The State Department has condemned an 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.
The mission of Shen Yun Performing Arts is to revive traditional Chinese culture, which has been all but erased in China. Shen Yun also portrays human rights abuses taking place today against practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to eliminate the practice 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 the department urges “the Chinese Communist Party to end its now 25-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong.”
The spokesperson said the State Department’s annual international religious freedom report “documents incidents of interference against Falun Gong practitioners and Shen Yun Performing Arts in many countries.”
In recent weeks, a theater set to host Shen Yun in Dijon, France, received a bomb threat, prompting local police 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 was received on Jan. 18 in Lodz, Poland.
A box office was threatened in Taiwan on Jan. 13, and a theater in Berkeley, California, was threatened on Jan. 10. In addition, Shen Yun’s headquarters in upstate New York received multiple bomb and mass shooting threats over the same period.
The threats of direct violence come after more than 15 years of CCP attempts to exert diplomatic pressure to stop Shen Yun’s performances—some of which have succeeded, 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 UK, Member of Parliament Jim Shannon raised the issue in a Feb. 6 debate.
Whistleblower accounts show that the Chinese 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.
“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 that Shannon had raised this “important issue of freedom of religion or belief.”
The UK’s foreign secretary and chancellor both visited China recently and discussed this topic with their Chinese counterparts, Powell 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 FDIC, Beijing’s new strategy involves manipulating social media influencers and Western media to propagate misinformation and false allegations, with the goal of sowing public discord and triggering a U.S. law enforcement response against practitioners of the spiritual discipline.The New York Times has published 10 articles attacking Shen Yun and Falun Gong over the past six months. A Chinese American YouTuber, who has declared Falun Gong his “enemy,” bragged on social media about helping the 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,” he wrote on social media platform X following the publication of The New York Times’ first hit piece on Shen Yun in August. “They found additional people through that.”
In 2023, the FBI marked the man as “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was spotted near the Shen Yun campus in upstate New York. He was subsequently arrested and is facing charges of possession of illegal firearms.
Several whistleblowers who provided internal CCP information to the FDIC have independently identified the man as being used by the CCP to spread “malicious” information against Falun Gong.
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 an FDIC report issued earlier this year.
The Beijing Dance Academy, a Chinese state-run organization, is an “instrument in the CCP’s global campaign against Shen Yun,” the report stated.
