On the Right Wavelength

Last week the Senate actually did something good. It unanimously passed a bill (S. 3104) to authorize funding for Radio Free Asia (RFA) on a permanent — as opposed to a temporary — basis. Co-sponsored by Dick Lugar, R-Ind., Ted Kaufman, D-Del., Al Franken, D-Min., Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Jim Webb, D-Va., the bill “indicates the importance we place on the free flow of information, particularly in countries noted for their lack of an open press,” said Lugar.

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RFA has a shorter pedigree than Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which date back to the early Cold War and now broadcast to the former Soviet republics and the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan region. And RFA bears very little resemblance to the 1951 effort to broadcast into Mao’s China. Like RFE/RL, that effort was initially funded by the CIA. But unlike RFE/RL, it ended after only two years, because while many Eastern Europeans and Russians owned shortwave receivers, few Chinese did. And shortwave is the only radio signal that can penetrate a large continent from outside its borders.

Today’s RFA was launched in the mid-1990s, to broadcast domestic news and information into seven countries: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. In eight of its nine language services (Cantonese, Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese) it has won prestigious awards for on-the-ground reporting and a sustained defense of human rights — in a region that, according to Freedom House, has seen an increase in media censorship over the last five years.

The Mandarin service poses a bigger challenge, because unlike RFE/RL’s Russian Service, it never had the chance to cut a deal with a post-Communist government to operate through local FM affiliates. This deal looked promising in the 1990s but lasted only as long as other press freedoms in post-Soviet Russia. When Putin came to power, he ordered a media crackdown that included closing all of RFE/RL’s affiliates. Because shortwave is no longer used by Russians, that leaves RFE/RL relying largely on the Internet, which today limits its reach to less than 30 percent of the population.

RFA has consistently refused to negotiate with Beijing, which makes it look less naive than RFE/RL, not to mention less compromised than certain U.S. businesses (Yahoo, Google, Facebook) whose liberty-loving image has been sullied by their cooperation with the Chinese authorities’ repression of dissidents. But RFA pays a price for its integrity. Today it too relies mainly on the Internet, and you know how much fun that can be in the PRC.

Still, the Senate did the right thing. With enough money (the appropriated kind), RFA could do a lot more with its Mandarin service, and perhaps find another media platform that would work even better. How about a shortwave receiver that looks like an iPad?