"The freedom to speak means nothing if you only whisper what you’re told to say."
When I was a teenage girl growing up in the iron grip of Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution, I dreamed of the outside world and risked everything to listen to its voices. While classmates denounced their parents and teachers under red banners and revolutionary slogans, I stayed up into the night, crouched beside a battered shortwave radio, tuning it inch by inch until the static gave way to a foreign miracle: “This is the Voice of America.” Or: “This is London. The BBC World Service.”
To be caught listening to such broadcasts was dangerous. Not merely “frowned upon,” but life-ruining dangerous. A neighbour’s son had disappeared after being overheard repeating a joke he’d heard on the BBC. My father and mother, both CPP members and a senior civil servant in the security department and a university lecturer respectively, were denounced as counterrevolutionaries and sent to labour camps. And yet, I listened. Terrified and in secret, but I listened to those calm, reasoned, and often warm voices—my lifeline to the world beyond claustrophobic, hysterical Beijing.
At first my only motive was to learn of the outside world, countries that seemed mythical and impossibly far away. And while I did learn about the world, I soon tried to listen in English so that I could learn to speak that very, very strange sounding language. (I eventually learned to differentiate between American and British English!)
But the voices I listened to also spoke of civil liberties, elections, press freedom, literature, and philosophy. They aired dissenting voices and interviews with what I at first assumed were suicidally brave men and women criticising their country’s governments. Listening to them I slowly realised that criticising power and the people who wielded it was considered not only acceptable, but even a good thing. I learned that Britain and America, the two foreign devils of CCP imagination, were a puzzling complexity of competing ideas where each had as much right to speak their mind as anyone, including the government.
I remember being astonished at hearing discussion on the BBC of the British prime minister Wéi Ersong possibly being a Soviet spy and having an affair with his secretary, and later that his successor, PM Ka Lahan had no power to prevent workers to go on strike! And then that the downtrodden brainwashed British had elected – yes elected – an evil crazy woman, Mǎgéléitè Sāqiè'ěr to be their leader! What a world!
For a young girl living in ideological captivity, those broadcasters were more than radio signals — they were truth’s whisper through the wall of lies. Truly, I thought, the VOA and BBC must be staffed by the fearless and the lovers of freedom and truth.
Today, half a century later, I’ve stopped tuning or watching either. For what was hearing from the BBC and VO was not the voice of liberty. Instead, it was the voice of woke and globalist conformity. Of managed narratives. Of ideological groupthink dressed in the polished language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The broadcasters I once revered have become unrecognisable, mere tools of a new orthodoxy every bit as rigid, moralising, censorious and dangerous as the Maoist propaganda I grew up with.
Where once they defended freedom, they now sermonise about identity politics. Where once they questioned power, they now amplify it, so long as it speaks the language of progressive technocracy. Where once they welcomed difficult questions and complex views, they now blacklist dissent and flatten debate.
To those who didn’t grow up under actual tyranny, the term “authoritarianism” might seem too strong. But I know authoritarianism intimately, I lived through its slogans, its denunciations, its perverted morality. I recognise it now in the West's growing intolerance for open debate. I see it in the ease with which once-principled media organisations now demonise dissenters and platform only those who parrot the correct ideological line.
Today, if you question gender ideology, you’re a bigot. If you criticise mass immigration policy, you’re xenophobic. If you believe that cultural heritage is worth preserving, you’re a far-right extremist and therefore suspect, possibly a terrorist. If you want merit over identity quotas, you’re accused of upholding white supremacy, even if, like me, you’re Asian. The BBC and VOA used to offer a window out of that kind of ideological absolutism. Now they help enforce it.
What’s more, they export it. These once-admired broadcasters now act as missionaries for a secular religion of the elite, trying to impose the Western ‘progressive’ ideology on a world that despises it, under the guise of human rights and social justice. This isn’t cultural sensitivity. This is cultural imperialism. As someone who took a big risk to hear the voice of the West, I never thought I would one day have to say this: stop lecturing us. Stop trying to re-educate the world in your fragile new dogmas. You’re not spreading freedom anymore. You’re spreading an evil dogma. And we’ve seen where that leads.
There was a time when the role of journalism was to confront power, challenge narratives, and give voice to the voiceless no matter what ideology they belonged to. Today, journalism has been replaced by moral posturing. “Speaking truth to power” now means repeating whatever script has been approved by the elitist globalist Establishment, and imposed by the State, the MSM, HR departments, activist NGOs, and elite universities.
I miss the courage of the old BBC, the one that aired Solzhenitsyn and reported from Tiananmen. I miss the VOA that dared to challenge dictatorships and empower dissidents. Today, both are more likely to run puff pieces on gender-neutral bathrooms at the State Department or spotlight TikTok influencers fighting climate change. Worse, they do so while actively censoring and ignoring stories that challenge their worldview. The Hunter Biden laptop story? Suppressed. The biological basis of sex? Treated as hate speech. The rising voices of working-class against globalist policies? Mocked or erased. This is not journalism, it is activism in a press badge.
Some might that say I am bitter. That I’m nostalgic for a romanticised version of the past. That I don’t understand the “evolution” of Western media. To them I say: no, I understand it all too well. I understand that when a media institution becomes more afraid of offending Twitter than of missing the truth, it’s no longer trustworthy. I understand that when every editorial choice is filtered through a lens of race, gender, and identity politics, objectivity is no longer possible.
I also understand what it means when truth becomes dangerous. When opinions are policed. When silence — strategic, ideological silence — becomes a signal of virtue. This is not new to me. It’s what I grew up with. The only difference is that back then, the ideology was enforced by men in green uniforms. Today, it’s enforced by bureaucrats in blue suits and activists with journalism or sociology degrees.
This is personal for me. When I was a teenager in Mao’s China, the BBC and VOA were my secret teachers, my clandestine mentors. They helped me understand that truth mattered. That lies could be resisted. That a single voice could make a difference. But now? That voice has been lost in a sea of moral vanity and ideological compliance. I didn’t survive the Cultural Revolution to be lectured by Western journalists about how dangerous “misgendering” someone is. I didn’t risk imprisonment to be told that my views are “problematic” because they don’t align with Harvard’s latest DEI memo. I believed in your principles and still do. You abandoned them.
The tragedy is not just what the BBC and VOA have become but what they’ve left behind. In silencing dissent, they have silenced curiosity. In enforcing conformity, they’ve extinguished courage. In replacing inquiry with ideology, they’ve traded journalism for propaganda. To the editors, producers, and journalists within those institutions who still remember what free speech actually means: speak up. Or if you can’t, walk away. The machinery you serve no longer deserves the loyalty of free minds.
To readers across the world, especially in places still fighting for the freedoms the West once championed: don’t be fooled. The loudest voices are not always the bravest. Sometimes, the real dissidents are the ones being deplatformed, not those on the front page.
And to my younger self, crouched beside a radio in the dead of night: I’m sorry. The voices we trusted changed. But the truths they once whispered, that freedom is fragile, that speech matters, that tyranny wears many masks, are still true. Even if you have to say them alone.