Commentary
Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants his regime to get more devious against overseas Falun Gong practitioners.
The Epoch Times on Dec. 6 reported that Xi wants his officials to secretly conduct disinformation against Falun Gong’s spiritual leader and media outlets founded by Falun Gong practitioners. Xi sees this media, which most prominently includes The Epoch Times and its sister media outlet, NTD, as a major threat to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi addressed the issue at a secret 2022 meeting in which he criticized the CCP’s Falun Gong persecution campaign as being too weak, according to two sources cited by The Epoch Times.
“The focus of the Chinese regime’s latest anti-Falun Gong strategy is launching disinformation campaigns via social media influencers and Western media outlets and using the American legal system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners,” wrote Epoch Times reporter Eva Fu.
“Details of the 2022 secret meeting were provided by Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese legal scholar living in exile in Australia who has maintained connections within the Chinese regime’s top political circles.”
The Epoch Times and NTD having sources so close to power in China is itself a win. Multiple other recent wins may be making the CCP nervous.
The Falun Gong Protection Act was passed unanimously by the U.S. House of Representatives in June. “This bill requires the President to impose visa- and property-blocking sanctions on foreign persons that are knowingly responsible for, are complicit in, or have engaged in the involuntary harvesting of organs in China,” the summary of the bill reads.
Introduced a year and a half ago, the bill has still not been passed by the Senate to make it law. The Senate should overcome its corporate China lobby, stop stalling, and pass the bill. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, introduced the Chinese Communist Party Lobbying Divestment Act in March to address these problems, but it has also not passed.
On Sept. 3, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal green-lighted a 2011 lawsuit against Cisco Systems for allegedly aiding and abetting the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong. Plaintiffs allege that Cisco developed software for China called “Golden Shield” that the company knew could be used to surveil Falun Gong practitioners and violate their human rights. The court’s ruling was in line with a 2004 Supreme Court precedent that allows non-U.S. citizens to sue under the U.S. Alien Tort Statute in cases where international law was violated.
Falun Gong’s recent wins in Congress and the courts, as hard-fought and slow as they have been, will draw greater attempts at transnational repression by Beijing.
In 2022, for example, the same year that Xi allegedly told his underlings to use more devious measures, a thug who had a mediate link to the CCP was arrested and charged with a hate crime for vandalizing Falun Gong information booths in Queens, New York. According to a letter from the Queens County District Attorney on November 2023, he pled guilty to criminal mischief in the fourth degree and was conditionally discharged.
In 2023, the Chinese regime attempted to use two agents to bribe a purported U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent to revoke the nonprofit status of a classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners. The Chinese agents were convicted and sentenced to prison time this year.
The dance company, called Shen Yun, in a Dec. 2 press release, cited documentation of “more than 130 incidents across 38 countries in which agents of the Chinese regime tried to sabotage Shen Yun by pressuring local elected officials, threatening theater managers, and even resorting to thuggery, vandalism, and death threats.”
The release cited evidence that the CCP “significantly escalated its assault” on Shen Yun in 2024 by weaponizing social media. “This effort is backed by China’s Ministry of Public Security and aims to sow disinformation about Shen Yun on social media and in the American press,” the release reads. “This appears to be the origin of recent articles in the New York Times and other outlets.”
The New York Times has indeed written hit pieces against Shen Yun, including breathless reporting about minor injuries common to many dance troupes, while largely ignoring extensive evidence of the transnational repression mentioned above and forced organ harvesting in China against Falun Gong and other prisoners of conscience. That repression includes the alleged sabotage of vehicles in which Shen Yun performers travel.
The New York Times has not yet reported on Cheng Pei Ming—a U.S. resident who is the “first known survivor” of the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting, according to the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.
The New York Times has consistently ignored such evidence while, in the past, taking money from the regime to publish CCP-backed online ads and “China Watch” inserts. These propaganda inserts are made to look like legitimate reporting. The ad campaign is linked to China Daily, a registered foreign agent in the United States since 1983.
Falun Gong practitioners are committed to telling the truth as they see it, and that truth is not easy to take when it comes to the CCP. But the unanimous vote of the House to pass the Falun Gong Protection Act in June demonstrates clearly that the American people are on the side of human rights for Falun Gong.
The CCP, since 2022, has escalated its transnational repression, but this will not succeed. Not against a spirituality that has proven its resilience in the past, and that will do so again in the future.
