(Clearwisdom.net) Minghui (Clearwisdom) journalist reports from Mainland China: Recently in Nahe City, Heilongjiang Province, Dafa practitioners successfully aired truth clarification videos through the local cable TV system. About 600 households viewed the program, which included the truth about the persecution against Dafa and Dafa practitioners. It had a huge impact among the people.

Background information:

Clarifying the truth by tapping into TV signals is a heroic act, due to long-term persecution and the Jiang group's demonizing of Dafa. The Chinese government has blocked all positive information on Falun Gong during the past four years, and it is a selfless and heroic act to uphold justice, for Dafa practitioners risk their lives to speak the truth and redeem people from having their minds poisoned.

Since 1996, Falun Gong practitioners have been denied freedom of belief and basic human rights. Especially after July 20, 1999, Jiang Zemin and Luo Gan's group used the government machinery to publicly persecute all Dafa practitioners.

In the past four years, many witness accounts showed that the policy of the "610 Office," which was set up to specialize in persecuting Falun Gong, is to "defame their reputations, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically." However, the facts of this persecution are covered up and twisted by countless lies, which prevented many people from realizing that the persecution is taking place in their own immediate area. Ever more people were misled and deceived by these lies, and as a result, like a reflex, they hated and misunderstood Falun Gong, even to the point that they feared Truth-Compassion-Tolerance.

According to verifiable statistics on the Clearwisdom website, as of the end of October, 2003, at least 810 Falun Gong practitioners have died as a result of this persecution because they refused to give up the practice of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance and they persisted in speaking the truth.

In late October 2001, information from inside the Chinese government revealed that the actual death toll had reached 1,600. At least 6,000 practitioners have been illegally sentenced to prison, and hundreds of thousands of practitioners were sent to labor camps.

Over 50 types of torture commonly used in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners by police and labor camps around the country include long-term sleep deprivation, shocking practitioners simultaneously with several high-voltage electric batons for a long time in sensitive places (including the mouth, chest, armpits, breasts and private parts), beating with limbs tied in four opposite directions. They also use the dungeon, a water dungeon, out-door latrines, "dead person's bed," and sitting planks to torture practitioners or lock them up in solitary confinement; they force practitioners to sit on metal chairs, "tiger bench" (a torture designed to break a person's leg), to do squats for a long period of time; they tie up the practitioners with rope and hammer nails under the practitioners' fingernails, they pinch the practitioners' bodies with pliers; they pull out the practitioners' nails with pliers, etc.

During the morning of July 22, 2003, several thousand Falun Dafa practitioners from all over the world gathered in front of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and held a symbolic public tribunal against Jiang Zemin. The public prosecutor, a practitioner, addressed the audience, "Imagine the despair and anger of a family who knows nothing of what happened to their loved one and has literally nowhere to turn. For the authorities to simply claim they have not killed a single practitioner - they were all supposedly suicides or death by natural causes is incomprehensible, immoral and the worst of the worst behaviors. And sometimes death can almost be a relief, if the alternative is unending torture and torment. Police guards burning the flesh, the mouth, the genitals with electric batons, hammering metal spikes under fingernails, whipping with spiked wooden sticks, beating with metal clubs, sexual humiliation and rape... the list goes on."

According to a report published by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong ("WOIPFG") on March 20, 2003, "The regime has expended one quarter of China's financial resources to persecute Falun Gong, which is one of the main reasons why the persecution is able to last. This funding comes from diverting foreign investments and Chinese citizens' earnings, as well as the illegal fines forcibly imposed upon Falun Gong practitioners and their family members and work units. A great deal of funding has been allocated to public security, national security, the criminal "610 Office" across the nation, and the foreign affairs department. The sustained defamation campaign and information blockade have cost a great deal of the country's financial resources. This has put tremendous pressure on the livelihoods of people throughout China and brought grave consequences to the nation's economic development."

This persecution, started by Jiang out of personal jealousy, is completely based on lies. This persecution is also covered up by all kinds of lies. People who were brave enough to seek out and speak the truth were brutally persecuted, and some people in Mainland China were given lengthy prison sentences only because they were suspected of visiting Minghui Net online. Falun Gong practitioners in China and abroad have made arduous efforts and tremendous sacrifices in order to expose and stop this persecution.

Dafa practitioners risk their lives to reveal the truth to the people by tapping into TV signals, which deeply frightens the "610 Office" on all levels. Recently, the central "610 Office" has sent a special case group to Nahe City in an attempt to arrest practitioners who took part in this activity. With cooperation from judicial, legal and police departments in Heilongjiang Province, a large-scale search was conducted. Several practitioners have been arrested.

This incident has also affected neighboring Fuyu County, where some practitioners' homes were ransacked and the practitioners were illegally interrogated and fined.