BEIJING (Reuters) - The head of China's state-owned television industry is sleeping in his office to prevent hijackers from once again beaming forbidden images of the outlawed Falun Gong movement to televisions around the country.
An engineer at state broadcaster China Central Television, whose channels were among those interrupted, said Minister Xu Guangchun of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television was spending nights at the office.
"The reason he is sleeping in his office is so that he can have instant access if anything unexpected happens and can handle the problem instantly," the engineer said.
Between June 23 and 30, hijackers cut into broadcasts of: the World Cup soccer finals, the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule attended by President Jiang Zemin and news of devastating floods, officials said.
Falun Gong, outlawed in 1999 after an estimated 10,000 followers demonstrated peacefully outside the Communist government's leadership compound in Beijing, has not claimed responsibility for hijacking the satellite broadcasts.
"The Falun Dafa Information Center does not know who tapped into these satellite signals," said a statement from the movement's information arm in New York, where founder Li Hongzhi lives.
But Beijing blames the group, which it calls an "evil cult," and said the disruptions were in retaliation for a government campaign that sent thousands of Falun Gong followers to labor camps or jail.
"This is extremely despicable and represents yet another crime committed by Falun Gong," senior official Liu Lihua said.
BIG STEP UP
Followers began hacking into local cable TV networks earlier this year to show Falun Gong videos after once-frequent demonstrations in Beijing petered out.
Falun Gong representatives in New York said those were the work of grass-roots followers.
They also said that by blaming foreign sources for the broadcasts, "Jiang's regime avoids acknowledging that the people of China possess the courage, capabilities, and the hearts to clear the air in such a public manner."
But hacking into national satellite beams is a big step up from cutting into a city-wide cable television network -- especially in a year fraught with change as a party leadership reshuffle looms and economic reforms threaten millions of jobs.
"Falun Gong obviously is playing a very sophisticated game of sabotage. They know where to hit," said a television executive with a foreign company in Beijing.
Experts said the hijackers could not, as one Chinese official told reporters, have popped into an electronics store and bought the required equipment.
"If all they wanted to do was disrupt the signal, that's relatively trivial," said Giovanni Verlini, editor of AsiaPacific Satellite.com magazine, from his base near London. "But they wanted to hijack the signal. That's not easy at all."
Experts said the hijackers would have needed access to a multimillion dollar earth station from which signals are beamed to satellites, or a satellite dish at least 30 feet wide.
EXTREME SENSITIVITY
Government sensitivity over Falun Gong was highlighted last week when Beijing stopped transmission of the BBC's World Service Television channel after it showed group members protesting in Hong Kong against Jiang's crackdown on the movement.
According to Hong Kong newspapers, state TV scrapped live coverage of Jiang's speech and the swearing-in ceremony of Hong Kong's Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa last week in fear that the satellite signal might be hijacked.
The June hijackings were aimed at the Chinese Sinosat-1 satellite, which also serves the national weather bureau and other strategic interests, the official news agency Xinhua said.
Sinosat-1 carries about 46 foreign and Chinese channels, according to the Web site www.sinosat.com Most foreign channels are allowed to broadcast only to luxury hotels and apartment blocks allowed to house foreigners.