Who's afraid of Shen Yun?

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.

Over the last week, we’ve faced an escalation in attempts to sabotage our shows as theaters where we’re performing in are receiving bomb threats.

The first time I heard about this was when one of our companies was performing at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California. On March 22, a day before the shows there, the theater received an email:  

“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!”

Police and sniff dogs carefully inspected the theater and determined it was an empty threat (news coverage). And with both precautions and a lot of courage from the theater and the performers, the weekend shows took place without incident.

My group, meanwhile, was performing in Vancouver, Canada when the Queen Elizabeth Theatre received an identical email the following day, March 23, also sent from a Chinese name. I got a copy of the email. As it’s still being investigated, I’ll remove the sender and recipient name and just share the text itself below:

By March 26, theaters in Long Beach and San Luis Obispo also received bomb threat emails. All turned out to just be scare tactics.

There were also some emails threatening mass shootings, perhaps inspired by the concert massacre in Russia. In Taiwan, where one of our other groups is performing and sightseeing on off days, multiple threats were received as well.

On March 27, our Shen Yun headquarters in Deerpark, New York received an email that read:

“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 comes on the heels of the recent revival of the old tire-slashing tactic (see below) and after two unknown Chinese nationals tried sneaking in backstage after our performance in Portland, OR. These two, a man and a woman, I actually intercepted as I was still standing around near the stage-right entrance minutes after the show was over. Normally people aren’t allowed backstage without a pass, and I didn’t recognize them, so I started chatting with them and asking them questions. At first, I thought they might be a performer’s parents or friends. They seemed friendly, and pretended to know people in the theater—but none of the staff there knew them. They kept asking technical questions about our production, like our lighting and projection setup. Eventually we asked them nicely to leave as we were actually locking up. They left followed by security, and I went back to change. Turns out they circled through the lobby and then tried to enter stage left, where our production manager intercepted them a second time.

Hmm… spies, slashing tires, and threatening to kill thousands of people in multiple cities and rape and murder our dancers. Seems like a real escalation of CCP tactics. Seems news worthy. I wonder when, say, the New York Times will cover this. Oh wait, that’s right, the Times much prefers writing stuff the CCP enjoys.

On March 15, in Costa Mesa, California, our dancer bus’s tire was slashed. It was a deep, curved cut that severed half of the rubber and was done in such a way that the tire would not deflate but only burst under pressure at high speed. The fact that it was on a front tire meant that the bus could go out of control on the highway.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because back in January 2010 we had an incident in Ottawa, Canada, when the driver’s routine pre-trip inspection discovered an identical cut, also on a front tire. When taken to repair, the mechanic said the cut was very interesting; he was the first to identify that the purpose of the cut was to make the tire explode at high speed.

Three days later, my group’s bus had a tire burst at 1am while traveling on I-40 West between Memphis, TN and Little Rock, AR. This was the first time in four years one of the company’s buses had a burst or flat tire. Two days later, while in Little Rock, I was part of our truck’s pre-trip inspection, when I discovered a similar slash on one of its tires. We immediately took it to be replaced.

Ever since these incidents, we’ve had security watching our vehicles 24-7. They’ve caught a few people trying to tamper with them, including in Atlanta (2013), Fort Worth (2013), and another incident in Costa Mesa (2014).

Ten years ago, one of our companies arrived in Southern California’s Costa Mesa ahead of a five-day run at the prestigious Segerstrom Center for the Arts. That night, March 12, our guards watching the buses and truck noticed suspicious activity around it. At 1:15am, the four security guards spotted a man in his 20s sneaking up to the vehicles. When they walked up to him, he ran away. Around 5:00am, another man approached, but when a guard noticed him, he ran off as well.

So how did someone get close enough to our bus this time to cut it? The bus had been taken to a local garage for regular maintenance, and the cut was discovered when the bus was picked up. The suspicion is that someone had followed the bus there and made the incision when no one was watching.

The police report noted an “approximately 7-inch slash on the side wall,” and that “the damage looked like a fresh cut in the rubber.”

After much resistance due to overt CCP pressure, we have some positive breakthroughs to report from South Korea. While still struggling with much resistance from state-operated theaters and, especially, in Seoul, the local presenters have managed to book four theaters in the cities of Goyang, Gumi, Gyeongju, and—proving that it’s also possible to book theaters in cities not starting with the letter G, Daegu.

The shows in South Korea are schedule April 24 to May 11. Definitely a step in the right direction! Congratulations to the local presenters and everyone there who has worked so hard, as well as to the theaters who decided to resist CCP intimidation and decide for themselves what shows they will host.