Defiance in the Kingdom of Fake News

This is Lei Ming, a Chinese factory worker learning to walk after two years of intense torture in a Chinese labor camp. You probably haven't heard of him before, but the shockwaves of what he and five of his friends achieved still reverberate to this day. It's the beginning of 2002 in the northeast city of Changshun, China. A group of six Falun Gong practitioners are gathering in secret to discuss an extraordinary task. A task with life and death consequences. They are preparing to break into the television broadcasting of the most tyrannical regime on earth, the Chinese Communist Party. Their goal is to expose one of the gravest state-sponsored lies in Chinese history. A single lie used to justify the persecution of millions. This most unlikely group of ordinary Chinese people spent the beginning of 2002 under constant risk of being caught. Climbing up and down utility poles under the cover of night, they mapped cable wiring around the city. They practiced how to splice wires to broadcast programs from a cheap portable VCD player. None of them had any formal training. The chance of success was small. Their very lives were at risk. What made them still carry on? When the communists took over China in 1949, they spent decades demonizing and violently rooting out all of Chinese culture and traditional thought with an aim to replace it with Marxism and communism. When the practice of Falun Gong was introduced to the public there, it became an instant sensation. Not only is it a direct continuation of traditional Chinese culture, being a Buddhist-based spiritual practice, but due to the health benefits of its exercises, in just a few short years, 100 million people were learning the practice. But in a shift of events, the CCP decided to try and completely eradicate it in less than three months, using any means necessary. Suddenly, practitioners were arrested in such high numbers that prisons were overflowing. Stadiums and hotels were used as detention centers. Criminals were let out to make room for Falun Gong. Reports of torturing practitioners to give up their faith were widespread across China. The CCP ordered nationwide book burnings, ransacking homes and publishing houses, to destroy any instructional materials. State-owned enterprises, schools and government offices started mandatory re-education sessions to reinforce communist ideology and root out Falun Gong. Those who were once most respected by society had to be despised. Books that were national bestsellers were now burning by the millions. The CCP's demonizing and dehumanizing of the practice flooded the media airwaves. A year and a half into the violent persecution, practitioners were still not giving up their faith. The propaganda proved to be ineffective on the general public. Most throughout China knew the practice to be very wholesome and good. People remained skeptical to the draconian nature of the CCP's campaign. A nervous debate within the CCP's top leadership was brewing. How could they get the general public and the rest of the world to join their side in the persecution? How to make people distrust and hate Falun Gong? They needed a trigger event with an unforgettable emotional impact. In January 2001, a shocking report started broadcasting aggressively across the country, alleging a group of Falun Gong practitioners had set themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in a religiously fueled suicide attempt. Western reporters quickly discovered that these victims were not practitioners and the incident was staged by the CCP. But inside China, the state-run media bombarded people with non-stop reports featuring grisly footage and terrifying narratives. The campaign was unescapable. The CCP even went after the most vulnerable, indoctrinating millions of elementary school children, placing propaganda in their textbooks, teaching them to hate Falun Gong. People began to shun Falun Gong and even despise it. This was the turning point when the brutal crackdown suddenly gained traction, when police and labor camp leaders lost all remaining restraint in torturing and killing Falun Gong practitioners. For the millions of people who practice Falun Gong across China, it seemed at this point all hope was lost. It was against this backdrop the unlikely group of six ordinary Chinese citizens found the courage to do the impossible. On March 5, 2002, the team dispersed into the night to fulfill their mission. That night, across eight separate Changchun City broadcast channels, over a million people found themselves stunned in front of their TVs. The team's mission had been a success. Their truth-revealing program ran for a full 50 minutes. It uncovered the lies about the staged self-immolation and showed wide support for Falun Gong all around the world. Many across Changchun City thought that the persecution of Falun Gong had come to an end. People gathered in the streets to celebrate and congratulate their Falun Gong neighbors that now, at last, the nightmare was over. But the celebrations did not last long. Acting under orders from CCP leader Jiang Zemin himself to kill Falun Gong without mercy, Chinese authorities descended on the streets of Changchun with unprecedented vengeance. Lei Ming and his five companions were all eventually captured and imprisoned. Lei Ming was tortured to the point where his spine was deformed and he could hardly walk. In the months that followed, other break-ins to CCP-controlled airwaves were achieved in many other cities around China. Motivated by this event, a team of Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S. created technologies allowing millions in China to break through the CCP-controlled internet firewall. These tools were also used to challenge oppressive regimes around the world, including Burma and Iran, where they played a vital role during the Arab Spring. Today, these tools remain a key instrument for freedom from censorship and propaganda in repressive regimes around the world.