Chinese Embassy Influence Over VOA Mandarin Service Programming

94 November 2018 gathering in Beijing was cancelled by Beijing and forced to move to Singapore.) International service broadcasters Another roadblock has been China’s efforts to limit the influence of the Mandarin services of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Starting in the first decade of the 2000s, the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, and the leadership of VOA’s Mandarin service began an annual meeting to allow embassy officials to voice their opinions about VOA’s content. PRC embassy officials have also reached out to VOA hosts to convince them to be more supportive of the regime. VOA personalities have hosted events at the embassy. One of VOA’s TV editors even publicly pledged his allegiance to China at an embassy event. It is not surprising, then, that some VOA staffers interviewed for this report believe that China’s outreach campaign has succeeded in pushing the VOA Mandarin service away from programs with direct relevance to China toward programming that seeks instead to highlight American everyday life or teach American-style English to Chinese listeners. An example would be a program called Cultural Odyssey, a VOA TV series that focused on Americana, such as fried chicken, doughnuts, and national parks. For years, Cultural Odyssey ate up one-third of the Mandarin service’s travel budget. Another program featured English teacher Jessica Beinecke, which launched her on a career as an English-teaching TV personality on mainland China itself. VOA officials internally praised these programs as both “non- political and non-sensitive,” a current senior VOA staff member noted. What’s more, VOA officials sought to scale back what were perceived to be sensitive reports. After running two years of a radio series on aspects of modern Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution and other events post-1949, VOA cut the program in 2009 despite several of those shows garnering well over three million hits each on the web. In 2011, the Broadcasting Board of Governors sought to cut 65 percent of the workforce from the Mandarin service. However, reporters and editors in the service fought back, they lobbied Congress, and the cuts were restored. In 2012, a Chinese immigrant, who was also a former Chinese dissident and a specialist on the US political system, became the first female Chinese head of the service. She was later fired over a controversial interview that drew the official ire of the PRC, which threatened repercussions.*’ Since her dismissal, VOA’s Mandarin service has resumed a pattern of avoiding stories that could be perceived to be too tough on China, according to several staffers. For example, blogs written by dissidents such as Cao Yaxue, who runs the human rights— Media HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020553