About Sound of Hope

Sound of Hope

Overview

Sound of Hope, known in Chinese as 希望之声 and abbreviated SOH, is an American nonprofit international Chinese-language radio network and news website headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Mountain View, California, by Falun Gong practitioner and former software engineer Allen Zeng, with co-founder Sean Lin, in 2001, was incorporated as a nonprofit organisation on 6 May 2003, and began operations in June 2003. Along with New Tang Dynasty Television and The Epoch Times, it is one of the three media organisations established by Falun Gong practitioners. The network runs two main operations: one serves Chinese Americans in the United States through AM and FM radio, supplying programming to 14 affiliated Chinese-language FM stations, and the other targeted China itself by shortwave, leasing Radio Taiwan International's transmitters from 2004. Its website, soundofhope.org, publishes Chinese-language news and streams programming for diaspora and mainland audiences, primarily in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Sound of Hope's history is a study in distribution under pressure. Built to carry uncensored news about China to listeners inside China and to Chinese communities abroad, it successively used local American radio, leased Taiwanese shortwave transmitters, satellite and internet streaming, adapting each time the channel it relied on was jammed, threatened or made obsolete. Its story is documented in sources as varied as the San Francisco Chronicle, Taiwan's Central News Agency, Defense One and the records of a Thai court case over one of its relay stations.

Founding in Silicon Valley

Allen Zeng, a former software engineer and Falun Gong practitioner, founded Sound of Hope in Mountain View, in California's Silicon Valley, in 2001. Sean Lin co-founded the network. Zeng's original purpose, as he and Lin have described it, began with the Chinese-language population of Silicon Valley itself: local Chinese-speaking residents had few media of their own that addressed their concerns, and outsiders' coverage of Falun Gong, which the Chinese government had banned in 1999 and was persecuting, struck practitioners as distorted. The network united local radio efforts that Falun Gong practitioners had started in different places into a single organisation, the Sound of Hope Radio Network. Incorporation as a nonprofit followed on 6 May 2003, with operations beginning in June 2003, and headquarters in San Francisco.

The founding context distinguishes Sound of Hope from both commercial ethnic radio and state international broadcasting. Commercial Chinese-language stations in the United States sell advertising against entertainment and community news. State broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia spend government money under government charters. Sound of Hope was built by members of a persecuted religious movement, as a nonprofit, with the explicit aim of providing news about China, and about Falun Gong's treatment there, that Chinese state media would not carry. That origin determines its editorial identity to this day: news and commentary on China mixed with cultural content, produced primarily in Mandarin and Cantonese, with human rights and religious freedom as central subjects.

The American operation

Within the United States, Sound of Hope serves the Chinese diaspora through AM and FM radio and online streaming. Its network programming is supplied to 14 affiliated Chinese-language FM stations, and its own broadcasting has been heard in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Chicago metropolitan area, among other markets, on stations whose call signs appear in its listings, including KSQQ-FM, KQEB-LP, KVTO-AM and WQEQ-LP. Its application for a low-power FM licence in San Francisco stated its goal as bringing significant programming to under-represented groups in the city's Chinatown district, promoting an understanding and appreciation of traditional Chinese and Western culture for the broader San Francisco radio market. That statement of purpose captures the diaspora half of the mission: community service, cultural programming and news for Chinese Americans, in their own languages, from a newsroom in their own metropolitan area.

The diaspora operation also gives the network its stable base. American FM and AM stations operate under Federal Communications Commission licences on American soil, beyond the reach of the jamming and platform decisions that constrained the China-directed service. Fundraising, staffing, production and web publishing are anchored in the United States, and the audience of Chinese Americans, students and recent immigrants provides both listeners and the community within which the network recruits and sustains itself. Programming heard in the Bay Area or Chicago and programming beamed toward China come from the same organisation, but they answer to different regulatory worlds.

The shortwave operation toward China

The second operation targeted China itself by shortwave radio, the classic technology for reaching listeners across borders without local infrastructure. In 2004 Sound of Hope began leasing transmission capacity from Radio Taiwan International, Taiwan's international broadcaster, whose powerful shortwave facilities on Taiwan could reach deep into mainland China. Taiwan's Central News Agency reported the arrangement in 2013 when it became a diplomatic story: Sound of Hope said several United States Congress members had expressed concern about Radio Taiwan International's decision to demolish broadcasting towers in southern Taiwan that had been used in part to send its programmes to China, and Taiwan's representative office in Washington responded that arrangements had been made for Sound of Hope programmes to continue via RTI's Danshui and Baozhong facilities. A leased transmitter on a friendly island had become a matter for legislators and diplomats, which measures how seriously all parties took shortwave reach.

The limits of that reach were equally clear. Defense One's 2019 account of dissident shortwave broadcasting reported that within about five years of the launch of the effort, Chinese jamming had largely squelched Sound of Hope's shortwave signal. Jamming, the deliberate transmission of noise on or near a target frequency, had been used against foreign broadcasters to China for decades, and a small nonprofit network had no technical answer to a state's jamming apparatus on equal terms. The same account described the founders' pivot: Sean Lin called shortwave a "grey area" worth continuing to exploit, but the network increasingly sought to reach Chinese listeners through the internet, relying in part on circumvention tools such as the virtual private network service Ultrasurf to help audiences inside China reach its content.

Pressure beyond jamming: the Thailand case

The risks of relay broadcasting were illustrated in Thailand. In August 2018, Thai officials shut down a shortwave radio station broadcasting from property rented in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, and in November 2018 arrested Chiang Yung-hsin, a 52-year-old Taiwanese businessman, who was indicted on charges of setting up the station without a permit for Sound of Hope. Court documents described Sound of Hope as a San Francisco-based radio network founded by Falun Gong, a movement banned in China, and reporting on the case recorded claims that Beijing had pressured Thai authorities to shut the station down. A Sound of Hope spokesman, Frank Lee, said the network believed shortwave broadcasting to China was critical for people there to learn truthful and accurate news about China and the world. The case, scheduled for hearing in Chiang Mai provincial court in June 2019, showed the network's distribution strategy extending to rented relay sites in third countries, and the legal exposure that strategy created for the individuals who hosted its transmitters.

Programming and editorial character

Sound of Hope's programmes are primarily in Chinese, in Mandarin and Cantonese. Its output mixes news and commentary on China with cultural content, reflecting its founders' dual aim of informing listeners and sustaining traditional Chinese culture as they understand it. News coverage emphasises subjects that Chinese state media suppress or frame adversely: human rights, religious persecution including the treatment of Falun Gong, official corruption, protest and dissent, alongside general news about China, the United States and the world. Cultural programming, history, health, traditional arts and community information, serves the diaspora audience's everyday interests and embodies the network's claim to represent a Chinese cultural tradition distinct from the culture promoted by the Chinese Communist Party.

That combination is characteristic of the three Falun Gong-founded media grouped together since the San Francisco Chronicle described them in 2005: Sound of Hope in radio, New Tang Dynasty Television in television and The Epoch Times, published in Chinese as Da Ji Yuan, in print and online. Each operates as a formally independent organisation, and each was created by practitioners after 1999 to break what they regarded as a state monopoly on information about China. Readers and listeners evaluating Sound of Hope should hold both facts at once: it is a genuine, long-running news and community broadcaster with licensed American stations and a documented record, and it is an advocacy-shaped institution whose founding purpose was to contest the Chinese government's account of itself.

The website and internet distribution

The network's website at soundofhope.org publishes Chinese-language news articles and provides streaming for the diaspora and for mainland audiences able to reach it. As shortwave declined under jamming, internet distribution became the network's growth channel, a transition Defense One described in 2019 as the founders' deliberate strategy, using circumvention technology to help Chinese users access blocked content. The website also freed the network from radio's scheduling: articles, audio on demand and programme archives could serve a listener in Toronto, Sydney or, through a VPN, Shanghai, at any hour. Sound of Hope is accordingly catalogued in this directory as an online news outlet as well as a radio network, since for most of its current audience the encounter with its journalism is a web page or a stream rather than a broadcast frequency.

Internet distribution carries its own vulnerabilities, blocking of domains, removal from app stores and platform moderation, but it reverses the economics of the shortwave era. A jammer must overpower a signal continuously across a continent; a website can be mirrored, shared and reached through tools its audience already uses. The network that began by leasing Taiwanese transmitters to throw a signal over the horizon now operates in that cheaper, more contested and more durable environment.

Position among Chinese-language broadcasters

Sound of Hope sits in a distinct niche among Chinese-language international broadcasters. Voice of America Chinese and Radio Free Asia's Mandarin and Cantonese services are funded by the United States government; Radio Taiwan International is Taiwan's state broadcaster; SBS Chinese is an Australian public service for its own residents. Sound of Hope alone among the major Chinese-language services directed at China is a private nonprofit created by members of the community it serves and by adherents of the movement whose persecution is its founding subject. Its scale, 14 affiliated American FM stations, its own Bay Area and Chicago-area outlets, a global web audience, is far smaller than a state broadcaster's, but its longevity, from 2001 to the present, through jamming, transmitter demolitions and a foreign prosecution connected to its relays, is itself a documented fact of the Chinese-language media landscape.

Current status and significance

Sound of Hope continues as a nonprofit network headquartered in San Francisco, broadcasting to Chinese Americans, publishing at soundofhope.org and maintaining its mission of reaching audiences in China by the channels available to it. Its significance for a directory of Chinese media is threefold. It is one of the three original Falun Gong-founded media organisations, and the radio member of that trio. It is a documented case of shortwave broadcasting's last era in Asia, complete with leased transmitters, jamming and diplomatic correspondence. And it is a working diaspora institution, serving San Francisco's Chinatown and Chinese communities across the United States in Mandarin and Cantonese, that happens also to be an actor in the international contest over information in China. Few outlets combine a local low-power FM application and a place in a Defense One analysis of information warfare; Sound of Hope's record contains both.