After US Election, Top CCP Official Tasks US-Based Agents to Target Falun Gong

For a quarter of a century the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has brutally persecuted Falun Gong in China. Now, whistleblowers have revealed 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, 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 by Chinese Americans in response to the persecution taking place in China.

The orders included instructions to promulgate disinformation campaigns using social media and Western media outlets as well as abuse the U.S. legal system with spurious claims.

On Dec. 11, new information released by The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a human rights watchdog documenting the persecution, corroborates that information with additional details from a more recent high level meeting in China.

In 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. The notes, reviewed by The Epoch Times, came from a source within the Ministry of Public Security, the national police force that Beijing frequently wields to crush dissent.

China’s Ministry of Public Security, alongside its Ministry of State Security, were assigned to the project by Xi in his bid to destroy Falun Gong. The first agency was instructed to focus primarily on domestic persecution and the second agency to focus on overseas operations.

“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 because the CCP’s senior leaders are “very afraid of the U.S. sanctions,” the ministry source said.

“Falun Gong holds evidence of their serious crimes.”

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 figure out “all possible sanction measures” the incoming administration might take.

To achieve this, the ministry ordered all CCP agents and operatives in the United States to be activated.

Specifically, he instructed 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,” a summary published by the watchdog reads.

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 critical voices of the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.

Smear Campaigns

A key part of the CCP’s strategy relies on the use of social media disinformation campaigns and deploying operatives to funnel such information to Western media organizations.

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“Continue to intensify attacks and smear campaigns against Shen Yun, The Epoch Times, and Falun Gong’s key or targeted individuals,” the meeting notes said.

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 on specific actions to take, as long as they don’t conflict with each other.

The official said the ministry plans to increase its support to 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 said. “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 individuals with no obvious Party 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 can “convert” one or two of them and have them act at critical moments, it would deliver a “fatal blow” to Falun Gong and sympathetic U.S. officials, the notes said.

Actions Underway

Several agents acting in concert with the attack campaigns have recently come to the attention of U.S. authorities.

The man, naturalized U.S. citizen John Chen, called several Chinese officials his “blood brothers.”

Chen and a co-conspirator had traveled to New York’s Orange County, where Shen Yun’s headquarters is 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.

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 Shen Yun’s 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.

“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.

This week, the Atlanta Symphony Hall in Atlanta, the first theater to host Shen Yun’s tour this year, was targeted with a mass shooting threat. The email, viewed by The Epoch Times, contained an image of a pistol, dozens of bullets, two magazines, and a message written in Chinese that threatened to break into the venue and conduct a mass shooting if the Shen Yun performance goes ahead. The organizer says authorities have been alerted.

“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, along with 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 ensure dissidents who have found freedom in America 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.

Other members of Congress who have condemned the CCP’s new transnational repression campaign against Falun Gong include Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), Jim Banks (R-Ind.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.).

Sherry Dong contributed to this report.