Gere faces Congress about China

Actor encouraging support for Tibet

By WILLIAM TRIPLETT

Actor Richard Gere testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Thursday.

Actor-activist Richard Gere urged Congress to engage more with China, particularly on protections for Tibet, and also asked for full funding of U.S. government broadcasts to Tibet, which the Bush administration is proposing to reduce as part of overall cuts to broadcasts to China.

Testifying to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Gere elicited praise and thanks from lawmakers for his detailed knowledge of issues affecting Tibet, for which he has been an activist for over 20 years. He is chairman of the board for the International Campaign for Tibet.

"The time has come for an intensified public discourse on China," Gere said, noting that attention to China has been overshadowed by the nation's fight against terrorism. "We are repeatedly asked to weigh the costs of the U.S.-led war on terror, but there is a virtual silence from our political leaders on China and its 1.3 billion people.

"I have listened with appreciation and admiration as you and your colleagues register outrage over human rights abuses and urge strategies to move China toward genuine, systematic reform," Gere said to committee chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.). "But we still face an uphill battle and the human rights situation for Tibetans has not improved."

Gere asked that Congress push for direct, regular meetings with China, and also pleaded for full funding of the government-sponsored Voice of America and Radio Free Asia's Tibetan broadcasts, which are crucial to the Tibetan exile community.

Lantos said he supports full funding, but the administration's proposed budget for fiscal 2008 slices $2 million from the $7.5 million that previously funded VOA's and RFA's Tibetan broadcasts. The cuts will effectively reduce Tibetan broadcast hours by half (Daily Variety, Feb. 27).

The 2008 budget also cuts RFA's Mandarin broadcasts by $300,000, and eliminates the Cantonese broadcasts altogether, which represents a $1 million savings.

VOA and RFA officials say the cuts are to help underwrite a new daytime television broadcast to the Middle East. According to an official at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees VOA and RFA, daytime audiences in the Middle East are negligle. "The primetime audience is five times bigger."

BBG spokesman Larry Hart said the cuts to the Mandarin service involve "the least-listened-to hours overnight. The board feels they can do this with no meaningful harm to overall Mandarin programming."

As for the new daytime broadcast in the Middle East, Hart said, "Naturally, just as in the U.S. there are fewer viewers during the day than in prime time, but, as in the U.S., daytime shows reach an important audience. The new program would be Alhurra's first regularly scheduled live broadcast from the Middle East, based in Cairo, with hubs in Dubai, Beirut and Morocco providing an information mix unavailable in the region today, everything from news of the day to reports from the U.S. focusing on culture and special events."