A spiritual community that escaped persecution from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is facing new threats in New York, with Chinese operatives warning of bombings and other attacks targeting them and lawmakers in Congress who have voiced support.
In a Chinese-language email made public by the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) on Jan. 28, an anonymous sender claims to have made a “large number of incendiary bombs” using alcohol and glass bottles.
The person claimed that on the first day of the Chinese New Year, he would send people to attack Dragon Springs, a campus in upstate New York that houses a Tang Dynasty-style Buddhist temple, rehearsal spaces for Shen Yun Performing Arts, and two religious arts schools, Fei Tian College and Fei Tian Academy of the Arts.
The email went on to detail a plan to wreck the site: The sender would set fire to vehicles, throw gasoline bombs at the wooden buildings, and slash anyone in the way. The person also claimed they would “attack congressmen who support Falun Gong.”
But the campaign to stop Shen Yun appears to have been dialed up to another level over the past year.
Since March 2024, the FDIC has documented 17 emails containing threats against Shen Yun. Many contain graphic descriptions of violence and threatened assaults on performers and their families.
The FDIC said that suspicious individuals have been attempting to approach Dragon Springs’s entrance to take photos or breach its security barrier in recent months.
Theaters hosting Shen Yun performances in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Taiwan have received at least 14 other threats collectively. None of the threatened attacks have come to pass, but they have prompted additional investments in security and law enforcement resources.
The frequency of such threats has noticeably increased since December 2024, with five dated on or after Jan. 13 that cited members of Congress as potential targets, according to the FDIC.
The Chinese New Year holiday, which falls on Jan. 29 this year, is traditionally a time for family reunions. By picking this particular day to incite fear, the CCP operatives have demonstrated their “malicious intent” to “sabotage and silence Shen Yun and the broader Falun Gong diaspora,” FDIC Executive Director Levi Browde said.
Taking together what has happened over the past year, Browde said he believes there is “almost certainly a connection back to Beijing.”
The Epoch Times learned in December that Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally gave instructions in 2022 for top officials to suppress Falun Gong globally, putting a heavy focus on leveraging Western mechanisms with no visible ties to Beijing—including social media influencers and media outlets—to sway public opinion against Falun Gong-founded entities.
On social media platforms such as X and YouTube, posts meant to incite hatred have also emerged.
The CCP continuously threatens and intimidates in order to “create a general chilling effect and create fear inside of every single member of the community,” Hui told The Epoch Times after a Hudson Institute panel on U.S. human rights policy on Jan. 28.
“[Those who are targeted] will give up on the front line. They will give up on fighting for what’s right because they want to avoid those consequences.”
Human rights watchers at the event agreed that consequences are needed for the Beijing-aligned agents who are going after dissidents through increasingly covert means.
“It’s really important that as the CCP is more creative, more tough with its tactics, that we also increase our protection for these dissidents here,” panelist Anouk Wear, a research and policy adviser at Hong Kong Watch, told The Epoch Times.
As Falun Gong practitioners in China continue to face the risk of death for adhering to their beliefs, the escalation against overseas practitioners and Shen Yun should also raise alarms, Browde said.
With the CCP’s “deadly propaganda and violence against Falun Gong practitioners” extending to those in the United States and their supporters in Congress, he said, it is all the more urgent for the U.S. government to open a “full-fledged counterintelligence investigation” to hold the responsible actors to account “before a tragedy occurs.”
The email threatening an attack on Chinese New Year came from an IP address located in France, but the perpetrator likely used a virtual private network to mask his or her location, the FDIC said. It added that both it and Shen Yun had reported the incident to law enforcement and Capitol Police.
