How CCP Exports Fear, Hatred to America in War Against Faith

‘They want to eradicate Falun Gong from the face of the earth and not just from China,’ says a religious freedom expert.

Simon Zhang, an architect in New York City, holds a photo of him and his mother, who was tortured to death in China, at a panel discussion marking the 25th year of the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Falun Gong, in Washington, on July 17, 2024. Caroline Li/The Epoch Times

Florida marine scientist Sherwood Liu knew something was amiss when friends out of state began messaging him.

“Do you know this guy?”

They were pointing to a federal indictment in which a man had just been charged with spying for Beijing.

Liu didn’t know him.

But the alleged spy, who works in an international information technology firm, might know Liu—quite well.

The indictment accused Li Ping of sharing biographical details of a certain Falun Gong practitioner in St. Petersburg with a Chinese intelligence officer. Who else could it be but Liu?

For more than three decades since Liu settled in St. Petersburg, only two practitioners have ever lived in the city. Liu was the only one there during the period the man was allegedly collecting information. As the volunteer organizer of meditation exercises in the local area, he was also publicly visible—an easy target.

Whether it was him or not, the arrest was a nagging reminder of how Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strains to keep tabs on dissidents like him, whether they are in China or an ocean away.

As the news sank in, Liu felt an urge to confront the man.

“I wanted to ask: ‘Do you know the consequences if ever the communists got a hold of me?’” Liu told The Epoch Times. He noted that Beijing’s “overseas police” have created 100 or more secret outposts globally, and have been actively trying to catch anyone they don’t like and force them back to China.

“We are dealing with the CCP, there is no rule of law,” Liu said.

Top Target

Falun Gong makes up a sizable community in China. In the 1990s, roughly 1 in 13 Chinese were practicing the meditative discipline. Millions of people across the country rose early to exercise in public parks, while aspiring to live by the practice’s three principles: truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

All that changed in July 1999, when the communist regime unleashed a ruthless eradication campaign and overnight turned Falun Gong into a top state enemy, with followers subjected to public ridicule, propaganda campaigns, and severe torture.

Xu Xinyang (R), a 17-year-old girl whose father (pictured) died as a result of the torture he endured in China because of his belief in Falun Gong, speaks at the “Deteriorating Human Rights and Tuidang Movement in China” forum, next to her mother Chi Lihua at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Dec. 4, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

The suppression doesn’t stop at the Chinese border. In the United States and elsewhere, Chinese operatives have tried every means to extinguish Falun Gong, including bribing IRS agents to revoke a practitioner-run nonprofit’s status, disrupting Falun Gong demonstrations during high stakes Chinese official visits, spying on individuals’ activities, and in some cases, carrying out violent assaults.

A 2021 report by Freedom House states that “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.”

From 2014 to 2021, Freedom House conservatively logged 214 cases of direct physical attacks originating from China, with Falun Gong on the list of top targets.

“It’s very alarming when you put the whole picture together,” Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times. “It shows the complexity, the sophistication, and the persistence of the CCP to monitor, harass, intimidate, and suppress religious beliefs and believers that it doesn’t like, probably foremost is Falun Gong.”

“They want to eradicate Falun Gong from the face of the earth and not just from China,” she said.

There are stakes for America, too.

With the CCP’s zero tolerance for any belief system outside of the Party’s control, the regime sees religion in general, “and Falun Gong in particular, which has an authentic Chinese voice, as an existential threat,” said Shea. And as Beijing goes about supplanting the U.S.-led world order with its own authoritarian model, she said, suppressing Falun Gong then becomes a way of exerting and solidifying power globally.

“It’s a threat, and it’s frightening for all Americans.”

Operating ‘In the Dark’

Flying out of China in 1992, Liu was in his late 20s, still shaken by the bloody Tiananmen massacre three years earlier that killed an unknown number of democracy-minded students who called for political reform.

His former schoolmate, a protest leader, was in jail serving an 18-year sentence.

Liu recalled drawing a deep breath as the plane took off from Beijing, telling himself, “I’m free now.”

He thought that he was out of the regime’s reach once and for all. But just a few years later, when a new political war descended across China targeting Falun Gong, he realized he was wrong.

Florida-based marine scientist Sherwood Liu meditates in Largo, Fla., on Aug. 4, 2024. Courtesy of Sherwood Liu

Liu, now a U.S. citizen, had taken up the faith by then. Every morning starting in 1998, he and his friends met at a St. Petersburg park to stretch and meditate to the soothing music. But as soon as the CCP launched its persecution in China in 1999, it also changed the environment around him here, on the other side of the globe.

Emails, written in Chinese and laden with abusive language, flurried into his inbox. A Chinese co-worker, who also practices Falun Gong, said CCP police harassed her family back in China, making it clear their American relative was being watched, even down to her purchases.

Around 2007, the same thing happened to Liu. It was the lunar Chinese New Year, a time for family reunions. A security official showed up at his family’s home in Beijing, demanding Liu’s phone number.

Liu’s parents refused to give it. So the official demanded they arrange a call with Liu. “We have met in the United States,” the official told Liu on the call, then said he’d been in the park where Liu does Falun Gong exercises and photographed him. “I know pretty well what you do.”

The official flattered Liu and tried to get him to return to China. He called Liu “a talent the country vitally needs” and promised to cover all his travel expenses if he agreed to go home. When Liu declined, the official made an about face.

”Watch out what you do,” the man warned, telling the researcher that if he continued talking about the regime’s persecution, his brother’s career and his children’s education could suffer.

The official seems to have made good on the threats.

Liu’s brother’s career stagnated after that. Until his retirement a few years ago, he was never promoted, staying in the same position at a state-run airline because, Liu assumed, his brother was deemed “not trustworthy enough for the CCP.”

Placing such a hold would have been easy for the official. “They just need to write or make a phone call to my brother’s company, that’s all it takes,” Liu told The Epoch Times.

Despite all that he’s been through over the years, Liu says he still feels uneasy thinking about being monitored so close to home. Wesley Chapel, where the alleged Chinese spy is based, is less than an hour away from his city. He wonders how many more Chinese agents could be nearby, acting as eyes and ears for the regime.

“The spy may live among us, without you knowing anything they can collect information, and you are constantly monitored by the communists,” he said. “That’s a pretty scary thing.”

“We are in the open,” he said. But the Chinese agents operate “in the dark.”

A balloon is held at a press conference in front of the America ChangLe Association highlighting Beijing's transnational repression, in New York City on Feb. 25, 2023. A now-closed overseas Chinese police station is located inside the association building. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Systematic Data Collection

Among Chinese dissidents, many share the worry of not knowing how much information the regime has on them.

Apps such as WeChat—the main messaging app for Chinese—aggressively gather user data, which by Chinese law, can be accessed by intelligence authorities. The state keeps a file on every person from China, tracking their activities and collecting information the regime can use against them at any time.

Families of U.S. citizens who practice Falun Gong have reported trying to travel, only to have their passports confiscated steps away from leaving China.

In some cases, naturalized U.S. citizens have been arrested the moment they return to China, sometimes being detained for years. Sometimes people aren’t arrested, but are pressured to spy.

“For people who came from China, even if they have left for years, the regime can retrieve their information easily,” said Liu. “That’s how they make threats.”

Compounding that is an added zeal Chinese officials have displayed for suppressing the Falun Gong diaspora. In an internal meeting in 2015, Meng Jianzhu, the top official of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, declared that the “struggle against Falun Gong” is a “political contest with anti-China forces in the West,” according to leaked confidential minutes.

Another leaked document from 2015, revealed Hubei provincial authorities actively spying on overseas Falun Gong practitioners originally from the province, ordering officials to “systematically” collect biographical data, social networks, immigration status, and activities.

With that information, security officials were instructed to “formulate personalized work plans one by one.”

‘We Know Everything’

For New York architect Simon Zhang, the realization that Chinese police had an eye on him came at the worst possible moment.

Zhang’s mother, Ji Yunzhi, already survived two narrow scrapes with death in Chinese prisons when she was locked up for her faith once again, just three days before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

Simon Zhang and his mother, Ji Yunzhi, pose for a photo during a trip to Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, in 2012. Courtesy of Simon Zhang

Within weeks, she collapsed from the torture, including forced feeding. She died at the hospital wearing iron ankle chains, blood smeared on her face and shoulder. Nearly 50 police officers guarded Ji’s battered body and forced Zhang’s father to authorize a cremation.

They showed him photos of his son attending Falun Gong events in the United States, to warn him “we know everything,” recounted Zhang.

Not long after that, they began probing the father for details about his daughter-in-law, Zhang’s wife.

Beijing was “mapping” the Falun Gong community like they would a terrorist group, said Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst and author of the 2017 Freedom House report “The Battle for China’s Spirit.”

An ocean apart, grappling with the gravity of his loss, Zhang said he found it repulsive that the Chinese authorities wouldn’t let up, even after killing his mother.

“It’s beyond my ability to describe what I’m feeling,” he told The Epoch Times. He spoke of his mother’s attention to detail, her loving heart that endeared in-laws, and her persistence, despite the torment, to stay true to her beliefs. At age 37, he said he felt as if a 37-year history was suddenly cut from him.

Zhang described a certain helplessness that sometimes sinks in. Simple as it is for Chinese authorities to reach him, the distance between him and his loved ones in China was almost insurmountable.

He says he strains to not cause them extra pressure, putting them in a position to either try to convince the persecutors to change their minds, or run away and hide.

“It feels like you have to censor yourself because you don’t want to bring trouble to people in China,” he said.

He noted that that’s precisely how the regime wants him to feel. It’s an efficient way, he says, for the regime to silence dissidents like him abroad.

Hatred on the Streets

Where threats fail, violence is often introduced.

In 2002, as Sean Yang, the current head of the Southern USA Falun Dafa Association, was meditating in front of the Chinese consulate in Houston to protest the persecution in China, when a car came round from the other side of the consulate. Someone hurled raw eggs at him from the window, then sped away. He was left with a white shirt covered in egg blots.

(Left) Sean Yang continues to meditate after eggs were thrown at him from a passing vehicle, in front of the Chinese consulate in Houston in 2002. (Right) The Chinese consulate in Houston. Minghui.org, Mark Felix /AFP via Getty Images

“It was clearly out of hatred,” Taiwanese-born Yang told The Epoch Times. “It was just too brazen they dared to do this here in America.”

On those same sidewalks, Cynthia Sun as a child had watched consulate employees stride out from the facility, come right up to the meditators, and take pictures of their faces from a foot away.

The message seemed to be that, “despite living in America, despite growing up here and being a citizen, that the CCP is always watching, the big brother is always there,” Sun, now a researcher for Falun Dafa Information Center, said at a recent Hudson Institute event.

The U.S. government eventually flagged the Houston consulate as problematic. In July 2020, the State Department under the Trump administration ordered the site closed, saying the “United States will not tolerate the [People’s Republic of China’s] violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people.”

Intimidation has come in many forms. In 2008 in New York’s Flushing neighborhood, a group of over 200 Chinese people, often seen waving red communist flags, engaged in a campaign over several months to spit on, curse, and physically attack Falun Gong practitioners.

During the height of the campaign, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong investigated and caught Peng Keyu, the New York Chinese Consul General, admitting on tape his role in instigating the attacks.

“After they fight against Falun Gong, I shake their hands one by one to thank them and say a few encouraging words,” Peng said on a call. “I can’t do this in front of Falun Gong. I always park my car quite far from the scene so they won’t see me. I have to be very careful about this stuff.”

Cook, while researching for Freedom House, lived just a few subway stops from Flushing so decided to check things out for herself one weekend afternoon. In no time, she spotted someone screaming anti-Falun Gong propaganda and disseminating hate literature. Crossing the street, she saw another group of between five to eight people surrounding and heckling a Falun Gong practitioner.

Cook was so stunned she almost wondered if she was in China.

Flushing resident Edmond Erh is allegedly assaulted by a pro-CCP mob while supporting a booth for quitting the Chinese Communist Party, in the Flushing, New York City, on July 10, 2008. Dayin Chen/The Epoch Times

“I was there on a routine day,” she told The Epoch Times. “This was the general atmosphere at the time in Flushing.”

She felt for the victims. Some might have just escaped from persecution in China, coming to America for freedom. “They’re walking down the street and just wearing a t-shirt” with a message about Falun Gong, and here they are “facing these hateful attacks.”

Similar scenes have played out in other cities and countries including Australia, Japan, and Canada, albeit on smaller scales.

Manipulating the US

Assaults, however disturbing, are the tip of the iceberg in Beijing’s global offensive. More worrying to researchers is how the Party manipulates Americans to carry its water.

A new report by Falun Dafa Information Center, citing three whistleblowers with access to internal information from the regime, reveals a campaign of an unprecedented scale and sophistication. The campaign’s goal is to sow public discord and potentially to trigger a U.S. law enforcement response against Falun Gong.

Officials attend a press conference held by the Department of Justice to announce the arrest and charges of multiple individuals alleged to be working with the Chinese regime, at the U.S. Attorney's office in New York City on April 17, 2023. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Some of the strategies include prodding social media influencers and Western media to propagate disinformation gathered by the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security, particularly aimed at Shen Yun Performing Arts. The New York-based classical Chinese dance company, founded by Falun Gong practitioners, depicts ancient Chinese culture prior to communist rule as well as scenes of human rights abuses in modern day China.

A Chinese state-run think tank gives instructions how to do this, according to a leaked document from July. “Actively share defamatory information about Falun Gong with overseas media, and provide support… content suitable for short, catchy videos should continue to be disseminated via overseas social media to increase coverage. Suppress Falun Gong’s internet traffic by buying ads [and] SEO optimization.”

For a long time, the CCP has used its relationships with the United States to further its goals. Economic activities, diplomatic relations, civil exchanges, and cultural activities, are all potential levers.

One leaked official document from Henan Province in 2017, told lower-level officials to exploit city-to-city partnerships, to mobilize “patriotic and friendly individuals, such as experts, scholars, reporters, and overseas Chinese community leaders” who have “major influence” to speak on the regime’s behalf

In 2016, the Minnesota Senate debated a resolution condemning Beijing’s systematic forced organ harvesting. The Chinese consulate in Chicago sent letters to legislators, and some officials drove out to visit lawmakers in person.

State Sen. Alice Johnson, cosponsor of the resolution, said during her floor speech, “They came to visit me as well.” She said the officials “mentioned no information about organ harvesting,” and instead devoted their time to slander Falun Gong.

But despite the Chinese officials’ efforts, state Sen. Dan Hall said, “We have ... enough evidence that these things are going on and we need to stop it.” The measure passed unanimously.

Some targeted individuals may not even know they’re being used. In 2012, a longtime Parliament Hill reporter in Canada, Mark Bourrie, quit his job with China’s state mouthpiece, Xinhua, when it became clear to him that he wasn’t working as a journalist, but as a spy. He, like other Xinhua employees, were regularly asked to collect names of participants at Falun Gong or other dissident events, to film and transcribe what went on in meticulous detail, and yet reports he filed for these assignments disappeared into the ether.

People hold signs to protest an electronic billboard (top) leased by Xinhua, a state-run news agency operated by the Chinese regime, as it makes its debut in New York's Times Square on Aug. 1, 2011. Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images

The latest directives go further, issuing instructions to focus on amplifying false narratives with the best chance of having legal ramifications, the report said.

Recently, two Chinese agents, one a U.S. citizen, the other a green card holder, pleaded guilty to trying to bribe an IRS agent with $50,000 to open an audit on Shen Yun—the IRS agent, however, was an undercover FBI agent.

Capturing Academia

The CCP has made massive inroads into the American education system. The State Department granted nearly 300,000 student visas to Chinese in 2023, roughly half of all foreign students.

Lily (who used a pseudonym for fear of retaliation) taught at a Virginia boarding school. In 2022, she made a school-wide presentation about a piece of artwork she enjoyed: A depiction of 36 Western Falun Gong practitioners staging a daring appeal for their beliefs in Tiananmen Square.

The school head and other leaders reacted positively—until the Chinese students “caused an uproar,” Lily said. She was summoned to meet with a school official who, according to Lily, repeated CCP propaganda and blamed her for “trying to cause trouble.”

Lily felt hurt. She had mentored the very Chinese students who turned against her. All of a sudden, she said, she was no longer seen by them as human, but as a “class enemy.”

It’s akin to “bringing communism to the United States,” said Lily. “In front of communism, whatever you have doesn’t mean anything, it takes away everything from you.”

Falun Gong practitioners from 12 countries peacefully appeal for an end to the persecution and torture of their Chinese counterparts, on Tiananmen Square in 2001. Minghui.org

The school head accused Lily of making the Chinese students feel “unsafe.”

“Some of their parents work in the Chinese government, so now they’re worried for their safety and their parents’ safety in China,” Lily recalled hearing. “They want to stay away from you.”

Lily eventually had to draft an apology letter to read from the podium. But on the appointed day, no Chinese students showed up, so Lily went straight home.

Two years later, and no longer at the school, Lily still feels traumatized by the ordeal.

“The Chinese students are [the school’s] customers and they are really aggressive, and the school just bows to them,” she said, adding that by extension, the school was bowing to the CCP.

In appeasing the Chinese students, Lily says, the school is doing them a disservice by shielding them from information counter to CCP narratives. Despite being in America, they are “still not free from the CCP influence,” she said. “They are physically here, but their mind and their heart are tied to the CCP.”

The seeping Chinese influence also manifests in other ways.

A 2023 report “Surveillance, Slander, and Censorship” co-authored by Cynthia Sun for the Falun Dafa Information Center, found that at least 10 top U.S. universities were using a textbook called “Discussing Everything Chinese” for its Chinese language course.

The book supports CCP policies, perpetuates “love of the Party,” and justifies the 25-year persecution of Falun Gong, using the Party’s anti-Falun Gong talking points. Many Falun Gong practitioners at universities surveyed for the report expressed the fear of stigma from their Chinese peers or faculty members.

In college campuses across America, Chinese student associations frequently report to their local Chinese consulates or embassy. The student groups comprise another part of Beijing’s sprawling overseas influence network, a “proxy”—as Cook calls it—to carry out the regime’s bidding.

The Chinese consulate in New York City on July 20, 2024. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

An ‘Adaptive’ Authoritarian Model

A labyrinthine incentive structure exists to keep the persecution machinery going.

In China, police officers often receive bonuses for making arrests; prisons exploit detainees as free slave labor; regular citizens are encouraged to snoop on Falun Gong practitioner neighbors, with cash awards sometimes reaching up to five figures in U.S. currency.

Rewards can come in the form of political cachet too. Lu Jianwang, minder of an extralegal Chinese police station operating in Manhattan, received a plaque from China for his role to counter Falun Gong demonstrations during communist leader Xi Jinping’s 2015 Washington trip, according to court filings.

As the CCP works to export its repression abroad, it is constantly adjusting its tactics and incentive schemes.

“The CCP is a very adaptive authoritarian regime,” Cook said, explaining that after 25 years of doggedly persecuting Falun Gong, the regime has a model it can deploy against other targets, such as the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Province.

Cook noted that several Chinese officials who later held influential posts in Xinjiang had built their careers through repressing Falun Gong.

A paramilitary police officer stands on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 15, 2019. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images

“Being good at repression” brings in tangible rewards, thus incentivizing further improving the tactics, she said.

Transnationally, the system works the same way. The recent Florida indictment suggests that Falun Gong had been an earlier target, then the alleged spy targeted other dissidents, U.S. nonprofits, and his own employers.

“The CCP doesn’t pick and choose,” said Cook. “It just looks at these different agents as being resources for collecting information across a wide set of CCP targets and priorities.”

This “insidious” aspect is why she thinks it’s in U.S. interest to take a “holistic defensive approach” to Beijing.

“Because that’s how the CCP looks at it from an offensive perspective.”

Shea, from the Huston Institute, echoes her.

Last year, Chinese cyber hackers who broke into State and Treasury department accounts also singled her out from the Hudson email system and copied her inbox, ostensibly to find her China contacts.

“The threat is here,” she said. “We, as the United States, are just catching on.”

Shadow of Fear

In China, Zhang was 14 when he had to cope with incessant police harassment, house raids, and fear of his mother being taken away.

Even now, he grieves recalling his mother’s one major wish that never came true for her: to come see for herself that people can freely practice Falun Gong in America without fear.

Still pained knowing that the police in China hold power over his family, Zhang finds it more important to speak up and “do the right thing.” He says in the long run, this is most important since the sooner the persecution ends, the sooner his family will find relief.

Liu, the Florida marine researcher, has the same thought: “We just have to carry on with all that we need to do for those people who don’t have a voice.”