BEIJING - It was about 7 p.m. in the northern Chinese city of Changchun when TV screens suddenly stuttered into black and white before settling into a broadcast that left viewers stunned.
There, sitting in the lotus position and preaching to a crowd, was the man whom Chinese leaders equate with evil: Li Hongzhi, guru of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Falun Gong followers had hacked into the lines of Changchun's cable TV network, hijacking the airwaves Chinese communist leaders so jealously guard. It was one of their most daring acts yet in a battle to survive a relentless government campaign to eradicate a group that has claimed millions of followers.
For Chinese, long accustomed to seeing Falun Gong vilified on state TV, the March 5 broadcast was electrifying. It lasted 15 to 20 minutes, during which the soft-spoken voiceover slammed the government for banning the group, said Falun Gong is practiced freely abroad and praised Li's "outstanding contributions," one viewer recalled, speaking by telephone on condition of anonymity.
Nearly three years after China outlawed Falun Gong, both sides have settled into the information age's equivalent of trench warfare. China claims sweeping victories, but Falun Gong holdouts fight on and say they are far from defeated.
Each accuses the other of atrocities. Both say truth is on their side.
From the safety of offices in the United States, Falun Gong organizers say Chinese prison guards and police routinely torture and murder followers. As of April 1, they claimed 386 dead. Followers have reported being shocked with electric batons, beaten bloody, sexually abused and otherwise brutalized.
China's version of events is the opposite.
Government officials insist no practitioners have died of persecution. Instead, they say crazed followers of the "evil cult" have hacked loved ones to death, hurled themselves from trains and buildings, set themselves ablaze, hanged or starved themselves to death in detention, and refused life-saving medical treatment.
They blame the group for 1,700 deaths.
"Falun Gong practitioners are pitiful," said Wang Yusheng, secretary of China's government-approved Anti-Cult Association. "They don't take medicine when they're sick, they don't even have a normal sense of humor and they don't believe in publicly accepted values. They only believe their master."
Critics say the crackdown goes against the Communist Party's modernizing aspirations — goals symbolized by Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympics and China's new World Trade Organization membership.
The Falun Gong faithful maintain that Li's teachings and meditative slow-motion exercises simply build happy, healthier citizens — and can even endow them with supernatural powers.
But Chinese leaders have long been suspicious of organized religions, and they see a direct challenge to their power in Falun Gong's ability to motivate millions for whom communism no longer means much.
They may also see parallels with earlier quasi-religious movements, such as the Taipings. Led by a man who believed he was Christ's younger brother, they swept through China in the mid-1800s and were put down only after a war that killed millions of people.
To crush Falun Gong, China's government is employing the same tools it uses to control its 1.3 billion people: a massive police apparatus, labor camps and pliant courts.
Police technicians block Chinese access to Falun Gong Web sites, and the entirely state-controlled media slams the group at every turn. Officials have also roped in followers' families, friends and workmates to pressure them to abandon the practice.
As of Jan. 15, courts had tried and sentenced 1,289 members, mostly on cult charges, said a government spokesman who talked to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
He wouldn't say what the sentences were, but some Falun Gong leaders are known to have received prison terms of 18 years.
Nor will authorities confirm claims by Falun Gong organizers abroad that as many as 20,000 have spent time in labor camps — a punishment handed out without trial.
Adherents from the United States, Australia and other countries keep the crackdown in the international eye by coming to Beijing's heavily policed Tiananmen Square to protest. They are quickly detained and deported, and hold news conferences.
But in China, repression has scared most followers into submission or underground. Tiananmen Square protests by Chinese followers have dwindled to almost nil.
The government claims 98 percent of the two million people it says practiced Falun Gong have abandoned the group. Wang, of the Anti-Cult Association, puts the number of unconverted adherents — including labor camp detainees and people practicing secretly at home — in the tens of thousands.
"Not a small number, but it's still a large percentage drop from two million," he said.
Falun Gong etched itself into Chinese leaders' consciousness on April 25, 1999.
That's when thousands of practitioners stood in silent daylong protest around the communist leadership's red-walled Beijing headquarters, seeking legal sanction for Falun Gong.
President Jiang Zemin was incensed. A crackdown was ordered and agents sent to infiltrate the group. Three months later, Falun Gong leaders were rounded up, protesters hauled away, the group's books seized.
Falun Gong "conducted illegal activities, spreading superstitious, evil thinking to blind people, to stir up trouble and sabotage social stability," said the government, announcing its ban.
Yet Falun Gong adherents fight on, some despite multiple stints in detention, against the official view that their "Master Li" is a demagogue living lavishly in the United States on money stolen from enslaved followers.
Some have organized into small cells — a tactic reminiscent of the Communist Party's own underground beginnings in the 1920s, only with the added technological power of the Internet age.
Hunted by authorities, facing the government's information blockade, some resisters communicate with encrypted e-mails and unregistered mobile phones. They say they keep their real names and addresses secret even from each other, to have less to tell if captured.
"In communist leaders' eyes, "it is the very strength of this 'virtual spiritual movement' and its mastery of modern communication in a way that is new in China... that is one part of the threat that it poses," said Barend J. ter Haar, a professor of Chinese history at Holland's Leiden University.
In February, the month before the Changchun TV hijacking, Falun Gong activists hacked into television cables in another northeastern city, Anshan, police there said. They said they arrested several Falun Gong members.
Police in the northeastern city of Mishan say they caught a follower distributing leaflets on the streets Feb. 12 and shot him in the leg after he stabbed and injured three officers in an attempt to flee.
Other resisters have set up loudspeakers that broadcast over city neighborhoods, daubed slogans on lampposts, walls and mail boxes, deluged officials with letters and e-mails, and made nighttime leafleting raids on housing projects.
"I got one in a bus station. The paper showed Li Hongzhi's face and said Falun Gong is good. I didn't dare read it carefully, so I threw it on the road immediately," said a woman in Changchun who gave her name as Mrs. Li.
The Changchun network's cables were cut in two places and broadcasting equipment attached, said the government official who briefed the AP. Police arrested several people, he added. Changchun police said they intensified security and searches for Falun Gong practitioners.
Jackie, a 27-year-old Falun Gong info-warrior who keeps his real name secret, learned the hard way that public protest gets nowhere. He says he was twice arrested on Tiananmen Square and served two months in a labor camp that made women's jewelry.
Released after he promised in writing to abandon Falun Gong, he says he soon began practicing again in secret and then last year turned to outright resistance after hearing that a friend, a practitioner with a baby daughter, died in a labor camp.
"I thought, my friends are suffering so much and I'm hiding here," he said in an interview. "I thought, I can't go on like this; I too must stand up again and speak out."
He quit his teaching job, moved secretly to Beijing and hooked up with a half-dozen other adherents, he said.
Now he writes letters — more than 1,000 of them in the past 10 months — to people in China whose postal addresses he finds on the Internet, he said. He also monitors Internet chat rooms for e-mail addresses to target with Falun Gong material, and advises fellow practitioners how to skirt government blocks and access the Web site of Falun Gong, which also calls itself Falun Dafa. There the reclusive Li posts his musings and promises of salvation in eight languages.
"No matter how the evil persecutes, what awaits Dafa disciples is still Consummation, and what awaits the evil beings is nothing but eternally paying in Hell for all they have done to interfere with and persecute the Fa-rectification and Dafa disciples," Li wrote in a March 8 posting titled: "Look at things with righteous thoughts."
Meeting Jackie is a cloak-and-dagger exercise. Instructions come in encrypted e-mails, one signed: "Surrender is not an option." They guide a reporter to a McDonald's.
There, as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" plays over loudspeakers, the reporter waits. Some 45 minutes pass, during which unseen watchers presumably check that he hasn't been followed. Then a call from a pay phone sends him to a waiting car, then a hotel entrance, and finally a teahouse.
Jackie turns up in a smart gray suit, crisp shirt and tie. It's the outfit he says he'll wear when he finally welcomes his Master Li at the airport on a triumphant return from exile.
"We can see that final victory will be ours, without a doubt, because justice is on our side," he said. "We know lies don't last. A person can be cheated for a day, but not for ever."
Jackie says he doesn't know how many others like him are in Beijing.
But he recently found a note on a mailbox that said: "Falun Dafa is good, Falun Dafa is the truth."
"I was so happy when I saw it," he said. "I knew I wasn't alone, that there are others persevering with me."