In recent months, Communist China has stepped up its campaign to crush Falun Gong, the popular faith group that has been severely persecuted for 25 years — yet never fully suppressed.
However, the focus of Beijing’s newest operations to “eliminate” Falun Gong once and for all is not in China itself, but overseas, especially the United States, where many Falun Gong practitioners have spent the last quarter-century raising awareness about the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and promoting a future for China without communism.
Rooted in the country’s ancient heritage of Buddhist and Daoist spiritual cultivation, Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, up to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong by early 1999, according to Chinese government estimates. That July, regime authorities deemed Falun Gong a dangerous “heterodox religion” out of line with the Communist Party’s atheist ideology, and subjected adherents to massive and still-ongoing human rights abuses ranging from imprisonment to murder by organ harvesting.
According to U.S. government officials, human rights organizations, and whistleblower reports from the top rungs of the CCP itself, Beijing sees Falun Gong’s presence outside China as a grave threat to its rule, and has mobilized its agents and supporters for a multifaceted campaign against Falun Gong in the U.S.
Chinese spies recently sentenced by U.S. courts have admitted to working on behalf of CCP security agencies to target Falun Gong. Adherents and their entities have seen an upswell of harassment, threats of violence, and in some cases physical attacks in past months, as compiled by the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) in a running list of incidents.
“The Chinese government sees Falun Gong as a threat to the continuation of Communist Party control of the country, according to the U.S. Department of Justice,” as reported by the Los Angeles Times in a Dec. 19 article on the unveiling of a new case against an alleged CCP agent in southern California.
The FDIC notes in a December report that “beyond the severe consequences for Falun Gong practitioners,” if the CCP succeeds in its attempts targeting the faith in the U.S., it “would offer Beijing a blueprint for how to destroy any company, organization, or group of people in the United States at will, therefore representing a significant threat to American institutions more broadly.”
Delivering a ‘fatal blow’ to Falun Gong outside China
By marginalizing and grinding down Falun Gong abroad, Beijing hopes to not only score a victory in its decades of brutal persecution, but also eliminate a force for peaceful change in China and reinforce the communist regime as it struggles with the U.S. for global dominance.
Media organizations founded by overseas adherents of Falun Gong have played a significant role in bringing uncensored reports in an informational environment otherwise controlled by the CCP. In China, the grassroots Tuidang movement facilitated by Falun Gong practitioners has led to hundreds of millions of Chinese renouncing their ties to the Communist Party and its ideology.
Shen Yun Performing Arts, founded by Falun Gong practitioners and based in upstate New York, uses the ancient artform of classical Chinese dance to depict a rich Chinese spiritual civilization quite different from the CCP’s “Sinicized Marxism.” Though yet unable to perform in mainland China, Shen Yun features at hundreds of theaters around the world on its yearly tours, reaching an audience of millions and winning critical acclaim.
In late November, the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) learned from a source in the CCP intelligence apparatus that Chen Yixin, head of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), was personally in charge of the overseas anti-Falun Gong efforts.
The efforts of the MSS, which functions as an intelligence agency, are to be joined with that of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Serving as China’s police, the MPS has in recent years been found to operate underground police units overseas, including in the U.S.
Another source, sharing information with the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) on Dec. 6, revealed five key points related to Falun Gong discussed at a recent video conference of the MPS, which serves as China’s police. These include driving “fabricated ‘narratives’ to pressure the U.S. government and relevant institutions to cease support for Falun Gong,” and “delivering a ‘fatal blow’ to Falun Gong and the U.S. officials who support it.”
In 2023, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Chinese descent, John Chen, was charged with attempting to bribe the IRS to revoke Shen Yun’s tax exemption as a religious organization. According to court documents, Chen was linked with a branch of the “610 Office,” an organization set up by the CCP in 1999 to coordinate the persecution of Falun Gong.
Following Chen’s guilty verdict this Nov. 19, an alleged conspirator, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was arrested in December on suspicion of furthering the CCP’s activities targeting Falun Gong in the U.S., as well as working to undermine proponents of Taiwan’s independence.
In comments on Sun’s case reported by the Los Angeles Times, U.S. Atty. Martin Estrada called it part of “a very disturbing trend” by Beijing to infiltrate American society and politics.
According to Estrada, part of the CCP’s goals was to reduce “support in our country for Falun Gong and … for pro-democracy movements in China.”
Making American law and media serve the CCP
The CCP’s transnational repression targeting Falun Gong and other overseas Chinese dissidents represents a weaponization of U.S. institutions to undermine America’s founding values of political and religious liberty.
Notes from a previous MPS meeting seen by FDIC mention the need to “mobilize concealed agents to create and escalate the internal conflicts of Falun Gong, to expand nonstop the fighting strength, depth, and reach of [social media influencers targeting Falun Gong and Shen Yun]… they must attract the continuous attention of the entire United States society, and force the U.S. government to strike on all fronts, eliminating the force of Falun Gong.”
Over the course of 2024, a series of articles published by The New York Times repeated the Communist Party’s slanderous views of Falun Gong and its beliefs. The Times’ coverage, while downplaying the persecution Falun Gong suffers in China, also makes misleading and apparently prejudiced claims about Shen Yun, which tours with the tagline “China before communism.”
Reports by the FDIC lay out the inaccuracies and biases in The New York Times’ reporting, stressing that “the extent to which the Times’ reporting achieves the goals of the [CCP] is also worth noting and deeply disturbing.”
According to the Dec. 6 revelations about the MPS internal directives for handling Falun Gong overseas, one of the main tactics is to utilize both the Party’s own agents and “external propaganda resources” to smear Shen Yun and other companies founded by Falun Gong practitioners. A tandem approach is to “focus on amplifying claims that Falun Gong violates U.S. laws and disregards the U.S. government’s authority.”
Pro-CCP individuals and organizations have been linked to The Times’ coverage, as well as suspicious lawsuits and government inquiries against Shen Yun.
A Chinese-American YouTuber known for a violently anti-Falun Gong stance took credit for providing The New York Times with some of its sources — former Shen Yun reporters with grievances against the company. The YouTuber, whom the FBI determined to be “potentially armed and dangerous,” was later arrested for illegal firearms possession.
The source who exposed MSS head Chen Yixin’s role in the CCP’s campaign named the YouTuber as being “completely utilized by State Security. He will send out anything that is provided to him, perhaps unaware it comes from the CCP.”
One of the former Shen Yun performers cited in The Times’ reports is associated with a dance studio in Taiwan that in turn partners with the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA). The BDA, a prestigious performing arts school founded in 1954, has, like other state institutions, been closely tied to the Communist Party since its founding.
In recent statements, Shen Yun noted that the former performer, who filed a civil lawsuit against Shen Yun in November, had never voiced dissatisfaction with her time at the company until developing ties with mainland China.
In one of its latest articles attacking Shen Yun, The New York Times focused on an inquiry opened on the company by the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL), an unprecedented event in Shen Yun’s 18-year-history.
“The inquiry followed calls on X by the above-mentioned [pro-CCP] YouTuber for followers to call local and federal authorities and urge an investigation of Shen Yun. The inquiry received coverage in a front-page article by the New York Times, which reported that it was opened after the paper had sent questions to the agency,” as described by FDIC.
“Similar to the lawsuits, the CCP’s planned campaign mentions this tactic, which also serves to tie up resources and generate negative media coverage even when baseless,” the human rights website continued.
“When the dust settles and the smoke clears, it will become frightfully apparent to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has facilitated the spread of false narratives in mainstream media on a large scale,” Shen Yun said in a Dec. 2 statement addressing the former performer’s new lawsuit.
“What is at stake is not just the reputation of our beloved company; what is at stake is America’s ability to prevent Beijing from controlling U.S. companies, the press, freedom of belief, and freedom of expression in the United States.”
Reprinted from Vision Times.
