by Sarah Jackson-Han

WASHINGTON, Aug 21 (AFP) - Asian governments worried about potentially destabilizing Internet technology will soon have a new source of information to contend with from a much older medium: radio.

The US government's new Asia Pacific Network (APN), also called Radio Free Asia, starts broadcasting in Mandarin next month, with services in seven other languages to follow. And experts say it could have a far wider reach than the advanced computer technology that Asian autocrats are scrambling to control.

"Radio still has enormous impact. It's far more important than computers or even television," said Lewis Wolfson, professor of communication at the American University here. "It reaches people more easily, and it's economically attractive." In the months leading up to its first broadcast, however, the fledgling network has met for the most part with a curious silence from Asia and an outcry from conservative US legislators who fear it won't take a hard enough line against communism.

They fear, notably, that a 1995 decision to drop the name "Radio Free Asia" in favor of the more neutral-sounding Asia Pacific Network may suggest backsliding on the service's original goal: to help spread democracy in Asia. APN president Richard Richter, a longtime broadcast journalist, seems resigned to some congressional criticism for the moment but also determined to broadcast objective programs that let the facts speak for themselves. In addition to broadcasting hard news, he wants to make APN a sort of "university of the air" with cultural programs and radio adaptations of now-banned Asian literary classics.

"We intend to be forthright about what's going on in each of these countries ... to make people hear different points of view," Richter said in an interview. He bristles at the notion of broadcasting propaganda and insists that APN must be perceived as independent to maintain credibility with listeners. The network expects to receive about 10 million dollars a year in federal funding, but it is technically a private corporation.

Richter, who was hired after broadcasting overseers opted for the name APN, said "Radio Free Asia" just sounded unnecessarily provocative. It could also impede future expansion into other media and discourage US allies in the region, already skittish about annoying Beijing, from allowing APN to transmit its signal from their territory. In another move toward establishing journalistic credibility, Richter recently hired Daniel Southerland, a respected Washington Post correspondent and early critic of plans to start Radio Free Asia, as APN's executive editor. Both are vetting potential employees with enormous care, Richter said, conceding that many Asian-Americans possess desirable language skills but undesirable bias against the countries from which they or their relatives fled. Richter also took the unusual step of explaining APN and its mission to Vietnamese and Chinese embassy officials in Washington. "They were basically curious," he said. "Their reaction was essentially, 'we'll wait and see what you do.'

" "Until we're on the air, there's going to be constant wonder and questions about exactly what we intend to do," he said.

Through their official media, China, North Korea, Burma, and Vietnam all criticized the concept of Radio Free Asia when it was first raised several years ago as unjustified American meddling.

Most have since fallen silent on the issue, though a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman contacted in Beijing in late July expressed "grave concern" at the creation of APN and urged Washington to dissolve it.

Nonetheless, China and the rest of Asia seem more preoccupied now with keeping a nervous eye on the Internet than jamming radio signals from the West, said Shalini Venturelli, a Washington-based global communications expert.

"You can shut down computers, but radio is much more ubiquitous and much harder to regulate or control," Venturelli said.

Bhuchung Tsering, a Washington-based official with the International Campaign for Tibet, agreed. Even in remote areas of Chinese-controlled Tibet, Buddhist monks and nuns can pick up radio signals from the Voice of America (VOA) with inexpensive transistors, he said.

Chinese listeners can tune into APN's Mandarin-language service for the first time on September 30 at 11:00 p.m. local time and again the next day at 7:00 a.m.

Radio programs in Cantonese, Tibetan, and five other languages will follow, with broadcasts targetting Burma, Cambodia, China, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.

APN programming will aim to supplement VOA, which is funded and managed by the US government, by focusing specifically on each target country and skipping VOA's emphasis on world news.