The regime has escalated a campaign of information and legal warfare to attack a faith group outside its borders, experts say.
WASHINGTON—The Chinese regime is waging an invisible war to manipulate the West and suppress dissidents outside China’s borders, experts and advocates said at a U.S. Capitol panel on June 6.
The panel, hosted by The Epoch Times at the Rayburn building in the U.S. Capitol complex, focused on Beijing’s escalating suppression of dissent in the United States.
The event opened with Piero Tozzi, who delivered an address on behalf of Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
“Many here in this room unfortunately are familiar with the tactics that the CCP uses to target individuals and groups and in particular adherents to Falun Gong even the most peaceful demonstrations of freedom of expression have been targeted,” said Tozzi, staff director of the commission. He called the CCP’s activities “blatant.”
During the last session of Congress, Smith introduced the Transnational Oppression Policy Act in hopes of raising the costs for such repressive actions and protect the dissident community. Smith intends to bring out the bill again, Tozzi said.
“There needs to be accountability. Justice delayed is justice denied,” Tozzi said.
A fire alarm followed by an evacuation order of the Rayburn House Office Building abruptly ended the event, preventing several panelists from speaking. The U.S. Capitol Police later told The Epoch Times the cause was “an electrical issue that has been fixed.”
At the time, panelist Mark Yang, advocacy officer for the nonprofit Falun Dafa Information Center, was discussing a congressional hearing held in December on Beijing’s lawfare against critics.
Moderator Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times, responded to the fire alarm by laughing, and said to the room, “Perhaps a case in point?” before directing everyone to leave.
‘Terrorism’ on US Soil?
One target in the regime’s latest suppression is Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Since Beijing launched an extensive persecution of the group 26 years ago, millions have been put in Chinese jails, where they were subjected to forced labor or other forms of torture.
Even outside China, Falun Gong practitioners have experienced pressure and harassment from the regime over the years. In late 2022, the campaign intensified under the direction of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who instructed the use of disinformation and lawfare to smear and discredit Falun Gong in the West.
Yuan Hongbing, a legal scholar who has high-level contacts in the Chinese state apparatus, first disclosed the Chinese regime’s campaign to The Epoch Times in December 2024.
Speaking virtually at the panel, Yuan broke the regime’s efforts down to “one central focus and two directives.”
According to Yuan, the campaign is focused on character assassination of Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, in a bid to shake the foundation of the spiritual group. The party also uses information and legal warfare by mobilizing Western mainstream media, deploying disinformation and other tactics to diminish Falun Gong’s influence.
The regime will “strike on all fronts,” Yuan said.
Epoch Times CEO Janice Trey described the campaign as a “silent war.”
By coopting the Western legal system, regulatory agencies, and legacy media outlets in the West to reshape global opinion, she said, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is directly challenging the foundation of a democratic society.
“This tactic threatens free speech, religious liberty, and national security,” Trey said.
Terri Marsh, executive director of the Human Rights Law Foundation, argued that the purge campaign against Falun Gong falls “clearly within terrorism.”
“The question that I pose is whether the party is now conducting the same purge terrorist campaign against Falun Gong on U.S. soil,” Marsh said.
“And perhaps the answer is yes.”
Varied Tactics
Yang, speaking just before the fire alarm went off, described how the regime’s campaign on U.S. soil has been playing out.
Over the past year, more than 100 threats of violence have been documented against Shen Yun Performing Arts, a company founded by Falun Gong practitioners in New York to showcase ancient Chinese culture while bringing attention to the abuses inflicted by the regime on those persisting in their faith.
Some threats have targeted Shen Yun’s hosting venues. A bomb threat made against the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in February forced the Washington venue to hold an evacuation hours before the show’s opening.
“This escalation that we are seeing right now is a result of a top-down decision,” Yang said. “Unfortunately, we are really witnessing these tactics unfold right now.”
He cited two Chinese agents who tried to use bribery to open an IRS investigation against Shen Yun, and several frivolous environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun’s campus that were mounted by an American with years of business ties in China. Meanwhile, The New York Times ran a series of articles that cast Shen Yun in a negative light. Those pieces were amplified by thousands of fake accounts on Western social media.
More than 1,500 Shen Yun performers and family members signed a petition to denounce the articles’ portrayal of the organization, describing it as “gross distortions and false narratives” against their values, work, and way of life.
Such manipulation of legacy institutions in the West struck Eric Patterson, a panelist and president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
“What was amazing is how many stories there were with this negative bent … against this one group, when there was no similar reporting, to my knowledge, against any other international performing group or any performing group in the United States,” Patterson told The Epoch Times.
“What that suggests is that The New York Times and other U.S. media outlets have to be extremely careful, and perhaps they have just been gullible in being manipulated by the CCP.”
The regime, in leaked internal documents, has used hostile language to describe the West, and “we have to take that seriously,” Patterson said.
“The Chinese people are not our enemy, but the leadership of the Communist Party and its many, many organs and institutions, they are saying that they are our enemy,” he said.
‘Consider the Implications’
Yang said that in the case of Shen Yun, the CCP has “demonstrated the ability to weaponize the American media, bait our government agencies, and take advantage of our judicial system.”
“Consider the implications,” he wrote in his prepared remarks that were cut short, “if the CCP can target one group effectively, what prevents it from targeting other individuals or institutions it doesn’t like?”
The Epoch Times’ commitment to exposing the communist regime’s abuses has made it one of Beijing’s key targets since the publication’s founding in the United States in 2000. Not long after, Chinese authorities arrested dozens of people in China who were involved with the publication, sentencing several to as long as 10 years in prison.
In March, the Justice Department indicted hackers and two officers at China’s Ministry of Public Security for launching cyberattacks against The Epoch Times.
Be it Falun Gong or other groups that the regime has sought to stifle, “the reason that they are targeted first and foremost is because they stand for something that cannot be controlled by the CCP,” Patterson said.
“They stand for an authority structure, for beliefs, for values that are outside of the control of the communist party, and that is a threat,” he said.
Sherry Dong contributed to this report.