Who's afraid of Shen Yun?

According to a report by Taiwan’s Liberty Times, in light of a spat of bomb and shooting threats targeting Shen Yun’s performances there, the Criminal Police Bureau launched an investigation and pinpointed the source of the threatening emails as the “Huawei Xi’an Institute.”

This Huawei research institute is located in the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi, China. The investigation further concluded that the threats were made by someone related to the Huawei Group, and indicated it does not rule out the possibility that it was made by Chinese Communist Party cyber-armies based in the vicinity of the location.

Theaters hosting Shen Yun performances in the Taiwanese cities of Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, and Keelung have all received emails threatening to bomb the theater or shoot audience members should the performances be allowed to take place.

On March 30, a total of 27 live chat message bomb threats were sent in under two minutes to Taichung City Chung Shan Hall, often with multiple messages going out the very same second, suggesting these were perhaps being sent by a bot.

“We have guns and Molotov cocktails prepared,” the identical messages read. “We will enter as spectators on the day of the Shen Yun performance. If the Shen Yun performance starts, we will suddenly pull out our guns and shoot at the actors and throw Molotov cocktails towards the stage! Anyone who stops us will be targeted.”

That same day, as widely reported in Taiwanese press, at least four entities in Taiwan received emails threatening to set off bombs if they don’t make public statements opposing Shen Yun. The threats included to blow-up the 17-story building shared by the Mainland Affairs Council and the Ministry of Digital Affairs, as well as the Neihu District Office of Taipei City, and two local media. The Ministry of Digital Affairs additionally received an email trying to blackmail it to pay 10 million NT$. Upon police investigation, no threats were found.

The Taiwanese Criminal Police Bureau investigation is the first to have identified the source of the threats. In total, 42 different theaters have received threats of mass violence targeting Shen Yun performances.

Additionally, Shen Yun’s headquarters of Dragon Springs in New York has received nearly daily death threats in recent months, as have individuals and entities affiliated with Falun Gong practitioners, such as the Falun Dafa Information Center.

Below is a graph showing the recent trend:

March 30 saw five theaters when Shen Yun is performing receive mass violence threats. It was one of the busiest days in a season that has already seen 37 different theaters receive emailed shooting and bomb threats targeting the performers and their audience members.

The torrent began in Taiwan, where Taichung City’s Chung Shan Hall received 27 live chat bomb threats in under two minutes. The first came in at 3:57:52pm Taiwan time and the last 3:59:42pm. Several messages were often sent on the exact same second timestamp, suggesting that they were perhaps being sent by a bot.

“We have guns and Molotov cocktails prepared. We will enter as spectators on the day of the Shen Yun performance,” the messages all read. “If the Shen Yun performance starts, we will suddenly pull out our guns and shoot at the actors and throw Molotov cocktails towards the stage! Anyone who stops us will be targeted.”

That was just before 4am New York time, and things were just getting started. Later that morning, the Hanover Theatre in Worcester, MA, where my group was performing, received an emailed bomb threat.

“We have put a lot of explosives in the theater. If you don’t want the explosives to explode, please cancel the Shen Yun performance immediately. If the Shen Yun performance starts, we will detonate the explosives remotely! I swear to Jesus, this is not a prank! ! !”

A very giddy and excitable canine and his police officer came in, searched the building, determined it was safe, and we had our matinee as planned and everyone went home happy.

The bomb threats were sent to at least three other venues that morning. At 8:44am PST (11:44am EST), Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, Canada received the identical threat sent to Taiwan. Half an hour later, at 10:27am MST (9:27am PST and 12:27pm EST), Colorado Springs’ Pikes Peak Center received a similar threat. And finally, 23 minutes after that, at 9:50am PST (12:50pm EST), Bridges Auditorium on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont, CA got one as well.

The police in Claremont actually evacuated the premises and blocked streets on a large part of campus. The dancers warmed up, stretched, and had their lunch in the parking lot before being allowed back in right before the performance when the venue was deemed clear. The show started after a 20-minute delay and was packed. Audience members spoke of not being intimidated.

Principal Dancer Kenji Kobayashi made a short video about the Claremont situation.

And award-winning journalist Eva Fu wrote about how audience members responded.

On a personal side note, I studied at Pomona College and Bridges Auditorium, which we called Big Bridges, is where I graduated, walking across the same stage Shen Yun performed on. Pomona is where I first learned Chinese, which helped me land this gig to begin with, and the community there has been extremely supportive of my work, starting with my trip to Tiananmen and arrest there as a freshman in college. Now they are being threatened with murder…

Kudos to the tremendous work of the local police in Claremont and, really, wherever we have received threats. We always feel respected, safe, and taken care of by you guys – thank you for the work you do to ensure everyone’s safety!

On March 28, for over an hour Shen Yun’s official website suffered a Distributed Denial of Service attack. For over an hour, between 12:13-1:25pm EST, some 10,000 distinct IPs from all over the world were manipulated to attack www.ShenYunPerformingArts.org using the DDoS technique. This is classified as a large-scale form of the cybercrime and significantly slowed down the site’s operations. By 1:25pm, the website’s firewall blocked all attacking IPs and the site returned to normal.

How often do you see someone invoking this collection: the Chinese sea goddess Mazu, Jesus, and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Republic of China? That’s exactly what the person (people?) sending bomb threats to Taiwan has been doing.

“We have placed explosives in 98 Xueshi Rd (the theater address), immediately cancel all upcoming Shen Yun performances, and make a public announcement, if we do not see the announcement by tomorrow afternoon, we will set off the explosives, I swear to Mazu, this is no joke!”

“Multiple bombs have been placed throughout the theater. If Shen Yun dares to start the performance, the bombs will explode! I swear to Jesus, this is not a joke!”

“I swear to Sun Yat-Sen! ! I have placed explosives in the Tainan Cultural Center Performing Arts Hall. If you do not want to be blown into rubble, immediately cancel all future Shen Yun performance plans.”

With Shen Yun’s Taiwan tour in full swing, the list of entities who have received them is just as wild: Mainland Affairs Council, Ministry of Digital Affairs, Taiwan Ticketing Center, and local media, as well as the Weiwuying Opera House, Tainan Cultural Center, Keelung Performing Arts Center, and Taichung City Chung Shan Hall.

And yes, for those reading carefully, “Chung Shan” is another name for President Sun Yat-Sen. So in one email, the sender is swearing to Sun Yat-Sen; in another, threatening to blow up a theater named after him.

(CNA article)

(Taiwan Liberty Times article)

On March 15, we were hunkering down for opening night in Birmingham, AL as tornadoes rolled across the southern U.S., causing devastation in multiple counties. We kept an eye out on the tornado watches and alerts and the theater assured us that, unlike what some scenes in Twisters would have you believe, the sturdy complex with much of it underground was one of the safest places to be.

But as if that weren’t enough, the BJCC Concert Hall where we were performing was one of four known theaters to have received identical bomb threats targeting the Shen Yun performances that day, joining Stifel Theatre in St. Louis, MO, Des Moines Civic Center in Iowa, and Teatro Auditorio in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain.

Here is a screenshot of the threat sent to St. Louis:

The shows went on just fine, and we were spared the tornadoes as well.

The Lienzo Norte theater in Ávila, Spain, received a letter from the Chinese Embassy in Madrid four months before Shen Yun was scheduled to perform there. The letter, signed by Cultural Office Minster Counselor He Yong, repeated long-standing CCP rhetoric attacking Falun Gong (“evil doctrines so extreme that it calls on its believers or practitioners to commit suicide in order to become ‘Buddha'”) before going on to include the token boilerplate reference that Falun Gong was banned in China “in accordance with the law,” and finally asking the the theater to renege on its contract.

“Considering the good relations between our two countries and their peoples, I request your valuable support in considering the possibility of canceling the two performances.”

The theater refused and, after seeing Shen Yun and particulary liking the performance, a theater representative provided us with the Embassy email.

Around 10:45am the Kennedy Center notified the Metropolitan Police that they had received a bomb threat targeting the Shen Yun performances scheduled to start that day. The Metropolitan Police Department’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Unit was dispatched and an investigation was launched by U.S. Park Police. The entire complex, with hundreds of people and at least six different performing arts companies, were evacuated and spent most of three hours outside in the cold waiting for a sweep of the buildings to be complete. No threat was found, everyone was allowed back in and Shen Yun’s Kennedy Center opening night took place as scheduled.

The evacuation quickly hit the news cycle, with over 40 news outlets reporting on the bomb threat. What was missing in all of their coverage, though, was that this is part of a pattern and that dozens of identical prank bomb threats have been received over the course of Shen Yun’s tour so far, and that it is part of a much larger pattern of the CCP’s efforts to sabotage Shen Yun – documented on this site for 18 years.

In this case alone, simultaneous emailed threats were also received in Milwaukee and at Shen Yun’s headquarters in New York.

Starting in March 2024, theaters in which we were performing suddenly began receiving emails with prank bomb threats. They each consisted of content—the sender claimed to have placed bombs throughout the theater that would be detonated should the Shen Yun performance be allowed to take place. Some were sent with identical wording.

The senders appear to be continuing this tactic in Shen Yun’s new 2025 season. Over the first couple weeks of tour, at least five theaters have received similar email threats leading up to their performances. Some emails threatened mass shooting and included pictures of weapons and ammunition. One such incident in Atlanta gathered local media interest.

Even though it was clear these were merely scare tactics, on each occasion the threat was still taken seriously. A report was filed with local police and FBI, and police and sniff dogs were called to the theater, conducting a thorough inspection. On no occasion was any threat found and all performances took place without incident.

According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice, two Chinese nationals pleaded guilty to acting as CCP agents in an operation targeting Shen Yun.

“John Chen, 71, of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Los Angeles, California, and Lin Feng, 44, a PRC citizen and resident of Los Angeles, California,” the press release stated,” pleaded guilty to acting as unregistered agents of the PRC and bribing an IRS agent in connection with a plot to target U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong.”

According to court documents, the two men worked in the U.S. following directions from the CCP, including a specific official identified by the court only as PRC Official-1, to repress Falun Gong practitioners in America. Specifically, one of their targets was Shen Yun Performing Arts. According to the DOJ:

“As part of the PRC’s campaign against the Falun Gong, Chen and Feng engaged in a PRC government-directed scheme to manipulate the IRS’s Whistleblower Program in an effort to strip the tax-exempt status of an entity run and maintained by Falun Gong practitioners (Entity-1).”

“Entity-1” turned out (per a following DOJ press release November 19 about their sentencing) to be Shen Yun Performing Arts.

The two agents tried to bribe an undercover agent posing as an IRS officer to try to strip Shen Yun of its nonprofit tax-exempt status.

At the time of the initial arrest, in May 2023, the U.S. Attorney on the case, Damian Williams said: “Efforts to manipulate and use the arms of the U.S. Government to carry out the PRC Government’s autocratic aims are as shocking as they are insidious. My Office will work vigorously to protect against malign foreign influences.”

The case garnered high-profile attention, and yet this operation may only be the tip of the iceberg.

“The FBI will not tolerate CCP repression – its efforts to threaten, harass, and intimidate people – here in the United States,” said FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. “We will continue to confront the Chinese government’s efforts to violate our laws and repress the rights and freedoms of people in our country.”

Over the last few weeks, Shen Yun has been threatened with bombs, mass shootings, and rape, while we have also had our bus tires slashed and faced a range of sabotage attempts from Beijing.

This marks a definite escalation. I’ve been with Shen Yun since day one 18 years ago, and have been documenting all the interference attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to stop the show—the evidence chart on my blog has over 100 such cases from around the world.

The most typical are Chinese embassies pressuring theaters and elected officials to try to cancel our shows, threatening advertisers and media partners to pull our ads or otherwise lose business in China, and harassing performers’ family members back in the PRC.

Why is Beijing so intent on stopping a performance of traditional Chinese culture?

First, if you’ve seen our billboards, and I think it’s hard not to these days, you know our tagline is “China before communism.” This isn’t just a slogan—Shen Yun’s mission is to revive five thousand years of Chinese civilization—the very heritage the CCP has spent more than seventy-five years trying to destroy. Shen Yun brings this traditional culture back to life through dance and music depicting the stories, and, more importantly, virtues of ancient China, which include deeply spiritual themes. The CCP sees all this as a threat to its monopoly on culture and its narrative on modern China.

Secondly, Shen Yun was established by practitioners of Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, in New York. This is a group that has been brutally persecuted by the CCP for over two decades and a number of Shen Yun artists experienced this persecution firsthand. As part of every performance, we also tell the story of the persecution in China and the courageous, peaceful resistance to it. On stage night after night, I can see that this is one of the stories that moves the audience the most, especially given its message of faith and hope. This is a persecution the CCP claims does not exist, and yet here we are depicting it on prestigious stages around the world. To the CCP, this is terrifying.

So, over the years, not only has the CCP tried, and mostly failed, to pressure theaters to cancel our shows, it has also placed well-disguised paid articles in major papers such as the Washington Post and London Telegraph vilifying Shen Yun, sent the 50-cent army of online commentators to dominate review boards and chat rooms, hacked our website multiple times, and repeatedly attempted to sabotage our tour buses and trucks.

The tire slashing tactic reappeared last month in Costa Mesa, CA, where, as before, our bus’s front tire was cut just enough that it wouldn’t immediately deflate but would burst at high speed, potentially causing the bus to lose control on the freeway.

Then, over the course of a week, theaters where we were performing in Santa Barbara, Long Beach, and Vancouver received bomb threats:

“We randomly placed a lot of bombs in the theater. If you don’t want us to detonate the bombs, please refuse Shen Yun Performing Arts to perform here immediately! And expel the relevant personnel to leave. If the show starts successfully, we will directly detonate these bombs!!!”

Other emails contained threats of mass shooting or of targeting our performers in a company currently touring Taiwan. In all cases, police were alerted and inspected the theater, found there was no danger, and performances went on as planned without incident.

Meanwhile, our headquarters back in Deerpark, NY received the following emailed threat:

“In the near future, you should take care of your actresses, who may very possibly disappear one by one and may be naked when found. Forensic conclusion is that they are killed after being raped!”

This fearmongering is just a new tactic as part of the CCP’s rather desperate series of attempts to stop a dance production. Be on the lookout for other forms, like media articles closely toeing Beijing’s line on Shen Yun masquerading as news.