For a quarter of a century, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has brutally persecuted Falun Gong in China. Now, whistleblowers have revealed that Beijing is escalating a campaign to target Falun Gong practitioners, and companies founded by them, in the United States.
Top targets of the CCP’s new campaign are Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance and music company that showcases China as it existed before communism, and media company The Epoch Times. Both companies were founded by Falun Gong practitioners in the 2000s in response to the persecution taking place in China.
On Dec. 6, The Epoch Times revealed, based on whistleblower accounts, that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had personally given orders in an October 2022 meeting for a new strategy to target Falun Gong practitioners overseas.
The orders included instructions to exploit the U.S. legal system with spurious claims and to promulgate disinformation campaigns using social media and Western media outlets.
On Dec. 11, new information released by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a human rights watchdog documenting the persecution, corroborated that reporting and provided additional details from a more recent high-level meeting in China.
At the meeting, which occurred after the U.S. presidential election, Ministry of Public Security head Wang Xiaohong and other senior CCP officials gave instructions on how to carry out the CCP’s transnational repression campaign against Falun Gong. Notes from the meeting, reviewed by The Epoch Times, came from a source within that ministry, which is the national police force that Beijing frequently wields to crush dissent.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security were assigned by Xi to carry out the new strategy. The first agency was instructed to focus primarily on domestic persecution and the second agency to focus on overseas operations.
The Ministry of State Security, an intelligence agency, is believed to be behind the recent hack of telecom providers that targeted the U.S. presidential campaigns as well as other high-profile politicians.
“Try every effort to sabotage the relationship between Falun Gong and the U.S. government,” the leaked instructions state.
“Best to eliminate Falun Gong from the United States, but at a minimum should destroy the relationship between the [incoming] Trump government and Falun Gong and any possible collaboration.”
A primary reason behind the new effort is the CCP senior leadership’s fear of U.S. sanctions for human rights abusers, the ministry source said.
“Falun Gong holds evidence of their serious crimes,” the source said.
The meeting notes indicate that Chinese officials are paying close attention to the U.S. government’s China policy and are mobilizing all intelligence sources in the United States to identify “all possible sanction measures” the incoming administration might take.
To achieve this, the public security ministry ordered all CCP agents and operatives in the United States to be activated.
Specifically, the instructions direct the use of contrived rhetoric to pressure the U.S. government and relevant institutions to stop supporting Falun Gong, and to achieve the goal of eradicating Falun Gong from the United States.
“Focus on amplifying claims that Falun Gong violates U.S. laws and disregards the U.S. government’s authority. Use such fabricated ‘narratives’ to pressure the U.S. government and relevant institutions to cease support for Falun Gong,” reads a summary of the instructions, published by the watchdog.
Two years ago, the United States sanctioned three officials for their roles in suppressing Falun Gong in China. One official had overseen a branch of the 610 Office, an extralegal apparatus set up in conjunction with the launch of the persecution in 1999.
Kelley Currie, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said the CCP’s use of key functions in Western systems doesn’t surprise her.
“The CCP has become very good at using the tools of democratic societies to leverage their own agendas. It’s something they excel at,” she told The Epoch Times.
It’s part of a “systematic malign effort” to “repress all voices critical of the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.
Smear Campaigns
A key part of the CCP’s strategy relies on using social media disinformation campaigns and deploying operatives to funnel such information to Western media organizations.
“Continue to intensify attacks and smear campaigns against Shen Yun, The Epoch Times, and Falun Gong’s key or targeted individuals,” the meeting notes read.
In recent months, The New York Times has published six articles targeting Shen Yun Performing Arts. One of the individuals who was previously identified by whistleblowers as being used by the CCP to spread disinformation about Shen Yun has publicly acknowledged that he helped The New York Times with its reporting.
Wang’s directive also instructed officials to deploy special agents and “new external propaganda resources” to “disrupt and fracture” overseas Falun Gong communities, giving free rein to local operatives to decide on specific actions to take, as long as they didn’t conflict with each other.
The official said the ministry plans to increase its support of anti-Falun Gong individuals by having various other executive branches supply information about targets.
“Make sure to handle well the personal information,” the meeting notes state. “Avoid exposing our involvement in the planning.” The ministry meeting also discussed using donations to incentivize operatives to act.
The ministry, according to the notes, will also activate sleeper agents who are embedded in Falun Gong communities in the United States and use them to turn others against their faith.
For those who turn, the ministry will “provide assistance”—financial or otherwise—through special relief funds from certain Chinese business associations or from individuals with no obvious CCP affiliations.
Senior CCP operatives were specifically instructed to target prominent figures in the Falun Gong community, as well as employees at The Epoch Times, and convince them to act against the community and the media company, respectively. If agents could “convert” one or two such individuals and have them act at critical moments, it would deliver a “fatal blow” to Falun Gong and sympathetic U.S. officials, the notes state.
Actions Underway
Several agents acting in concert with the attack campaigns have recently come to the attention of U.S. authorities.
In November, a Chinese agent was sentenced to 20 months in prison over a $50,000 bribery scheme targeting an IRS agent with the intent to have Shen Yun’s nonprofit status revoked.
The man, naturalized U.S. citizen John Chen, called several Chinese officials his “blood brothers.”
“We started this fight against [the founder of the Falun Gong] 20, 30 years ago. They are always with us,” Chen said in a call to an undercover FBI agent.
Chen and a co-conspirator had traveled to New York’s Orange County, where Shen Yun’s headquarters are located, to surveil the Falun Gong practitioners there and collect materials for an environmental lawsuit meant to “inhibit the growth” of the local Falun Gong community, according to court documents.
In September, a federal judge dismissed the latest in a string of frivolous environmental lawsuits that had been filed by a U.S. citizen with deep ties to China, targeting Shen Yun’s dance studios and training facilities in upstate New York. Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled.
The individual who claimed to have played a role in kickstarting the New York Times articles targeting Shen Yun was charged for illegally possessing firearms after the FBI issued an alert saying he was “potentially armed and dangerous.” Local law enforcement had tracked him near the Shen Yun campus, which includes two performing arts schools.
The individual had also publicly bragged about filing complaints against Shen Yun with federal authorities in order to generate legal action against the arts group. He encouraged others to do the same.
Meanwhile, a former Shen Yun performer who filed a recent civil lawsuit against Shen Yun alleging labor abuses has collaborated with a Chinese government entity, according to a statement by Shen Yun.
“When the dust settles and the smoke clears, it will become frightfully apparent to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has facilitated the spread of false narratives in mainstream media on a large scale,” Shen Yun said in the statement.
On Dec. 11, the Atlanta Symphony Hall, the first theater to host Shen Yun’s tour this year, was targeted with a mass shooting threat. The email containing the threat, viewed by The Epoch Times, contained an image of a pistol, dozens of bullets, two magazines, and a message written in Chinese that threatened a mass shooting if the Shen Yun performance went ahead. The local organizer of the performances says authorities have been alerted.
According to Levi Browde, executive director of the New York-based Falun Dafa Information Center, the revelation of the CCP’s latest strategy explains why there have been significant escalations in the campaign against Falun Gong in the United States.
“They are spelling out in their plan, what we’re actually seeing happen in reality,” he told The Epoch Times.
Linking Human Rights to China Policy
A dozen U.S. lawmakers, representing both sides of the aisle, have voiced concerns over the CCP’s renewed transnational repression operation targeting Falun Gong.
“Xi Jinping will be remembered for the atrocities that he has committed against the Falun Gong and others,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) told The Epoch Times.
Smith and several other policymakers believe the United States should link economic policy to human rights because China is “a country that exports.”
“Without exporting, Xi Jinping is toast,” he said. “There’s no way he survives as a dictator.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a member of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said he hopes everyone can “stand up and denounce” the covert activities the Chinese regime has sponsored.
“The Chinese government, sadly, has had a horrific human rights record, and they have attacked numerous groups in China, and some of these attacks have come in the most vicious forms,” he told The Epoch Times.
He said accountability is key to ensuring dissidents who have found freedom in the United States don’t once again live in fear.
Sanctions might be one way to respond, according to Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.).
“We’re going to be working with the Trump administration to look at a whole range of sanctions against China’s entities that threaten our national security and that violate human rights,” he told The Epoch Times.
The U.S. government is also paying attention to the influence operations stemming from the Chinese regime.
The White House on Dec. 12 established the China Censorship Monitor and Action Group to address efforts of the Chinese regime, “either directly or through proxies, to censor or intimidate any United States person” exercising freedom of speech. The task force will include top officials across executive agencies.
Other members of Congress who have condemned the CCP’s new transnational repression campaign against Falun Gong include House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), Jim Banks (R-Ind.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), and Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.).
Sherry Dong contributed to this report.