Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday, January 21, 1998

BEIJING, Jan 21 (AFP) - China launched a scathing attack Wednesday on Radio Free Asia (RFA) accusing it of trying to hinder the region's development by rocking stability.

"From the RFA's biased and even distorted reporting, one can easily find Uncle's Sam true motive to contain Asian countries' development and disrupt their stability," the official China Daily said in an editorial.

The American Congress on Saturday agreed to more than double the budget to the radio which broadcasts on short-wave to China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cambodia.

The new funds will allow the station, founded in September 1996, to double its broadcasting hours in Chinese and Tibetan.

It will also start broadcasting in Cantonese, spoken mainly in southern China, and in Uighur, the language most widely spoken in the remote mainly-Moslem northwestern region of Xinjiang which has been rocked by separatist violence.

Both houses of Congress have now approved 24.1 million dollars in federal funds for RFA for fiscal 1998, which began in October, up from 9.3 million dollars.

"The RFA has wasted no time in the past year fabricating tales of 'human rights abuses'," the China Daily said.

"It hasn't voiced anything positive and constructive to Asia's development, especially China's ethnic unity and will never do so.

"Asian people, including Chinese, have long demonstrated their contempt against the programming. Instead of blind expansion, the RFA had better stop its hullabaloo."

The move by US legislators came as they grew more frustrated at Beijing's alleged jamming of RFA broadcasts.