolyn Bartholomew as the new chair of its board of directors. As of December 2023, its board members include:
Michael J. Green,
Michael Kempner,
Keith Richburg,
Shanthi Kalathil, and Allison Hooker. RFA receives its funding through annual budget allocations from the USAGM. In March 2024, RFA announced the closure of its Hong Kong bureau, citing journalist safety concerns from Hong Kong's enactment of the
Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.
List of presidents Radio jamming and Internet blocking Since broadcasting began in 1996, Chinese authorities have consistently jammed RFA broadcasts. Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit in June 1998. The
Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to the three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to
Beijing. The
White House and
United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip. The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government from the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the
OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed that the Vietnamese-language portion of the Radio Free Asia website was blocked by both of the tested ISPs in Vietnam, while the English-language portion was blocked by one of the two ISPs. To address radio jamming and
Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contained instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies. On March 30, 2010, China's domestic internet censor, known as the
Great Firewall, temporarily blocked all
Google searches in China, due to an unintentional association with the long-censored term "rfa". According to Google, the letters, associated with Radio Free Asia, were appearing in the URLs of all Google searches, thereby triggering China's filter to block search results.
Arrests of Uyghur journalists' relatives In 2014–2015, China arrested three brothers of RFA Uyghur Service journalist
Shohret Hoshur. Their jailing was widely described by Western publishers as Chinese authorities' efforts to target Hoshur for his reports on otherwise unreported violent events of the
Xinjiang conflict. Much larger numbers of relatives of RFA's Uyghur-language staff have since been detained, including the family of
Gulchehra Hoja. RFA was the only station outside China that broadcast in the
Uyghur language. In particular,
The New York Times has regarded certain RFA articles as part of the few reliable sources of information about Xinjiang. In 2018, after RFA journalist Hoja published an interview with an individual who had been detained in the Xinjiang internment camps, Chinese authorities detained approximately two dozen of Hoja's relatives. Later that year, Chinese authorities
forcibly disappeared two brothers and five cousins of an editor for RFA's Uyghur language service.
National Review has reported that as of 2021, eight of Radio Free Asia's fifteen staff of Uyghur ethnicity have family members who are detained in the Xinjiang internment camps. The station and its staff have defied the executive order and remained on the air while considering legal action to challenge the presidential directive. On March 27,
Democracy Forward filed suit on behalf of Radio Free Asia to block the U.S. Agency for Global Media's attempt to cancel federal funds appropriated by Congress. On April 4, Radio Free Asia halted radio broadcasts in Mandarin, Tibetan and Lao, and heavily reduced its Burmese, Khmer, Korean and Uyghur language services. In April, it closed down its Lao language service. On May 2, RFA announced it was laying off 280 staff members members in the United States and cutting 20 positions overseas. It also announced it would be closing down its Tibetan, Burmese, English and Uyghur language services by the end of May, and announced it would close Asia Fact Check Lab and all radio and TV-style broadcasts. On May 8, RFA suspended Burmese language services. On May 9, RFA suspended Uyghur and Tibetan language services. On July 8, RFA shut down its Cantonese language service. On July 17, the Korean language service suspended its activities. In October, Khmer language service suspended its activities. RFA halted its news operations on October 31. Offices in Seoul, Istanbul and Bangkok were closed, and language services for China, Vietnam, North Korea, Myanmar and Cambodia were suspended. In February 2026, RFA announced the resumption of service to China, Tibet, North Korea and Myanmar citing "private contracting with transmission services." Mandarin content was online only while Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean and Burmese content aired over short- and medium-wave radio frequencies. ==Mission==