The U.S. State Department has condemned the intimidation campaign carried out by Beijing and its proxies targeting a New York-based performing arts group, and is calling for measures to ensure freedom of expression.
Shen Yun Performing Arts’s mission is to revive traditional Chinese culture that’s been all but erased in China; Shen Yun also portrays human rights abuses taking place in China today targeting Falun Gong, a faith group the regime has been trying to eliminate for the past 25 years.
“We condemn such acts of intimidation and urge protection of the right to free expression,” a State Department spokesperson told The Epoch Times, adding that they “urge the Chinese Communist Party to end its now 25-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong.”
The spokesperson said that its annual international religious freedom report “documents incidents of interference against Falun Gong practitioners and Shen Yun Performing Arts in many countries.”
In recent weeks alone there was a bomb threat at a theatre in Dijon, France, where French police had to sweep the theater before the performance could go ahead; a similar threat was sent on Feb. 3 to a theater in Woking, England; another occurred on Jan. 18 in Lodz, Poland; the box office was threatened in Taiwan on Jan. 13; and a theatre in Berkeley, California was threatened on Jan. 10. In addition, multiple bomb and mass shooting threats directly targeted Shen Yun’s headquarters in upstate New York during the time period.
The threats of direct violence come after over 15 years of CCP attempts to exert diplomatic pressure to stop Shen Yun performances—sometimes succeeding, as in the case of South Korea.
Global Concerns
While no violence from the recent spate of threats has materialized to date, concerns are growing in Washington and beyond. In the United Kingdom, Parliament member Jim Shannon raised the issue in a Feb. 6 debate.
Whistleblower accounts show that the regime has been escalating this campaign globally.
These leaked notes, Shannon said, “indicate that the regime is now escalating efforts to eliminate Falun Gong worldwide using a network of spies, social media, disinformation and harassment of practitioners—even here in this great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”
“The expansion of this campaign beyond China’s borders is deeply troubling,” he said.
“This is not just an attack on religious freedom, it is an affront to British values, democracy and the rule of law.” he said. “Will the Government urgently investigate and counter the influence of the Chinese Communist Party’s transnational repression within our borders, including its attacks on Falun Gong and its attempts to censor Shen Yun performances?”
Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, said she appreciated Shannon raising the “important issue of freedom of religion or belief.”
U.K.’s foreign secretary and chancellor both visited China recently and raised this topic with their counterparts, she said, adding that “these issues are taken very seriously by this government.”
Disinformation Strategy
According to multiple whistleblowers cited in an August report by the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC), a nonprofit documenting the CCP’s persecution, Beijing’s new strategy involves manipulating social media influencers and Western media to propagate misinformation and false allegations, with a goal to sow public discord and to trigger a U.S. law enforcement response against practitioners of the spiritual discipline.The New York Times has published no less than 10 articles attacking Shen Yun over the past six months. A Chinese-American YouTuber, who has declared Falun Gong his “enemy,” bragged on social media about helping New York Times reporters.
“I was the one who introduced people [ex-Shen Yun performers] to the New York Times, especially for the initial interviews. They found additional people through that,” he wrote on X following the publication of The New York Times’ first hit piece on Shen Yun in August.
The FBI marked the man as “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was spotted near the Shen Yun campus in upstate New York in 2023. He was subsequently arrested and is facing charges of possession of illegal firearms.
The New York Times relied heavily on a small group of disgruntled former performers without revealing that at least three of them have ties to the Beijing Dance Academy, according to a Falun Dafa Information Center report issued earlier this year.
The Beijing Dance Academy, as a Chinese state-run organization, is an “instrument in the CCP’s global campaign against Shen Yun,” the report said.
