Over the past few years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has escalated attacks of some of its most vocal critics in the United States, deploying a comprehensive playbook to silence them.

The operation has highlighted the level of infiltration and influence the CCP possesses in the United States. If the plan gains traction, the CCP is likely to use the same toolkit against other targets, experts told The Epoch Times.

The operation kicked into high gear in 2022, when CCP leader Xi Jinping complained to top officials that practitioners of Falun Gong, a faith group persecuted by the CCP in China, have been increasingly effective at exposing the CCP’s crimes overseas, several internal sources told Chinese dissident and legal scholar Yuan Hongbin last year. 

(Click here to see enlarged image of the infographic above.)

According to the sources, Xi chastised the officials, saying their previous efforts to suppress Falun Gong overseas were ineffective and ordered a new campaign that would focus on the most prominent companies started by Falun Gong practitioners abroad. Those include Shen Yun Performing Arts, a premier classical Chinese dance and music company that puts on hundreds of performances a year under the tagline “China before communism,” as well as several media companies, including The Epoch Times and NTD.

Shen Yun, it appears, has borne the brunt of the new campaign, facing legal warfare; hit pieces in Western media and from social media influencers; attacks by social media bots and trolls; and even bomb threats and death threats.

Falun Gong practitioners have faced brutal persecution in China since 1999, involving imprisonment, torture, and even forced organ harvesting. Incessant harassment by the regime’s henchmen has extended to American soil.

The CCP sees Shen Yun as undermining its ideological grip on China and the image it presents to the world, which in turn threatens its grip on power and its ambition for dominance overseas, multiple experts previously told The Epoch Times.

The State Department on Feb. 7 denounced the CCP’s continued targeting of Shen Yun, telling The Epoch Times: “We condemn such acts of intimidation and urge protection of the right to free expression.

“We urge the Chinese Communist Party to end its now 25-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong.”

The spokesperson added that the department’s annual international religious freedom report has documented “incidents of interference against Falun Gong practitioners and Shen Yun Performing Arts in many countries.”

Several CCP whistleblowers came forward last year with more details about the anti-Falun Gong campaign.

The campaign mainly relies on information laundering via social media influencers and Western media outlets that can’t easily be traced back to the CCP. In tandem, it utilizes the U.S. legal and law enforcement system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners, particularly Shen Yun, the whistleblowers said.

The head of China’s Ministry of State Security, Chen Yixin, personally oversees the campaign, one whistleblower said, though other agencies are also involved, including the Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

Notably, officials believe the Ministry of State Security to also be behind other high-profile operations in the United States, including the “Salt Typhoon” attack that hit most of the U.S. telecommunications system and targeted top political figures.

The campaign is particularly pernicious for its use of undercover MPS operatives in the United States, according to the whistleblower, who said, “Once these people are mobilized, the threat is very high.”

Media

Last year, multiple Western media outlets, led by The New York Times, published an unusually large number of hit pieces on Falun Gong.

The New York Times alone has produced about a dozen such articles since August 2024, relying heavily on the claims of a small group of former Shen Yun performers, some with ties to CCP entities.

The articles center on two main claims. One is that companies started by Falun Gong practitioners in the United States have become successful—a fact the articles try to spin as nefarious. The other is an allegation that Falun Gong prevents people from getting medical treatment—an old CCP propaganda canard deployed by the regime in the early years of the persecution to justify its campaign. The claim has been repeatedly debunked, mainly by Falun Gong practitioners themselves explaining that they do, in fact, see doctors when needed, and also by physicians who have treated them.

Almost 800 current and former Shen Yun artists and production staff members, including virtually all current performers and staff, have signed a petition condemning the media attacks.

The “gross distortions and false narratives” in media, as well as lawfare and “malicious calls for government inquiries,” were threatening their company and showed “Beijing’s ability to manipulate and control our society,” they wrote in the petition, which was presented during a press conference at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, several hours before Shen Yun’s opening performance at the venue in March.

Social Media

U.S. social media has been manipulated to promote anti-Falun Gong content. On X, an Epoch Times investigation found thousands of fake accounts had been used to share The New York Times’ hit pieces and other anti-Falun Gong propaganda. The platform, when alerted, removed many of the accounts, but new ones have been continuously created.

Some of the fake accounts were sophisticated; they built a following for months, or even years, by posting various kinds of unrelated content, such as nature, food, animal, and travel photos, before abruptly mixing in anti-Falun Gong content.

On YouTube, dozens of English-language anti-Falun Gong videos have sprung up in recent years, some produced by influencers who repeat the same talking points lifted from CCP propaganda.

According to whistleblowers, Chinese public security officials have been ordered to support YouTubers who portray Falun Gong and Shen Yun in a negative light.

One of the YouTubers specifically mentioned by the whistleblowers has claimed credit for supplying sources to the New York Times reporters.

The man has made threatening comments directed toward Shen Yun personnel, and in 2023, the FBI issued a warning to law enforcement that he was “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was spotted near Shen Yun’s campus in upstate New York.

He was subsequently arrested and charged with illegal firearms possession.

One of the CCP whistleblowers noted that the YouTuber isn’t a CCP agent himself but is “completely utilized” by the CCP’s Ministry of State Security.

“He will send out anything that is provided to him, perhaps unaware it comes from the CCP. The agents won’t reveal their identities [to him], but he is already a pawn of the CCP,” the whistleblower said, according to a Falun Dafa Information Center report.

Lawfare

In the past few years, an American man with longtime business ties to China repeatedly filed defective environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun’s campus in Orange County, New York. The most recent one was dismissed by a federal judge in September 2024—this time “with prejudice,” so it can’t be refiled.

In July 2024, two Chinese Americans—John Chen and Lin Feng—pleaded guilty to acting as agents of Beijing after they attempted to bribe an IRS agent to open a bogus investigation into Shen Yun.

Lin told the FBI that he and Chen also surveilled the Falun Gong community in Orange County to collect information for an environmental lawsuit meant to inhibit the growth of the Falun Gong community in the area, according to court documents.

Since November 2024, Shen Yun has been hit with another two lawsuits filed by several ex-performers. The same ex-performers, some with ties to CCP entities, have supplied most of the allegations levelled in the New York Times articles. Parts of the suits appear to be lifted from the articles.

Death Threats

Over the past year or so, Shen Yun has faced dozens of false bomb and death threats targeting theaters where the company performs as well as its training facilities. Threats have even been made against U.S. lawmakers who express support for the company or for Falun Gong.

Some of the threatening emails targeting Shen Yun were sent using email addresses that belong to the Taiwanese Ministry of Justice. The email metadata, reviewed by The Epoch Times, show that the emails were processed by the ministry’s own email servers, indicating that somebody gained access to those email accounts. However, several cybersecurity experts told The Epoch Times that the metadata information could be spoofed.

Spoofing the detailed fingerprints of multiple Taiwanese Ministry of Justice email servers, however, would seem unnecessary if the culprit were simply an individual bent on sabotaging Shen Yun, according to several experts.

The threats themselves have become increasingly graphic and specific. In January, one threat claimed that the sender had made a “large number of incendiary bombs” using alcohol and glass bottles and would use them to set Shen Yun’s training studios ablaze.The sender claimed he would set buildings and cars on fire and slash anybody trying to stop him. He would also “attack congressmen who support Falun Gong,” the email claimed.

Two more threats were sent the week before, in emails The Epoch Times reviewed.

“We do not rule out attacking congressional members who support Falun Gong,” one said.

“Bombs will be installed and detonated at or near these congressional members’ residences or in their vehicles!”

The U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI were informed of the threats.

Some of the senders have tried to impersonate Chinese dissidents or even Taiwanese government officials, including Taiwan’s vice president, Hsiao Bi-khim.

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau said that a multiagency investigation traced some of the emails back to Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province in central China. The emails appear to have originated from a location near the Huawei Xi’an Institute, a research center of the company that now plays a key role in aiding Beijing’s global tech ambitions, Taiwanese authorities confirmed.

On April 20, several New York City libraries received threats targeting events organized by local Falun Gong practitioners. The sender of the emails, one of which was obtained by The Epoch Times, threatened to drive a car into a Falun Gong parade in Queens on April 25. The parade, however, had already taken place on April 19. Still, the local library branch was evacuated for several hours on April 21.

The New York-based Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party (Tuidang Center), which is run by Falun Gong practitioners, received similar threats between April 20 and April 28. The six messages threatened bomb attacks, shootings, car accidents, rapes, abductions of children, and other acts of terror, largely targeting Falun Gong practitioners and supporters.

An official with the New York City Police Department’s 109th Precinct confirmed that the emails the center received were similar to those sent to the library and that the IP addresses of the senders are located in China.

Paid Protesters

The CCP has long been known to organize and even pay people to protest on its behalf, usually in attempts to crowd out human rights protesters during CCP officials’ visits overseas. Recently, there appears to be a new phenomenon of Westerners being paid to stage such protests, specifically against Falun Gong.

The protests usually have half a dozen participants, mostly non-Chinese people of black and Hispanic descent, holding banners and distributing English versions of anti-Falun Gong propaganda that’s commonly found in China.

On May 9, such protesters showed up alongside a Falun Gong parade in Manhattan. The group of fewer than 10 protesters, a majority of them black, shouted as they walked in parallel to the parade, and at times huddled with a Chinese man in a lime green jacket, who filmed them with his phone throughout the process.

Toward the end of the parade, an Epoch Times freelancer witnessed a police officer asking one man from the group if he was paid.

The man responded in the affirmative, saying “$200,” a figure the police officer repeated twice. The officer turned around and told his colleagues, “I told you they were paid,” the freelancer recounted.

Three other protesters in previous similar protests, two Chinese and one black man, said they participated because they needed the money. One other person, a Hispanic man, described the activity as “work.”

Falun Gong practitioners have recently witnessed several other instances of unusual interference.

On April 29, an unknown man smashed up one of the Tuidang Center booths in New York City. An eyewitness of the incident, Chen Yikui, said that he and a few other practitioners were also harassed while doing their daily morning exercises in Kissena Park in the Flushing neighborhood, home to New York City’s largest Chinese population, between April 30 and May 2. Some onlookers, apparently Chinese, played Chinese music at high volume and hurled insults toward them and about Falun Gong.

Chen said that this kind of harassment has never happened before and that he believes it is part of the CCP’s campaign.