Despite severe funding threats and administrative shifts in 2025, Radio Free Asia (RFA) successfully stabilized its operations earlier this year.
The non-profit news organization has resumed reporting and broadcasts across China and Southeast Asia—a small but significant recovery for an outlet often targeted by restrictive media laws.
In an announcement on LinkedIn on Feb. 18, RFA’s president and chief executive Bay Fang wrote, “RFA is back in business! We are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world’s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages.”
In the same LinkedIn post, Fang included a link to a report by their Uyghur Service, detailing how children of detainees in Xinjiang are forced into manual labor rather than learning at school.
In terms of how RFA is able to resume its operations, Fang only said it was “due to private contracting with transmission services.” No further details were given.
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However, Fang did express hope that the FY26 spending package, signed by President Trump in February, would provide the funds and “unwavering bipartisan support” necessary to sustain RFA’s mission.
This spending package included $653 million for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which monitors RFA, Voice of America (VOA) and “other government-funded outlets,” the Guardian wrote. While this is a decrease from the $867 million provided in previous years, it significantly exceeds the $153 million the administration originally requested to effectively dismantle the agency.
Fang further shared her hopes that RFA will “continue and grow,” crediting the journalists, technicians and legal and HR teams for their efforts in reviving RFA’s operations.
“I cannot be more proud of everyone behind this effort to get back on our feet as we enter a critical phase for our organization’s present and future.”
As of now, RFA is still churning out news articles in the aforementioned sites, beginning with their Korean page in January.
The English site, however, has only one new article posted since the initial shutdown; an interview on March 18 with Australian National University’s Graeme Smith, a lead researcher on Chinese investments, on China’s influence in Pacific island nations.
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RFA’s shutdown
RFA was founded almost three decades ago to spread awareness of developments and issues surrounding Asia, particularly in China with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ongoing repression of dissenters and ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
However, Kari Lake, a former news anchor, was appointed by Trump as acting chief executive of USAGM last year. She proceeded to shut off the agency’s grants, claiming “waste of taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias,” the Guardian reported.
Previously funded by Congress, RFA lost its funding when the Trump administration cut it off that same year, leading to mass layoffs and shutdowns of RFA’s overseas bureaus.
While critics decried the move as surrendering global ground to China and other adversaries, Beijing and its state media applauded Trump’s actions.
“Radio Free Asia has long spread falsehoods and smeared China, and they have a poor record when it comes to reporting on China-related issues,” Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said. “We hope more media outlets in the U.S. can make objective and fair-minded reports on China and China-U.S. relations.”
