TRANSCRIPT:
When I was at VOA in the 2000s, in the East Asia Division, we were broadcasting 12 hours a day in Mandarin and another three or four hours a day in Tibetan. We had a bureau in Beijing with two reporters on the ground full time. We had three or four more down in Hong Kong. We were never silent. Twelve hours a day during rush hour and primetime.
We didn’t just preach democracy. We exhibited. We told America’s story. One man told us a story of how we’d given him the information that he needed to be able to argue with provincial-level officials who thought they knew better, and we saved his life, he said, by providing that information. This happened time and time again. Then Mr. Trump came along and in one day we were silenced for the first time in 75 years.
The Chinese are now not so much rushing in to fill the gap vacuum but being handed the vacuum. You know, we’re talking about thousands of affiliates who VOA used to provide primetime programming for all over the world. You know, China started in some areas where we had exclusive dominance, like Hausa in Nigeria.
It is time to save the Voice of America. It is time to save the Mandarin and Tibetan services. We have over 100 bilingual, highly-trained journalists at home on administrative leave. Bring them back. Give them, let them do their jobs and fund them at the 2025 level of $200 million. Save VOA. Thank you.
Published
Henderson was the Voice of America East Asia Division director from 1998–2010. Prior to VOA, he worked at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York, and the Institute of International Education, based in Hong Kong.