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related http://chinachange.org site, have been removed from the VOA website. Several prominent Chinese commentators are no longer on VOA’s lineup of analysts. Many staffers now describe VOA’s content as neither pro- nor anti-China. The emphasis, the staffers observed, is on travel, culture and language, programming the likes of which Chinese viewers can access equally well on CGTN or China’s internet. By contrast, the
content of Radio Free Asia remains far more hard-hitting than its counterpart, VOA.
Conclusion and Recommendations
China has used America’s openness to convey its message both to English- and Chinese-speaking residents of the United States. US rules allow foreign media companies, even ones run by foreign governments, to broadcast freely via American cable and satellite networks. Unlike in China, the United States government does
not block any Chinese websites, many of which are funded by the PRC government. While the Communications Act of 1934 theoretically only allows foreigners to own
20 to 25 percent of terrestrial wireless radio and TV stations, the law has been loosened considerably over the past decade, and it does not even apply to cable channels or leasing arrangements wherein a foreign entity, including one owned by a foreign government, can pay an American licensee for airtime. Chinese media outlets have used all such strategies to publicize the views of the Beijing government.** Perhaps more worrisome, China has also been successful in funding or convincing pro-PRC businessmen to fund pro-PRC media outlets in the United States that nominally appear independent so that the three most important traditionally independent Chinese-language newspapers now
increasingly side with Beijing.
By contrast, the Chinese government severely limits the scope of US and other Western media outlets in China and has banned Western media investment in China, except in very limited innocuous areas, such as in fashion, automobiles, investing, health, and lifestyle. The idea that a Western TV news network could lease a Chinese station and broadcast news to China around the clock—as their Chinese counterparts do here in the United States—is not even thinkable. Equally, there is no chance that a Western
media company would be allowed to invest in a Chinese publication that reported
mainstream news.
Both the expansion of Chinese state-owned English-language media in the United States and Beijing’s increasing control of Chinese-language media outlets in the United
States are very problematic for an open dialogue. For one, these media are under the
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