China gets more airtime around the world as Voice of America signs off

China's perspective on global events has begun to dominate broadcasts around the world

- Aruna Viswanatha, Alexandra Wexler & Clarence Leong

For years, one of Indonesia's most popular news channels hosted a weekly segment for the country's Chinese diaspora that often featured reports in Mandarin from both the U.S.-government-backed Voice of America and China's state-run television.

Now, since the Trump administration moved to dismantle most of the U.S. Agency for Global Media in March, only the reports from Chinese state media show up.

In his second term, Donald Trump has blown up decades of U.S. foreign-policy efforts, eliminating billions of dollars of foreign aid and influence programs, saying the money was being misused and would be better spent elsewhere.

Trump's March executive order called for the $900 million media agency, which not only funds VOA but also other media outlets, including Radio Free Asia, to do only the things it was legally required to do.

The official overseeing its retrenchment, Kari Lake, accused the agency at a hearing last month of being incompetent, politically biased and itself a national-security threat. Most of the staff has been either fired or put on administrative leave and has filed lawsuits alleging the shutdown of programming was illegal.

In its wake, China's perspective on global events has begun to dominate broadcasts around the world. In Thailand, for example, VOA's regular appearances on the state-owned MCOT broadcaster went to a Chinese media outlet.

A tale of two Thai broadcasts: VOA in February, Chinese state media in May

In Africa, another Beijing-backed network, CGTN, announced in March that it would expand its operations on the continent, following others that have already increased their reach there. China Radio International, for example, mainly broadcasts in English but has expanded its coverage with some of Nigeria's widely spoken languages, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, to try to reach local audiences.