《華爾街日報》報導主標題：不同的波長-----中國異議人士通過媒體王國反迫害，其副標題：在中國被 鎮壓的法輪功通過衛星電視發出大聲音。報導以新唐人經濟節目的主持人向東先生的生活故事為切入，介紹了新唐人電視台的運作、大紀元等媒體的情況，包括媒體 的規模，報導的內容，資金的來源及與法輪功的關係等。

報導稱，新唐人電視台對美國、歐洲、亞洲，包括中國播出，是主要由法輪功修煉者辦的媒 體機構中的一個，這樣的媒體機構數量一直在增加，還包括一家電台和一份用10種語言出版的報紙。 還有一家電影製片公司，一所表演藝術學校，十幾個網站，還有關於中國文化演出，已經在世界各地巡演，其中包括紐約的無線電音樂城和華盛頓特區的肯尼迪中 心。

挑戰中共 大陸人可收看新唐人

《華爾街日報》的報導稱，這個群體的目標越來越大，新唐人電視台總裁李琮在曼哈頓中城新唐人狹小的總部說：「一開始，主要是作為法輪功的聲音說話。但是媒體也可以扮演重要角色，推動中國的民主。」

文章稱，法輪功1992年開始傳播，是一個精神運動，其中一個目的是增進修煉者的身體健康。儘管政府的鎮壓大大遏制了在中國的法輪功，但是這個群體由受過很好教育的修煉者推動在海外興旺蓬勃。他們貢獻時間、金錢、專業技術來推動他們這個事業。

《華 爾街日報》介紹新唐人說，新唐人電視台的中文和英文節目所涉及的問題，在中國官方控制的媒體來看還是禁忌的話題，從政治腐敗到2003年在中國傳播的傳染 病SARS。在美國和台灣總統大選期間，新唐人作了電視直播，來展現民主的實際畫面，並準備對2008年美國總統競選作同樣的直播。這家公司還播出電影、 烹飪節目、體育和其他娛樂節目。

文章提及去年新唐人電視台與大紀元在西方媒體與人權組織尚未確信之時，就率先報導了在中國發生的系統摘取被關押的法輪功學員的器官牟利的惡性事件。

《華 爾街日報》的文章說，觀眾可以通過衛星或在網站上觀看新唐人的節目。在中國，政府禁止私人擁有衛星接受天線，並封鎖與法輪功有關的網站和其他政治上敏感的 網站。但是私自安裝衛星接受天線很普遍，一些互聯網用戶找到辦法繞過政府的防火牆，包括使用法輪功追隨者開發的軟件工具。

《華爾街日報》記者在文章中還採訪了美國普林斯頓大學訪問學者，何清漣表示，新唐人電視及相關機構「代表反對的聲音存在，這是他們最大的價值。」

《華爾街日報》說，新唐人電視台協助建立數十年來挑戰中共最重要的海外異議運動，除了向美國、歐洲及亞洲播送節目外，在中國也能看到。

文章報導法輪功學員辦媒體初衷

《華 爾街日報》的報導談到了法輪功學員辦媒體的初衷，1999年7月，中國當局發動了鎮壓，向先生及其他法輪功學員每天早晨5點在（海外）公園煉功，他們討論 決定需要向公眾講清法輪功是什麼。他們與美國各地的法輪功追隨者一起，在華府中國大使館前集會。有的去見使館官員，有的派發資料。1999年11月，美國 國會通過了一個沒有約束力的決議，呼籲中國停止迫害法輪功追隨者。向先生和其他人認為，北京向媒體灌輸了很多法輪功的負面消息，他們要尋找到更有效的方式 澄清，所以就開始建立自己的媒體。在阿拉巴馬州的伯明翰，一群追隨者建立了一個新聞網站。加州的追隨者學會了製作電視節目。在華府，一些人開始辦電台，其 他人辦報紙。

《華爾街日報》記者在文章也談到法輪功學員開辦的媒體影響力越來越大，正面臨著專業化的挑戰。為了提高專業程度，新唐人請 有經驗的記者做培訓，前法國國際廣播電台中文部主任吳葆璋先生就曾給予了幫助。報導說涉及法輪功學員的個人捐助是當前的新唐人媒體運作的主要來源，而中共 謠傳的台灣政府後台出資經營並不存在。

《華爾街日報》、大陸精英公開論法輪功 中共尷尬

針對《華爾街日報》 和中國大陸精英公開討論法輪功話題的現象，美國中國問題專家石藏山指出：「中共剷除法輪功的鎮壓行動受到中國國內和國際社會的抵制和譴責，迫害被迫轉入地 下，中共正試圖將法輪功事件邊緣化，迴避這個問題，並控制國內媒體少見報端，十七大會議也在迴避這個敏感的話題。」

他說：「一直以來，中共都試圖通過遮掩、淡化等手段，使得法輪功議題在西方邊緣化，但始終未能得逞。」

石 藏山表示：「中國著名律師高智晟等人因揭露對法輪功的迫害而遭打壓。但是，十七大以後，繼安徽省政協常委汪兆鈞、安徽企業家鄭存柱及近日中國民主同盟盟員 郭泉先後向胡溫等高層要求政改，並直接呼籲停止鎮壓法輪功或關注中共違法鎮壓法輪功的問題，法輪功議題被擺上桌面。現在，《華爾街日報》作為美國主流大媒 體高調報導法輪功及相關媒體，令中共十分尷尬。」

「永遠都不會被中共收買的媒體」

針對《華爾街日報》談及法 輪功學員開辦的國際媒體的專業化發展，記者特別採訪了大紀元總編郭軍女士，她表示：「法輪功學員開辦的社會媒體，以大紀元為例，經過幾年的發展已成為具有 影響力的中文媒體集團，現在正在全面專業化，大紀元記者、編輯都要經過專業培訓。辦好大紀元，因為她是世界上永遠都不會被中共收買的媒體，所以也稱得上是 這個世界的道德守護神。」

郭軍表示：「中國大陸民眾通過突破網絡封鎖的工具，在大紀元網站退黨、了解沒有被過濾的國際新聞和中國消息，大紀元不僅承擔社會責任，也成為包括大陸在內的各界民眾和機構對中共發出真實聲音的平臺。」

國際媒體業艱難 大紀元蒸蒸日上

據大紀元資料顯示，在平面媒體面臨電子媒體衝擊出現虧損、經營艱難的時代，國際上不少報業倒閉、萎縮和拍買，而《大紀元時報》在海外的發展持續擴充，獲得海外各國民眾的認同和支持，在國際媒體業市場立住腳跟。《大紀元時報》繼美國、加拿大、台灣、香港、澳洲出版日報之後，還出版了英文、法文、德國、日本、韓文、俄文、希伯來文等多語種《大紀元時報》，成為全球發行覆蓋面最廣、語種最多的報紙，報紙廣告收入一直增長，成為國際媒體業的奇蹟。

11/17/2007 3:58:42 PM

本文網址: http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/7/11/17/n1904818.htm

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DIFFERENT WAVELENGTH
Chinese Dissidents Take On
Beijing Via Media Empire

WASHINGTON -- Most days, Xiang Dong leads a life typical of this city's suburban office worker. But at nights, he takes on another persona: China dissident.

The bespectacled Mr. Xiang, a 38-year-old father of two, hosts a pair of weekly talk shows for a U.S.-based satellite-TV broadcaster called New Tang Dynasty Television. Setting up at a bare-bones studio at a high school one night, he fiddled with his laptop-cum-teleprompter. "I forgot my power cord," sighed Mr. Xiang, who works as a database manager. "I'll just have to rely on batteries."

Making do is the modus operandi for the largely volunteer staff of New Tang Dynasty TV. Yet they are helping build one of the most significant overseas dissident movements to challenge China in decades. Most staffers belong to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual-and-meditation movement banned by Beijing as an "evil cult." What started as an effort by U.S.-based Falun Gong practitioners -- many immigrants from China -- to speak out against a government crackdown back home has evolved into a broadcaster with big aspirations.

New Tang Dynasty broadcasts to the U.S., Europe and Asia, including China. It is one of a growing number of media organizations run mostly by Falun Gong practitioners, including a radio station and a newspaper with editions in 10 languages. There is also a film-production company, a performing-arts school, dozens of Web sites and a Chinese cultural show, which has played around the world, including New York's Radio City Music Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington.

The group's ambitions have grown, says New Tang Dynasty President Zhong Lee. "At the beginning, a big part was to speak as the voice of Falun Gong," he says, at the station's cramped headquarters in midtown Manhattan. "But media can also play a big role pushing democracy in China."

Falun Gong follows in a long tradition of sects in China that have challenged the state. Falun Gong started in 1992 as a spiritual movement intended partly to improve practitioners' health. While a government crackdown has largely contained Falun Gong in China, the group has flourished overseas, driven by well-educated practitioners who volunteer time, money and technological expertise to push their cause, to what some experts describe as a near-fanatical degree.

Question of Funding

A question surrounding these media organizations is how they are funded. Some Chinese officials privately question whether they get backing from Beijing's political nemesis, Taiwan, or from groups determined to embarrass Beijing in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, although publicly they say that they don't know where the funding originates.

Charles Lee, press director of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago, one of the Taiwan government's representative offices in the U.S., said, "I've never heard this rumor . I think it's problematic."

New Tang Dynasty says the bulk of its revenues come from donations by individuals. Its staff is comprised mainly of Falun Gong adherents, who often pay out of pocket for equipment and other expenses. Executives say they don't receive Taiwanese government funding. The Epoch Times, the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper, says ad sales cover "the majority of costs" for its Chinese-language editions, and that those editions help finance operations for the English-language ones.

New Tang Dynasty's revenues were $4.7 million in 2005, according to its Internal Revenue Service filings as a nonprofit. Mr. Lee says last year's revenues were about $5 million, and that they will increase to $6 million or $7 million this year.

For Chinese officials and other Falun Gong opponents, the growing influence of NTD is evidence of their longstanding assertion that the group was never just a spiritual movement. NTD and its sister organizations report frequently on Falun Gong-related news and often focus on negative news out of China. They have also sometimes played up stories discredited by Western media and human-rights groups, such as China's alleged systemic harvesting of the organs of detained Falun Gong practitioners for use in transplants.

At the same time, NTD's programs, broadcast in Chinese and English, address issues that remain largely off-limits to China's state-controlled media, from political corruption to the spread of the infectious disease SARS in the country in 2003.

During elections in the U.S. and Taiwan, NTD beamed live feeds to show democracy in action, and is gearing up to do the same for the 2008 U.S. presidential race. The broadcaster also airs movies, cooking shows, a sports program and other entertainment.

Viewers can tune in to New Tang Dynasty's programs via satellite dish or online. In China, the government bans individual dish ownership and blocks Falun Gong-related and other politically sensitive Web sites. But illegal dish ownership is widespread, and some Internet users have found ways to skirt official fire walls, including by using tools developed by Falun Gong adherents.

New Tang Dynasty TV and affiliated organizations "allow an opposition voice to exist," says He Qinglian, a visiting scholar at Princeton University. "That's their biggest value."

The group faces numerous hurdles, from a dearth of full-time staff to questions about its credibility, as well as what its executives and independent academics describe as interference from Beijing, such as efforts to discourage sponsors.

Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to discuss any specific actions allegedly taken by the embassy involving New Tang Dynasty TV or other Falun Gong-affiliated groups.

"Falun Gong is an evil cult and political organization bent on conducting activities against China and sabotaging China-U.S. relations," he said. "It has a lot of groups under it, and it's very clear they all oppose the Chinese government."

No reliable data are available for the number of Falun Gong adherents. In 2000, Beijing put the number of China-based followers at two million, though other estimates have been much higher.

A self-described dissident in the Chinese province of Guizhou, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Chen, says he began tuning into NTD's Web casts on his computer after learning about them from human-rights activists. State-run Chinese television "can't compare to NTD's openness," says Mr. Chen. But the station's viewers aren't limited to dissidents, he says: "Average citizens" watch its shows, too.

NTD also serves as a platform for China's pro-democracy dissidents, who have been torn by internal squabbling and lack of organization. Contributors have included veteran Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who was detained by Chinese police in September after writing a letter critical of China to U.S. lawmakers.

Mr. Xiang, who heads NTD's Washington office, got his first taste of activism by fighting for democracy in China -- as part of the Tiananmen Square 1989 protests. A student at Renmin University of China, he says he was in the square on the night the Chinese military moved in.

"I never believed the Communist Party would do this," he says. "I decided that night to leave China....I had no interest in China's future."

In 1990, Mr. Xiang went to study accounting at Old Dominion University in Virginia. After graduating, he got a job as a financial analyst in the Washington, D.C., area and married his girlfriend from China, who moved to join him.

A search for spiritual mooring in his new country led Mr. Xiang -- who, like many Chinese, grew up atheist -- to Falun Gong. After reading a book on the movement given to him by a visitor from China, he began to practice its breathing exercises and moral precepts.

In the early years after Li Hongzhi founded Falun Gong in northeastern China, Beijing generally ignored it. But in July 1999, Chinese authorities launched a crackdown, after Falun Gong practitioners held a large protest in Beijing over Chinese media criticism of the movement.

Recalling Tiananmen Square

To Mr. Xiang, "it was just like" the Tiananmen Square protest. "Ten years had passed, and they hadn't changed."

He was determined to fight back. In a discussion during their daily 5 a.m. exercise session at a city park, Mr. Xiang and other Falun Gong followers decided they needed to explain Falun Gong to the general public.

They joined Falun Gong adherents from around the U.S. who were gathering in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington. Some met with embassy officials. Others passed out information packets. In November 1999, Congress passed a nonbinding resolution calling on China to stop persecuting Falun Gong adherents.

But Mr. Xiang and others also sought a more direct way to counter what they felt was a negative message being fed by Beijing to the media about Falun Gong. So they started their own media. In Birmingham, Ala., a group of followers set up a news Web site. California adherents learned to produce TV programs. In Washington, some started a radio station, and others set up a newspaper.

Mr. Xiang decided to focus on producing TV shows. In July 2000, he enrolled in evening classes offered by Fairfax Public Access, a nonprofit organization providing media-production facilities.

One of his first programs to air on Fairfax Public Access's Channel 10 was a minidocumentary about Falun Gong adherents. "Our teacher watched it and said it could be more professional," Mr. Xiang says. Undeterred, he produced more programs featuring Falun Gong followers.

As the various projects gathered steam, some banded together. Local newspapers eventually merged to become the Epoch Times, and the radio stations united into Sound of Hope radio network. In October 2001, a dozen activists gathered in New York to discuss setting up a 24-hour satellite TV station serving North America.

Carrie Hung, a Chinese-American who grew up in New York's Chinatown and runs a women's apparel business, focused on raising funds. Like others involved in the TV endeavor, she was a Falun Gong practitioner and volunteered her time. Supporters in Taiwan and democracy activists offered free programming. The venture acquired rights to some films, including old Western movies subtitled in Chinese.

Ms. Hung says donations, including some big ones from U.S.-based Chinese individuals, paid for the main expenditures: satellite and office rental.

Mr. Xiang, who makes a six-figure salary at his database-management job, estimates he has spent at least $10,000 of his own money to help build the Washington station. He says he spends five or six hours each night on his two talk shows -- one on economics and one on China -- for which he serves as reporter, writer and producer.

Still, financing remains a headache. Mr. Lee estimates individual donations account for 70% to 80% of revenues. NTD has recently begun a campaign to solicit donations from viewers on its Web site. And while ad sales have grown, he says, "our corporate sponsors don't match our reach, because we're on the Chinese government's blacklist."

In 2004, New Tang Dynasty started a Chinese New Year cultural performance to help supplement funding. Many of the show's acts, which feature both professional Chinese artists and students of a Falun Gong-affiliated performing-arts school, are imbued with Falun Gong sentiment and symbolism. One depicts a follower being beaten by Chinese police before she ascends to heaven. The show was performed in about 30 cities around the world this year, compared to four the first year, backers say. The show plans to tour more than 40 cities for the coming season.

On opening night at Washington's Lisner Auditorium in January, Mr. Xiang hosted a preshow gathering. "We have endured heavy interference from the Chinese Communist regime since the beginning," he said to Falun Gong adherents, journalists and Washington figures nibbling on sushi and egg rolls. "But we love China...and we will be more successful in the future."

New Tang Dynasty officials say the Swatch Group Ltd. originally signed up to sponsor the show, but pulled out after Chinese officials told the company the program was affiliated with Falun Gong.

Swatch said in an email statement that it canceled its sponsorship because the show was "not in line with the overall marketing concept of Swatch headquarters for the Chinese New Year." Swatch said New Tang Dynasty approached it to sponsor the show "without revealing that a political group stood behind the commercial company."

Ms. Hung of New Tang Dynasty says, "We always tell our potential sponsors what NTD is about and what our shows are like."

Another challenge for NTD and sister organizations has been how to strengthen credibility with audiences and sources. A few of the volunteer staff have journalistic backgrounds, but most don't.

White House Briefing

Last year, an Epoch Times reporter, part of a group of journalists covering a meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush, made headlines around the world when she yelled insults at Mr. Hu during a briefing on the White House lawn. Wang Wenyi, a pathologist by profession who was volunteering at the newspaper, says she undertook the action on her own. The paper later apologized to the White House, and Ms. Wang no longer reports for the paper.

NTD, the Epoch Times and Sound of Hope Radio were about the only media covering an annual Falun Gong rally in Washington in July. With several thousand adherents convening in front of the Capitol, NTD's broadcast focused on praise for the movement by U.S. congressmen and human-rights activists. Mr. Xiang hosted a live Web cast of the event.

To strengthen professionalism, NTD holds training sessions with experienced journalists, such as Wu Baozhang, former China director for Radio France International. Editors meet weekly to discuss the previous week's programming and how to improve it.

"There are all kinds of demand for different programming, but our funding isn't sufficient," says Mr. Lee. Eventually, NTD hopes to move to income sources such as movies-on-demand and revenue sharing with cable systems.

For Mr. Xiang, who hosts two weekly talk shows, there is a downside to all the growth. "Before, I practiced the Fa [meditation and exercises] two hours a day," he says. "Now I do it only for one hour. Everyone's busy."

Write to Kathy Chen at onlinejournal@wsj.com

本文網址：http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119508926438693540.html?mod=blog