“Whynot bids farewell today. Remember the silence and the echo of this voice of freedom,” reads the front page of Chinese-language online media outlet Whynot, last updated on March 21, 2025. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

This report was written by Hans Tse and published in Hong Kong Free Press on March 30, 2025. The following edited version is published as part of a content partnership agreement.

Veteran Hong Kong journalist Justin is a freelance editor at Whynot, a Chinese-language online media outlet and a subsidiary of the US government-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Since US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, Justin — not his real name — began to fret about the future of his media organisation. It turned out his fear was not unfounded.

His contract has been suspended following an executive order Trump signed on March 14 to defund RFA’s parent agency, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Around two dozen employees at Whynot and hundreds at RFA have been put on leave.

Trump’s move against the USAGM — which oversees the Voice of America (VOA) and gives federal grants to RFA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and other news outlets — forced VOA to place more than 1,300 of its staff on leave and axed funding for RFA and RFE/RL.

The cuts were part of the US president’s sweeping effort that he claimed would reduce federal spending and remake the US government. Critics warned that shutting down the news outlets would benefit US adversaries like China and Russia.

RFA is “still providing limited news updates” following the grant cuts, according to a notice on its website. As of March 15, it was still publishing stories from across the region in a limited capacity.

But Whynot has halted operations. “As RFA appeals against the grant termination, the future of Whynot is uncertain,” the online outlet said in a statement dated March 21, the last day the website was updated.

Whynot occupies a unique position in the Chinese-language media landscape, employees and experts alike told HKFP, as there are few alternative platforms dedicated to telling human-interest stories and covering topics that appeal to China’s younger population.

Losing Whynot also means losing an important platform for a group of liberal-minded Chinese journalists to get editorial support and publish their stories, they said.

Whynot and RFA

Whynot was launched in September 2020, targeting young, educated Chinese as its audience.

The online outlet said its mission was to encourage “genuine, diverse, and secure” conversations about significant topics in China. “If you always ask: ‘Why not?’ Then you must be one of us,” it said on its website.

Since March 21, all of Whynot’s two dozen staff members — as well as its contractors — have been placed on leave, according to a Canada-based employee at the outlet, who spoke anonymously due to safety concerns.

RFA spokesperson Rohit Mahajan told HKFP that the broadcaster had to rely on its own savings following the grant termination and that it had been forced to retain only around 70 of its 350 US-based full-time staff, placing the rest on furlough.

About 500 contracts with stringers and freelancers worldwide were suspended, including those working for Whynot, he added.

RFA is prioritising keeping foreign staff whose visas depend on employment and who will face persecution in their home countries, the spokesperson said. Some RFA journalists say they fear deportation if they lose their work visas. Mahajan said:

We’re trying our best to keep all those folks not just on staff, but also receiving payments so they can continue staying in the US.

RFA was established in 1996 to provide reporting to China, North Korea and other countries in Asia with limited press freedom. Sarah Cook, an independent researcher on China's media landscape, explained:

RFA has been a vital source of information… on what is happening at the grassroots level in China and especially in regions like Xinjiang and Tibet, which are mostly off-limits to foreign correspondents… RFA’s Uyghur and Tibetan journalists have extensive contacts in the regions and among the diaspora, and are adept at collecting and verifying information on what is happening.

While RFA focuses on straight news stories, Whynot is specialised in long-form journalism, offering in-depth analyses and feature stories on topics like China’s feminist movement and young Chinese who emigrated overseas.

It also reported extensively on the “white paper” protests, which emerged in 2022 in response to China's strict COVID-19 lockdown, even after they had ended. One year after the protests — the largest display of dissent in mainland China since the 1989 pro-democracy movement — Whynot published a series of reports on the whereabouts of those who were arrested during rallies, as well as the overseas civil society organisations that emerged following the demonstrations.

Despite its relatively young age, Whynot has won multiple prizes, including a Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, two Human Rights Press Awards, and an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association (ONA).

Both Whynot and RFA cannot be accessed from mainland China, where the “Great Firewall” blocks politically sensitive content, including scores of other Western news media.

Whynot’s link to RFA, as well as to the US government, is not overtly visible.

It can be considered a “strategic decision” to keep Whynot away from China’s criticism of RFA, said Fang Kecheng, assistant professor in journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Despite that, Fang told HKFP in Mandarin that Whynot’s coverage did not shy away from politics, and its editorial stance was “obviously” liberal. He also added that its reportage also had a clear emphasis on telling human interest stories in China:

To put it this way, [Whynot] is down to earth. It understands what is actually happening in China. Its coverage tends to tell the stories of individual people and their fates. These stories will be lost.

The Canada-based Whynot employee similarly mourned the loss of Whynot and its human-interest focus:

There are ample media outlets in the Chinese-language landscape that like to address China from a macro perspective. Stories that concern people’s actual lives, in particular young people’s lives and their interests – they are not so common.

“We want to fill this gap,” he said in Mandarin, “and now this leaves a hole.”

Impact on Chinese journalists

The suspension of Whynot may have a tremendous impact on a network of Chinese journalists who are likely to lose not only their jobs but also a channel for their creative output.

Justin said they had put on hold planned stories about China-Japan relations and the fifth anniversary of the Beijing-imposed national security law in Hong Kong. He said:

I have no idea about where I should go from now on, nor do the journalists I have worked with [at Whynot].

Whynot “would run stories where other media wouldn’t,” he said. “This is a serious loss for the Chinese-language media landscape.”

Fang said that one possible option for Whynot journalists is to become freelance reporters and publish their stories through social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram.

Some citizen journalists in mainland China have adopted this strategy.

But that cannot be compared to news reports produced in a professional newsroom that has its own set of journalism standards, the scholar said.

Moreover, more ambitious reportage that requires fieldwork and long-term investment will not be possible without financial support from media outlets.

Fang took as an example a Whynot documentary that was published in December 2024. It reported a surge of Chinese migrants entering the US illegally through dangerous treks in Colombia and Mexico, sometimes risking death. The crossing is known in Chinese as zouxian, “walking the line.” He pointed out:

Without a proper media institution that sponsors the reporting, an individual reporter can hardly accomplish such a task.

After Whynot announced its suspension on March 21, some readers went to its Instagram page and left “thank you” comments. “We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness,” one netizen wrote.

There is still a possibility that Trump’s executive order will be reversed.

RFE/RL said on March 25th that it successfully challenged the decision in court and announced the following day that the USAGM had rescinded its letter terminating the grant for the broadcaster.

Following its sister company’s court victory, RFA filed a similar lawsuit on March 27. It said that it would “fully shut down by the end of April” if the court did not intervene.

In a separate court case, a federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from dismantling VOA and prohibited the termination of RFA’s and RFE/RL’s grants.

The Canada-based Whynot employee said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of RFA successfully challenging Trump’s decision, citing some bipartisan support for the broadcaster in Washington.

But Fang argued that the grant termination had already underscored that US funding to the media outlets was not “guaranteed forever” and that it could be subject to political uncertainty or even the whim of a president. He stressed that media outlets should diversify their funding so that losing one stream of income would not lead to immediate closure:

Frankly speaking, it doesn’t sound quite right or healthy that high-quality journalism concerning the interests of young Chinese people is funded solely by the US government.