The history of broadcasts to the Hmong communities of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China) spans almost 45 years. During that period, the responsiveness of the Hmong to Christianity has been well known in all of these areas, largely through verbal reports (the Hmong are 99% illiterate in the hill country). During the Vietnam war, Hmong, known in the press as "montagnards," were inexplicably friendly to the American armed forces. In 1975 and thereafter, many Laotian Hmong fled to Thailand to escape communist persecution. The poor "montagnards" were abandoned by the U.S. to suffer the consequences of their disloyalty to North Vietnam. Virtually nothing was heard from this area from 1975 until around 1992, when we noticed an article in a Hanoi newspaper which complained about "whole villages" becoming Christian. Explicitly, "Christian broadcasts from Manila" were blamed as attempts by the U.S. government to "undermine the revolution." The exact content of the broadcasts was described, and it was indeed FEBC's Hmong programs to which the article was referring. It further complained that the Hmong were abandoning the ancient practices of spirit worship, the drinking of blood, the sacrificing of animals, and instead were selling their animals to buy radios to listen to "Manila." The writer of the article urged the Vietnam government to begin broadcasts of their own to the Hmong. Successive articles in the Vietnamese press continued to lament the situation. One even suggested that the government should leave the Hmong alone, since having become Christians, the Hmong were actually becoming better Vietnamese citizens.

In 1994, the first letter came to FEBC from the montagnards themselves. It reported that a "census" had been taken among Christians in the hills, and that they had reckoned themselves to be 330,000 in number. Incredulous, FEBC's Hmong broadcaster wrote back asking if this could be true, if perhaps the comma were in the wrong position (after all the Hmong are illiterate). The reply came several weeks later: there was no mistake, it said; the Christian communities now numbered 330,000 (of the total 560,000 N. Vietnamese Hmong!).

When this information was published (with a disclaimer that certainly the "census" was not scientific), there was understandably much skepticism in the Christian public at large. There was also the possibility that such conversions were in fact political in nature; that the Hmong were responding to a legend that one day "a King would come to lead them," and that they were interpreting the Christian message in this light (a theory proposed by several writers in the Hanoi press, too).

Because the Vietnamese government forbids/discourages outsiders, including Vietnamese Christians, to visit the Hmong, it had been difficult to receive further confirmation of this amazing story. But in 1995, two Hmong Christian ladies originally from Laos, went into the N. Vietnam highlands to investigate. In every village they visited, hundreds and in many cases, thousands of villagers gathered spontaneously to give testimony of their faith, to learn songs from the (unprepared!) ladies. These encounters were videotaped and provided to FEBC and others, confirming if not in hard numbers, the mass conversion of the Hmong, attributed in great part to the daily broadcasts from FEBC Philippines. By what we have seen and heard on the videos, this movement seems genuinely spiritual in nature, and apparently devoid of political implications, despite their continued persecution by the government.

In February of 1997, a report came to FEBC from a reliable witness who spoke to a high Vietnamese minority affairs official, who estimated that the size of the Hmong Christian community in the highlands is 250,000.