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Additional News Releases

Washington, D.C., Sept. 10, 2001 – The Voice of America’s Chinese branch today officially launches its new web site for China at www.voachinese.com.

Test launched in July, the site offers Mandarin-language U.S., regional, and international news, and features an advanced search engine and improved layout and graphics.  It replaces the branch’s former site which had been available since 1995 but which has been blocked by Chinese authorities since 1997.

Featured in today’s launch of the new VOA site is an interview with former President Jimmy Carter as he was observing a village election outside of Shanghai. Carter, who had been attending a conference in Beijing on village elections in China, told VOA that the villagers “…are voting in a completely secret way. They apparently have a very high turn-out today, maybe because the Voice of America is here.”

It was on Aug. 1, 1995 that the Voice of America’s Chinese Branch began publishing Chinese-language scripts on VOA’s homepage. In early 1997, the Chinese government began blocking VOA’s site, and the number of hits on VOA's Chinese website dropped abruptly. Later that year, VOA responded by devising an alternate means of disseminating information in China, becoming the first international broadcaster to use an on-line subscription service to send news briefs from its web site to computer users in the PRC via e-mail.

Every day since Oct. 1, 1997 the VOA Chinese web team has been e-mailing condensed scripts of in-depth, Chinese-language news and analysis to subscribers along with News in Brief, a summary of the most recent major international events and domestic Chinese news not reported by the Chinese state-run media.  Today, some 180,000 subscribers in China receive the daily e-mails of VOA scripts.

The Voice of America is a multi-media international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. Government. Using radio, television and the Internet, VOA broadcasts over 900 hours a week of news, informational, educational, and cultural programming every week to a worldwide audience of 91 million. Programs are produced in English and 52 other languages.

VOA broadcasts a combined total of 18 hours a day of Mandarin, Cantonese and Tibetan into China, along with an hour and a half of Special English, which uses a 1,500-word vocabulary and a slow rate of speech to provide news and information for non-native English speakers.

For additional information, please contact the Office of External Affairs at (202) 619-2538 or send email to pubaff@voa.gov.