LOS ANGELES—About 180 practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong gathered in front of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles on May 3 to call for an end to a slanderous media campaign in Hong Kong. The protesters quietly rallied for more than an hour, bearing signs that read “truthfulness, compassion, tolerance”—the main tenets of the practice, also known as Falun Dafa—while about 20 cars with Falun Gong decorations circled the rally. The protest was sparked by a recent editorial from Ta Kung Pao, a pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) newspaper in Hong Kong that published eight articles slandering Falun Gong and called on the government to ban the spiritual practice in Hong Kong. Almost 22 years ago, the CCP launched a brutal persecution campaign against Falun Gong in China; at that time, up to 100 million people in China were practicing Falun Gong, according to official estimates. Since then, adherents have been arrested and tortured within the country’s prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric wards in an …