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Chinese need truth via outside broadcasts

Like all totalitarian regimes, the government of Communist China prefers to keep its subjugated people in the dark about events that might be inconvenient to the regime's long-term survival. But Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded news service, helps breach China's great wall of censorship with rigorous, independent reporting of events in China and around the world, broadcast into China.

Started just three years ago over the protests of the U.S. diplomatic establishment, Radio Free Asia is now a tremendous success.

How successful? Successful enough that the Communist Chinese government for two years has tried &emdash; fruitlessly &emdash; to jam RFA's signal. (RFA avoids jamming by constantly changing frequencies and transmitters.)

RFA is modeled after Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcast independent news into the old Soviet Bloc throughout much of the Cold War. RFE/RL was successful because it never became a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. It merely provided to the enslaved peoples of the former Soviet bloc what they never were allowed to get from their own media: the straight story.

Presidential candidate Steve Forbes had a hand in RFA's creation. While serving on the presidentially appointed board of Radio Free Europe, he began to push &emdash; over the protests of the State Department and other diplomatic blue-noses &emdash; the idea of a Radio Free Asia, in order to ensure that people in China could get straight news of events such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Now that China is engaged in a new Cold War against America and the West, it is a good thing RFA exists to counter Chinese propaganda with the one thing that always has defeated propaganda: the truthful reporting of events.

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