sale would anger China, with Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer stating, "we are certainly not in the game of provocatively damaging our relations with China." In response to radio jamming efforts from China, Newt Gingrich and House Republican leaders helped to increase the budget of RFA and VOA, with further funding of RFA proposed as a way to combat China's political repression without levying trade restrictions that would anger American businesses. With the passage of the International Broadcasting Act in 1994, RFA was brought under auspices of the United States Information Agency where it remained until the agency's cessation of broadcasting duties and transitioned to U.S. Department of State operated Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1999. In September 2009, the 111th Congress amended the International Broadcasting Act to allow a one-year extension of the operation of Radio Free Asia. RFA broadcasts in nine languages, via shortwave, satellite transmissions, medium-wave (AM and FM radio), and through the Internet. The first transmission was in Mandarin Chinese and it is RFA's most broadcast language at twelve hours per day. RFA also broadcasts in Cantonese, Tibetan (Kham, Amdo, and Uke dialects), Uyghur, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer (to Cambodia) and Korean (to North Korea). The Korean service launched in 1997 with Jaehoon Ahn as its founding director. Broadcasts in Khmer to Cambodia that began under the country's communist regime continue despite the country no longer being communist. In 2017, RFA and other networks, such as Voice of America, were put under the then newly created U.S. Agency for Global Media that also sends representatives to its board of directors. List of presidents Radio jamming and Internet blocking Since broadcasting began in 1996, Chinese authorities have consistently jammed RFA broadcasts. Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit in June 1998. The Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to the three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to Beijing. The White House and United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip. The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government from the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed