When the Central Broadcasting System went on air in 1928, the Kuomintang was consolidating power over much of China, and state radio was a tool of governance as much as communication. The station broadcast from Nanjing, the KMT's capital, and its purpose was largely political — projecting authority, building a sense of national identity in a country that had only recently emerged from warlordism.

The Second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937, forced the system into a peripatetic existence. Japanese advances pushed the KMT westward, and the CBS moved with it — to Hankou in Hubei Province, and then further inland to Chongqing. The pro-Japanese Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing provided additional pressure. Through all of it, the station kept broadcasting. Radio, in wartime, is among the most resilient of institutions: it requires no building the enemy can occupy, only a transmitter and a frequency.

The KMT's defeat in the Chinese Civil War and the subsequent retreat to Taiwan in 1949 transformed the Central Broadcasting System's mission. No longer the voice of a continental government, it became instead an international broadcaster — speaking to the world from an island that claimed to represent the legitimate government of China, and that the People's Republic on the mainland sought to delegitimize. The Voice of Free China, as it was known in one of its iterations, broadcast across shortwave frequencies to audiences in mainland China, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

For decades, the station navigated the political complexities of Taiwan's unusual position: present, functional, internationally unrecognized. Its programming in Chinese dialects — Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese — was aimed partly at diaspora communities and partly at mainland China itself, where state censors could block newspapers but could not jam every shortwave frequency.

After restructuring in 1996–1998, the broadcaster cycled through several names — Radio Taipei International, Voice of Asia — before settling on Radio Taiwan International in the early 2000s. The name change was practical: listeners outside Taiwan often couldn't connect 'Taipei' with 'Taiwan,' and clarity mattered when the station was competing for ears across a crowded shortwave band.

Today, Radio Taiwan International broadcasts in at least 14 languages: Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, Cantonese, Taiwanese Hakka, English, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Russian, with Ukrainian added more recently. The geographic reach spans China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Shortwave remains part of the mix, alongside internet streaming, podcasts, and social media channels. The flagship program Taiwan Insider is a weekly video and audio news magazine; Taiwan Today covers politics and society; Feast Meets West explores food and culture. In 2022, the board appointed Cheryl Lai as chair.

There is a certain irony to shortwave broadcasting in the internet age. Shortwave was essential during the Cold War precisely because it crossed borders that governments controlled — it was a technology of circumvention, reaching audiences in countries that banned foreign press. RTI's shortwave transmitters still operate, though the station terminated its shortwave service to North and South America in July 2013 after budget cuts made the arrangement with Florida's WYFR transmitter unsustainable.

What remains is a broadcaster that has outlived multiple political formations and several technological eras. It began as an instrument of Kuomintang rule on the Chinese mainland, survived two wars and a civil war, crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1949, and kept evolving — from shortwave-only to multi-platform, from one name to several, from Nanjing to Chongqing to Taipei. The transmitters are quieter now than they once were, but Radio Taiwan International is still on the air.