A surge of bomb threats and intimidation targeting Falun Gong practitioners and Shen Yun Performing Arts in the United States has heightened concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign of transnational repression and spurred a push for new state and federal legislation.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, is backing the Transnational Repression Policy Act, which would create a nationwide framework to combat foreign influence and repression campaigns.
“The Transnational Repression Policy Act recognizes that authoritarian regimes no longer confine their oppression within their own borders,” said Smith in a statement on Aug 1.
Texas recently became the first state to enact an Anti-Transnational Repression Act, creating new criminal offenses for transnational repression and unauthorized enforcement of foreign laws. Starting Sept. 1, offenders face a minimum 15-year prison sentence.
China analyst Heng He, a contributor to The Epoch Times, wrote in a recent commentary that the CCP’s methods of transnational repression pose a serious threat to U.S. sovereignty.
“Existing U.S. federal tools, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), have proven ineffective in countering these tactics, but Texas’s new law helps fill that legal gap,” he wrote.
Between May 29 and June 17, the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) reported receiving multiple anonymous bomb threats through its online contact system. The messages, written in Chinese and often using fake identities, threatened high-profile American targets, including the White House, a military parade in Washington, D.C., and Shen Yun Performing Arts’ training campus in upstate New York.
Shen Yun Performing Arts, founded by Falun Gong practitioners in 2006, is a U.S. dance company aimed at reviving traditional Chinese culture. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The practice was first introduced to the public in 1992 and quickly grew in popularity, with between 70 million and 100 million people practicing by decade’s end.
In July 1999, the CCP launched a brutal persecution campaign aimed at crushing the practice and its adherents within six months. Since then, millions have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, forced labor, and even forced organ harvesting.
One threatening message on May 29 warned that bombs would be detonated at the White House if the United States continued to support Falun Gong. Another, on June 8, impersonated a prominent Chinese whistleblower and threatened Shen Yun’s student performers. A third, on June 14, said attackers disguised as Falun Gong practitioners would carry out mass shootings and bombings during the Army’s 250th anniversary parade.
Since March 2024, the FDIC has documented at least 154 anonymous threats worldwide, most in the United States. Many targeted Shen Yun theaters, training facilities, and individual practitioners; others named U.S. lawmakers supportive of Falun Gong.
While none of the threats were carried out, they mark part of a disturbing trend.
“This is obviously yet another example of the [CCP] party state using our open society to target their domestic entities in ways that should not be allowed,” Kelley Eckels Currie, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues and deputy ambassador to the United Nations, told The Epoch Times.
“But because of the way our laws and our legislative processes work, we have not been able to get legislation to catch up to the nature of the problem.”
Currie said that legislation like Texas’s gives local and state law enforcement the tools to recognize and prosecute transnational repression for what it is.
“So that when a call comes in [for law enforcement], for instance, a bomb threat against a performance, or somebody calls them and says, ‘I’m being stalked and harassed by these people,’ they have a context and they understand that it’s not just a local matter,” Currie said. “It is connected to the party state’s efforts to have long jurisdiction and to reach people inside of our country.”
She added that the laws also encourage closer engagement between law enforcement and vulnerable communities, including ethnic and religious minorities most likely to be targeted by the CCP.
Organ Harvesting Survivor Faces Intimidation
Also among those targeted is Cheng Pei Ming, the only known survivor of the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting.
Now living in New York, Cheng reported a suspicious attempted intrusion at his home on June 17. Surveillance footage captured a masked man approaching his car before fleeing when an alarm sounded, after earlier vandalism and a home break-in last November.
“The CCP wants to silence me because I’m the only surviving witness of their organ harvesting,” Cheng told NTD, sister media of The Epoch Times.
A group of House Republicans recently urged the State Department to set up a reward to curb the CCP’s practice of forced organ harvesting, in which organs taken from living prisoners of conscience are used in transplant surgeries across China’s hospital system.
In an Aug. 7 letter addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Smith and Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) said there is an “urgent need” for the State Department to offer reward money under its “Rewards for Justice” program to obtain firsthand evidence to hold perpetrators in China accountable for the transplant abuse.
“The complicity of the Chinese government in forced organ harvesting … is deeply troubling and should be considered a ‘crime against humanity,’” the lawmakers wrote.
In the letter, the lawmakers wrote that congressional hearings and independent investigations had presented an “extensive body of evidence” on the Chinese regime’s abuse. They referenced a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation, saying that Chinese surgeons “acted as executioners” because the prisoners were not declared brain dead before their organs were removed.
The regime came under media scrutiny for organ harvesting in 2006, the year two Canadian human rights lawyers released an investigative report confirming allegations that such atrocities were being committed in China. In 2019, an independent tribunal in London, led by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice, concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place in China for years “on a significant scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the primary victims.
Behind the Threats
Currie said the threats signal Beijing’s desperation.
“They know that there is no legitimate excuse for trying to repress minority religious groups, and so, because they don’t have a legitimate argument, they resort to these coercive and illegitimate practices,” she said. “So in one sense, it’s a sign of weakness and of insecurity that they have to rely on these coercive mechanisms instead of trying to make an argument to make their case through normal discourse.”
Yuan Hongbing, a former professor of law at Peking University who now lives in exile in Australia, has long warned of such tactics by the Chinese regime. He revealed to The Epoch Times that at a high-level political and legal affairs meeting before the CCP’s 2022 Party Congress, CCP leader Xi Jinping called for renewed persecution of Falun Gong abroad, emphasizing “public opinion warfare” and “legal warfare.”
That strategy, Yuan said, is now playing out in the United States.
Looking Ahead
With bomb threats and harassment showing no sign of slowing, advocates say broader adoption of state-level anti-repression laws is urgently needed.
“If you commit those crimes in the course of engaging in transnational repression, then your jail sentence will be longer, your fine will be higher, [and] you could be subject to deportation,” Currie said. “We need to take action to pass legislation so that law enforcement has the tools they need to target people who are engaged in these behaviors.”
Li Chen and Frank Fang contributed to this report.