March 18, 2002

Settling in front of the tube one evening last week, residents of the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun thought they were about to watch a special about their rubber-stamp parliament in Beijing. They got some special programming all right--brought to them by the Falun Gong movement, Public Enemy No. 1 of the Chinese state. Hacker devotees had spliced their way into the cable system in Changchun, birthplace of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, and broadcast to as many as 300,000 households. Stunned city officials held an emergency meeting and swore to punish followers "with no leniency"--but the damage was done. Twice during prime time that evening all eight cable channels went dead "and then there was Li Hongzhi speaking," a viewer told the Reuters news agency. Shots of banners reading FALUN GONG IS GOOD were followed by a documentary called Self Immolation or Deception? that accused the government of staging protest suicides in Tiananmen Square last year and blaming them on Falun Gong.

The attack could rejuvenate a movement that seemed crushed. Police hold thousands of the group's followers in labor camps. The only protests in Tiananmen Square these days are by foreign devotees: seven Australians were detained there on the same day as the pirate broadcast and later deported.

But Falun Gong is a techno-savvy group. It has a coterie of underground activists that stay in touch through encrypted e-mails and temporary mobile-phone numbers. Hacking into a cable network is as simple as hooking up a portable dvd player to one of the cable's unprotected transmission points. It takes about 10 min. and "everything they need is available at Radio Shack," says a foreign cable executive in China. There's not much the government can do except encrypt transmissions or lay state-of-the-art digital cable lines--both far too expensive solutions for rusting industrial cities like Changchun. Watch for prime time to become a prime target.