Radio Free Asia to step up China broadcasting with more funds By Sarah Jackson-Han

Agence France Presse
WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (AFP) - In a move sure to annoy Chinese authorities but delight many of its citizens, US legislators have more than doubled funding for Radio Free Asia to expand its broadcasts to China and Tibet.

Both houses of Congress have now approved 24.1 million dollars in federal funds for RFA for fiscal 1998, which began in October, up from 9.3 million dollars the previous year.

"It would have been more," RFA president Richard Richter said in an interview Friday, "except that by the time it was approved the first fiscal quarter was over."

The largesse came as legislators grew more frustrated at Beijing's jamming of RFA broadcasts and convinced there must be a better way to promote democracy in China than continuing yearly debates over whether to yank its US trade privileges.

"Nobody (in Congress) could really be against RFA," said one Republican congressional aide who asked not to be named.

"The people who might be against it needed to show they're doing something for freedom in Asia, because they're not doing much, and those who always favored it were happy to jump on board."

RFA began operations in September 1996 with the aim of broadcasting news and cultural programming to Asian countries where heavy-handed censorship is the norm.

From transmitters in the Pacific, it now broadcasts to China, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cambodia, though the new funding is specifically earmarked for China and Tibet.

The new funding will allow RFA to increase its staff from 126 to 224 by the summer and more than double the amount of time it spends broadcasting to China.

Mandarin broadcasts will increase from five to 12 hours daily and Tibetan from two to four hours, alongside new programming in Cantonese and Uighur -- dialects of southern and northwestern China, respectively.

RFA decided to add Uighur after realizing that the Mandarin service has attracted a large number of listeners in remote Xinjiang province, Richter said.

Like Tibet, Xinjiang has seen increasingly restiveness among residents who are not Han Chinese. The Han constitute an overwhelming ethnic majority in territory under Beijing's control.

Authorities blamed Uighur separatists for several bombings last year in the provincial capital, Urumqi, and Beijing, so reporting on events in Xinjiang, as RFA plans, could make Chinese authorities nervous.

That wouldn't be anything new for the radio service, which has encountered jamming in China, North Korea and Vietnam. All have accused RFA, funded by Congress but technically a private corporation, of meddling in their internal affairs.

Yet scores of letters from listeners suggest RFA broadcasts are reaching many ordinary people and providing a welcome source of news, commentary, and culture at a time of dizzying social and economic change.

One of several dozen letters seen here came from a Buddhist monk trying to make a living selling compact disks on the streets on Shenzhen, the freewheeling special economic zone in southeastern China.

His life speaks volumes about the odd patchwork of professions and pastimes flourishing in China since senior leader Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms of the 1980s.

"In the last decade, the world has changed so much that the things I learned, the education I received, over the last 30 years became worthless overnight," wrote another listener from northern Hebei province.

"Five thousand years of right and wrong, all the sayings about the ever-changing world, it's like the endless song of Chinese life," it said.

Another, from a radio reporter in northern Shanxi province, bemoans the economic pressures of the new, market-oriented China. "Throughout the station, everyone from top to bottom is working on commercials," the author grumbles.