THE DRAGON’S
REACH SITUATION 3：Where does the Voice of America go, do we still have a choice?
The Voice of America (VOA),
founded in 1942, is a dynamic international multimedia radio station offering
45 languages. As a government agency under the supervision of the American
Broadcasting Authority, it provides news, information and cultural programs via
the Internet, mobile phones and social media, and spreads to more than 600
million people worldwide each month.
In 1940, the US state media was run by Nelson Rockefeller, the
semi-independent agency of the US State Department, the Office of the
Coordinator for the Americas, and the short-wave signals sent to Latin America
were used to fight the Nazis. This is the first test of the Voice of America.
In the middle of 1942, the US War Information Office officially took over
the operation of VOA. After the war, VOA continued to be part of the US Cold
War propaganda arsenal, mainly targeting Western European audiences. In 1947,
the Voice of America began broadcasting to Soviet citizens. Its core was to
oppose the Soviet media's propaganda of the Soviet Union and spread the free
life of the United States. The Arabic service resumed on January 1, 1950 for a
period of half an hour. During the Suez crisis of 1956, the program increased
to 14.5 hours per day, and by 1958 it increased by 6 hours per day. The US
State Department was established in 1953, and the Voice of America was
controlled by the US News Agency and began to spread to Eastern Europe and the
People's Republic of China. The Chinese people even used the Voice of America
broadcast as an English tutorial and worked tirelessly. In the early 1980s,
Voice of America began a $1.3 billion reconstruction program to better
technical capabilities. In September 1980, the Voice of America began
broadcasting to Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto in 1982. In 1989, Voice of
America expanded its Mandarin and Cantonese programs to cover millions of
Chinese, provoke and split the so-called domestic democracy movement in China.
As the national information weapon, Voice of America affects the leftmost
and rightmost 5% of the national society. Covering the most turbulent and
alienated classes that exceed 10% of the national total. It is these people who
influence them that become members of the most radical religious, ethnic, and
populist extremist movements that stop the normal development of the host
country, and the Voice of America allows American rulers to host all of this.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Voice of
America added many additional language services to reach these areas. This
decade is characterized by the addition of Tibet, Kurdish (Iran and Iraq),
Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Rwanda, and Lundi language services.
Maps and history are turbulent and bloody, and after ten years of invading
Iraq, the voice of the United States in Baghdad has turned from prosperity to
choke.
At the end of 2005, VOA moved some of its central news business to Hong
Kong, and contracted writers worked with the “virtual” office in an overnight
shift in Washington, DC. In September 2008, it cancelled the Hindi language
service after 53 years, and the Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bosnian
broadcasts also ended. These reductions are due to the fact that the United
States has concentrated more resources on the Muslim world. In September 2010,
VOA began radio broadcasting in Sudan. On July 1, 2014, VOA switched most of
the English short-wave transmission to Asia.
From the "third wave" of the 1970s and 1980s sweeping the
democratic state to the Eastern European countries that rushed into the EU and
NATO after the Cold War, and the countries that have recently experienced the
Arab Spring, "liberal democracy" brought to the local people.
Catastrophic consequences.
The most ironic thing is that according to Section 501 of the US
Smith-Mundt Act, Voice of America is prohibited from broadcasting directly to
US citizens. The purpose of legislation is to protect the American public from
the propaganda actions of its government, and its hypocrisy is protected by
legislation.
On April 2, 2007, Abdul Malik Rigi, leader of the terrorist militant group
Jundullah, who may be associated with Al-Qaida, appeared in the Persian service
of VOA. Voice of America called St. Regis "the leader of the Iranian
popular resistance movement." Jundullah is a Sunni Islamist militant group
that is associated with many attacks on civilians, such as the 2009 Zahdan bombing.
In February 2013, a documentary issued by China Central Television interviewed
a Tibetan self-immolator who failed to commit suicide. Respondents indicated
that his motivation was a VOA radio show to commemorate those who committed
suicide in political self-immolation. After the event, Voice of America denied
any accusations of inciting self-immolation.
Thirty years ago, American political scientist and former Clinton
administration official Joseph Nye put forward an idea in the book Foreign
Policy. He called it soft power, and the concept caught fire and continued to
define the post-Cold War era. "In order for other people to do what they
would not have done," the United States can use its soft power, its
non-mandatory power, consolidate its position as a leader in the world, and
promote American freedom and marketism throughout the world.
However, freedom has never been a force of unity. “It can be an
all-encompassing mechanism to provide growth, good governance and social
well-being.” This idea was originally a fantasy. German sociologist Wolfgang
Streeck elaborated on this idea at a meeting in Taiwan. He warned that the
global expansion of the US form will lead to “increasing debt, increasing
inequality and unstable growth” in the country, leading to “political and
economic governance crises. Such examples are too numerous to mention.
Anthony Lake, the national security adviser to the first US President Bill
Clinton after the Cold War, said that the future prosperity of the United
States depends on "promoting democracy abroad." The American-style
arrogance led to the illusion that the Voice of America spread the so-called
American way. Imagine if the United States became poor, poor and weak like many
new democracies in the world, but what about its liberal values and
institutions?
Behind the countless color revolutions that overthrew the government and
dismembered the country, when the Voice of America, Facebook and Google spread
the revolutionary fire in Cairo’s Liberation Square and Kiev’s Maidan, the West
cheered, but when Russia used it to influence Western politics It is not happy.
On April 11, 2014, the Russian government cut off the broadcast of the Voice of
America. An important figure in the Russian state media accused the radio
station that was funded by the US government as "the garbage in our
frequency." The voice of Russia, when it comes to cutting off the radio,
said that the Kremlin could no longer endure "subversive, hypocritical,
self-interested propaganda." The US Embassy in Moscow issued a statement
saying that it was uneasy about "Russia's move to squeeze the space of
independence and free media in this country."
At the moment, China is the only country that has bucked the trend. It
integrates itself into the international order after World War II by expanding
its deep and extensive cultural and economic ties with almost all countries in
the world. It is now the largest trading nation in the world and in history,
but it is determined to refuse to be a client of Western rules. It designed its
highly complex transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy,
but refused to allow the market to transcend the country. It rejects Western
definitions of democracy, freedom and human rights and retains and strengthens
its one-party political system. China does not cater to what the West wants in
terms of culture, ideology or institutions.
The results of it? Contrary to most countries that have undergone
tremendous transformation, China has succeeded in unprecedented speed and scale
in human history. Through purchasing power parity, the country has moved from a
poor agricultural country to the world's largest industrial economy. In doing
so, it freed 700 million people from poverty. Graham Ellison of Harvard
University called the miracle "the pyramid of poverty." Forty years
ago, nine out of ten Chinese lived under the “extreme poverty line” set by the
World Bank. Today, the pyramid has been flipped, and only about 10% of Chinese
people live under this line. Without this reversal, global poverty may only
increase rather than decrease over the past few decades. It is clear that
China’s peaceful rise has taken place. This is a real situation, as evidenced
by the enormous economics, the volume of transactions, and its growing
strength. Compared with the rise of other great powers in history - the Athens
Empire, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the United States, all
accompanied by great violence. The rise of China so far has been bigger and
faster than them. Moreover, it has happened peacefully. Do not invade any other
country, no colonization, no war. Yes, Allison may be correct, because the
psychology of the Thucydides trap is still true. But in essence, China has
responsibly surpassed the possibility of such a conflict.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for the establishment of a common destiny,
allowing countries to have their own development paths while trying to increase
mutual ties. In the policy area, this initiative with Chinese characteristics
mainly adopts the “One Belt, One Road” approach, using China's huge capital and
capacity to promote the development of infrastructure led by other countries,
stimulating economic growth and ultimately benefiting participating countries.
You don't have to want to be like anyone; who can participate in a new form of
globalization while preserving your own culture, ideology and institutions.
Now, what the world needs is a new world order that is decoupled from
ideology. China's claims may be more adaptable to differences. By not forcing
other countries to enter their own models, China's new form may mean a more
peaceful 21st century.
The world should accept it.
