NEW YORK—An ever-growing lineup of whistleblowers has identified the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the culprit behind an avalanche of attacks on Falun Gong practitioners in America as well as companies they founded to raise awareness about the persecution they face in China.

The attacks adopt various tactics and forms, showcasing the range of the CCP toolkit for using American institutions and silencing its critics.

One of the companies targeted by the CCP, Shen Yun Performing Arts, produces acclaimed classical Chinese dance shows presented around the world under the tagline “China before communism.” It was founded by practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline who fled religious persecution in China.

Over the past few years, Shen Yun, and Falun Gong more broadly, have been under constant attack in the U.S. The methods employed included bomb threats, mass shooting threats, social media trolling, impersonation, lawsuits, media smears, and even physical attacks.

Over the past six months, multiple CCP whistleblowers have come forward, warning that the attacks are orchestrated by the CCP as part of a new campaign to “eliminate” Falun Gong not just in China, but also in the United States and other countries around the world.

The campaign mainly relies on disinformation via social media influencers and Western media outlets that can’t be easily traced back to the CCP. In tandem, it utilizes the U.S. legal and law enforcement system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners, particularly Shen Yun, the whistleblowers said.

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Xi pinpointed Falun Gong and the U.S.-based media companies started by its practitioners, as the main “hostile force” against the CCP and called it a “dire” issue, the insiders told Yuan.

The Epoch Times, NTD Television, and Shen Yun were started by Falun Gong practitioners and have been active in exposing atrocities committed by the CCP.

The campaign is particularly pernicious for utilizing MPS undercover operatives in the United States, the whistleblower said.

“Once these people are mobilized, the threat is very high.”

While the CCP pursues a number of targets in the United States, the breadth of the new campaign against Falun Gong indicates the importance the CCP assigns to it, according to multiple experts.

“The CCP’s campaign against the Falun Gong is only the most outrageous example of the way that Beijing is interfering in American sovereignty on a daily basis,” said Steven Mosher, social scientist and China expert, in an email to The Epoch Times.

Reggie Littlejohn, a human rights advocate and founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, agreed.

“The recent attacks on the Falun Gong are an illustration of the lengths to which the CCP will go to stomp out dissent,” she told The Epoch Times via email.

Littlejohn is a leading expert on abuses against women in China, including forced abortion and sexual slavery. She encountered CCP’s influence in America first-hand when she, in the 2000s, wrote a movie script set in the context of forced abortions during China’s one-child policy. The script won several awards, but was never committed to film.

“I could not get it produced,” she told The Epoch Times.

Many investors wouldn’t touch it because they had business ties in China. Casting was an issue because actors would be “committing professional suicide by appearing in a film like that,” she said.

The experience revealed to her the depth of CCP’s control in America.

There have been examples of Hollywood’s caving to Chinese censors by altering movies already in production. But “it’s not just about changing a little bit of a plot line,” she said.

The core issue is self-censorship.

“The result is that important stories about the multifarious human rights abuses of the CCP will never see the light of day,” she said.

That’s also the reason the CCP targets Shen Yun, she noted.

“Culture and entertainment are so crucial in the formation of public opinion,” she said.

“The CCP has so much influence in the media and the entertainment industry, in academia—all of the places that we look to be telling the truth. … It gives the U.S. population, and one could argue the world population, an unrealistic view of what China is all about.”

The point of psychological warfare is to demoralize a population; public opinion warfare aims to control what and how people think about relevant issues; legal warfare uses the law as a weapon against enemies.

The goals of such operations are “to seduce and subjugate foreign audiences by creating a positive narrative of China,” and “above all, to infiltrate and coerce,” the report said.

The U.S. government has been vocal against CCP influence operations and has had some success countering them, arresting and prosecuting CCP agents that have harassed or spied on CCP critics. But that has barely scratched the surface, some experts say.

A major issue is that the United States operates from an outdated legal framework, said Casey Fleming, chief executive of BlackOps Partners and counterintelligence expert.

“Our laws have never been updated for technology, and they have never been really updated for these types of attacks,” he said. “The attacks that we’ve had in the past have been straight military attacks and unrestricted war is all focused on the citizens and the economy first and, as a last resort, the military.”

Another reason why the attacks are difficult to shut down is that the CCP often uses middlemen to launch them, some experts noted.

“That is exactly the design—to appear that there is no connection so on the surface it’s not questioned,” Fleming said.

Sometimes, the regime will keep several degrees of separation from its pawn. And sometimes the pawn won’t even be aware of being used, according to Lu Dong, who was once such a pawn.

In the 1990s, Dong was one of the main Chinese community leaders in New York, helping the CCP to influence public opinion and policy in the United States. His service to the regime even earned him an audience with then-CCP head Jiang Zemin. But after he saw CCP officials gleeful about the 9/11 attacks, he recoiled and broke ties with the regime. He has since been active in exposing CCP operations in the United States.

“They figured out, ‘Well, if we have people who join institutions as members, and then they can run for office in the institution, they could start controlling policies and things like that,’” he told The Epoch Times.

“It’s just this grand strategy where the CCP basically looks at people as being chess pieces, moving them around on the chessboard to carry on China’s foreign policy agendas.”

The CCP is willing to play the long game, recruiting and cultivating its agents during their student years and gradually helping them build a resumé and credibility, until they are placed in the desired position in the military, business, government, the justice system, academia, or the media, Dong said.

His co-conspirator, Chen Jun, urged Sun to “add content about Chen and Sun’s past struggle fighting Taiwanese independence forces in a named California city over the years and fighting “FLG” [Falun Gong] influences in that city,” the indictment said.

Most of the time, the regime relies on people who are ethnically Chinese. Even if they are U.S. citizens, they often hold sentiments toward China that can be exploited, Dong said.

He didn’t consider himself a CCP spy. He felt he was simply helping a country he cared about.

“We think, ‘Oh, we’re doing something good for China.’ No, you’re not doing something good for China. You’re doing something good for the Chinese communist government,” he said.

If need be, the regime can also twist arms, Graceffo noted, pointing to China’s national security law that makes it mandatory for all Chinese to aid its intelligence activities.

“Their families are back in China. Some of them may be honest people that don’t want to help the CCP, but they’ve got no choice, right?” he said.

Recognizing CCP agents can be extremely difficult.

Even criticism of the CCP isn’t a guarantee as some agents are encouraged to speak against the regime in order to gain credibility.

“They use criticism of the Communist Party as a sheepskin to cover the wolf,” Dong said.

Mosher said he saw first-hand how some of his friends in the China democracy movement “have been in one way or another compromised by the CCP.”

“Some have moderated their stance in response to threats against their families, opportunities to travel to China, or, sadly, financial inducements,” he said.

The “extreme efforts by the CCP to attack and destroy” Falun Gong are “the best evidence that Falun Gong practitioners are immune to such bribes and threats,” he said.

Indeed, one of the reasons the CCP targets Falun Gong so intensely is that its attempts to infiltrate it have met with limited success, Dong said.

“It’s too hard. … Whether you are real or not, you can tell right away,” he said.

During the 2022 secret meeting, CCP leader Xi Jinping said that the usual tactics to “infiltrate, break down, and dissolve” have been insufficient against Falun Gong, according to Yuan.

Because Falun Gong practitioners, similarly to followers of other traditional faiths, place emphasis on development of spiritual values such as benevolence or love, they develop a demeanor that is hard to fake, Dong said.

In September, the House Committee on the CCP held a hearing exploring “How the CCP Uses the Law to Silence Critics and Enforce Its Rule.”

“This is lawfare, plain and simple, and it needs to be stopped,” he said.

CCP leader Xi openly said the Party must “use the law to carry out its international struggles,” noted Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the ranking member.

“The CCP views the law as a sword to use against its opponents and a shield to protect its interests,” he said during the hearing.

Chinese companies have been known to file patent and defamation lawsuits against American companies in a pattern of harassment. Even though the lawsuits are baseless “it still takes up court time and company time,” Fleming said.

Sometimes, the CCP uses U.S.-based entities to do its work.

“They would actually fund environmental groups to file lawsuits and to try to stop fracking, slow down fracking,” he said.

There are now entire law firms in the United States working in CCP’s interest, Graceffo said.

“It’s a very long-term strategy to take people loyal to the CCP, put them in the United States, give them full scholarships, funding, have them go to law school, get their law license, form a law firm over a period of years. And now these firms exist and then the Chinese government feeds people into those firms.”

He expects to see the regime use this strategy even more.

“It’s very successful; it’s very cost-effective; and there’s complete deniability, because there’s nothing really to accuse China of. They haven’t committed a crime, they haven’t fired a shot, they haven’t stolen anything. They’re just using your freedoms and your legal code against you,” he said.

“Chen reportedly expressed his astonishment that he was caught, remarking that the ‘610 office’ had resources and he couldn’t believe they didn’t do a better job watching him,” the indictment said, adding that Chen also reportedly said that the 610 office paid him $250,000 to move to the U.S. and had paid him $52,000 per month since then.

Lin told the FBI that he and Chen also surveilled the Falun Gong community in Orange County, New York, where the Shen Yun campus is located, to collect information for an environmental suit meant to inhibit the growth of the Falun Gong community in the area, according to court documents.

“Lawfare is extremely effective in silencing dissent, because if an individual or even a company or an organization gets hit with one of these lawsuits, it can do them in,” Littlejohn said.

“They can actually just be shuttered by it, because even if you are completely in the right, the drain of your time and your resources is so great that you will be struggling even just to survive in a lot of cases.”

She also said just the fear of a possible lawsuit can have a “chilling effect.”

“So that you would not put out information that you know to be true, because if you get hit with one of these lawsuits, you know that you do not have the resources to defend yourself.”

Last month, Shen Yun was hit with another lawsuit filed by an ex-performer who left the company about five years ago. Parts of the suit appear to be lifted from a New York Times article attacking Shen Yun.

The former performer has been a key source of allegations in the article and several others the paper published earlier this year. The lead author of the New York Times articles, reporter Nicole Hong, said in an interview with the paper that she and her co-author started working on the articles after a “tipster” approached them with supposed information on “inner workings” of Shen Yun and introduced them to a former performer.

Some sources for the article were also supplied by a Chinese-American YouTuber who’s been pinpointed by at least three CCP whistleblowers as being used by the regime as a vehicle in its smear campaign against Falun Gong.

The man has made threatening comments toward Shen Yun personnel and last year the FBI issued a warning to law enforcement that he was “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was spotted by local law enforcement near the Shen Yun campus.

He was subsequently arrested and charged for illegal firearms possession.

“There is a certain amount of interplay because once you’re controlling what’s going on in the press, you’re also controlling the public opinion. And then, of course, in the United States court cases can often be highly influenced by public opinion,” Graceffo said.

The pro-CCP slant of American news was on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“It was like they were receiving weekly briefings from the CCP. I couldn’t believe the nonsense.”

The situation has somewhat changed because public opinion in the United States has turned against China to such a degree that people “don’t want to see positive stories in the news about China,” he said.

It also holds leverage over the media companies’ access to China.

But the influence goes even deeper, according to Dong.

The regime sponsors young Chinese to study journalism and join major media, he said.

“Maybe 10 years or 20 years ago, the Chinese government sponsored them into Harvard University, Columbia University, majoring journalism. … Gradually, somebody would get them into the Voice of America, into The Wall Street Journal, into The New York Times.”

The New York Times has a long rap sheet of amplifying communist propaganda.

Its coverage of Falun Gong has been “shameful,” according to an analysis issued earlier this year by the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit monitoring the persecution of Falun Gong.

“You can have a great law on paper, but if you’re not enforcing it right, it’s not going to help.”

Mosher agreed.

“The solution is to deport each and every agent of the Chinese state who is engaged in this behavior. If any CCP consular officials are found to be engaged in such behavior they should be declared persona non grata and removed from the country. Finally, any [Chinese] consulate that is engaged in such behavior should be shut down.

The law could go as far as requiring parties to litigation to disclose any CCP members in their leadership, he said.

“For nearly a decade now, China has telegraphed that it intends to use our legal system and our conception of the rule of law against us, including against our own companies, our people, and our nation. China has likewise made clear that it will close off its system to us and that our companies and people will have limited, if any, recourse in China’s legal system,” Jaffer said.