Who's afraid of Shen Yun?

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.

Despite the CCP’s interference last year, Shen Yun was able to perform in South Korea, including sold-out shows at the National Theater of Korea. But when local presenters began approaching theaters this year for the 2024 season, they again ran into serious difficulties, receiving rejections in 13 cities, including theaters that had happily hosted Shen Yun in the past.

Local news outlet Chosun Monthly published a long article in August, interviewing local officials and theater managers who relayed the pressure they had received from Chinese diplomats.

Multiple US lawmakers have raised concerns about the CCP’s pressures and the prospects of Shen Yun being effectively barred from performing in South Korea, with some writing letters to the country’s ambassador and president. California Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean American, wrote to South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol:

“I am alarmed to hear that there are attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to exert influence to prevent the performances [of Shen Yun] in the Republic of Korea. This saddens me and I hope we can work on a solution to showcase classical Chinese culture… I have also had the pleasure of attending one of their performances in California and found the virtues represented throughout the show about the universal values that connect us all inspiring. The Republic of Korea, as a free and democratic nation, has been one of the United States’ most important allies in promoting mankind’s shared values. I sincerely request your help to prevent the CCP from suppressing Shen Yun.”

References:

Vision Times: US Lawmakers Voice Concerns Over the CCP’s Censorship of Shen Yun in South Korea

The Epoch Times: Lawmaker Urges South Korean President to Stand Against CCP, Allow Shen Yun to Perform

House Foreign Affairs Lawmakers Express Concern Over CCP Blocking Shen Yun in South Korea

Op-ed by Congresswoman Steel.

Ever since our first year performing in Seoul in 2007, it’s been very difficult to book theaters in South Korea. Although democratic and supposedly free, the country seems rather susceptible to CCP interference, at least when it comes to Shen Yun. The best and most prestigious theaters in the country are controlled by various levels of government, and year after year they prove difficult if not impossible to rent.

You might recall how, in 2011, the theater in Busan canceled the performances due to CCP pressure and then on the day of the first show, the local court ruled that Shen Yun be allowed to perform. The setup for the first show started at lunch, was completed in half the time, and the company performed in front of a sold-out house.

In 2016, in Seoul, we weren’t as lucky. We were scheduled to perform at KBS Hall and, in a back-and-forth affair, were eventually locked out. Here’s a video we made at the time about it:

https://www.shenyun.org/videos/latest-videos/play/3CirFYHWiJM/video-report-seoul-cancels-shen-yun-performance.html?forcePreview=1

So what happened in 2023?

• This year, in order to book shows in South Korea, the local presenters contacted independently owned and operated theaters, and were given positive responses about the possibility of renting their theaters for Shen Yun performances. But when it came to the final step of securing the venues, the local presenters were repeatedly informed that “due to political and religious elements in the performance” the venues could not be rented. This included theaters that were able to be rented in previous years. The suspicion is that the theaters were influenced by the CCP or PRC embassy.

• In Gumi, where two performances were held at the Gumi Arts Center Grand Hall, the Chinese Consulate in Busan directly called the Gumi city government warning the city not to allow the venue to be rented to Shen Yun, and also sent a letter.

• In Busan, presenters signed a contract to perform at Sohyang Theater, which belongs to Dongseo University. Dongseo University has close cooperation with Chinese universities and has a Confucius Institute. About two months after signing the contract, the PRC side “expressed regret” to the university that the performances were scheduled and asked that they be canceled. At the time, Dongseo University then canceled the contract. The local presenters took the case to court to block the cancelation. The presenters won the case, and only then learned that Dongseo University had been consulting the Chinese Embassy about whether or not to allow Shen Yun to perform.

• As far as renting the Seoul National Theater, the Chinese Embassy used the form of a civil lawsuit (filed under the name of individual Wu Mingyu) to claim that Shen Yun is a performance propagating Falun Gong and should therefore be canceled. Presenters have not been able to rent this theater as a result.

• Every year, in every theater where Shen Yun performs, there is a protest outside led by a woman named Wu Mingyu, who is the one who instigated the civil lawsuit. The protests are professionally organized and set up, with a consistent number of individuals, commercially produced displays and signs. This year, they applied for permits and carried out protests in front of every theater’s entrance. They also printed a full-page ad attacking Shen Yun and Falun Gong in The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest and oldest daily paper (rough estimated cost is $9,850 USD). Three of the individuals involved in this group had previously attempted a protest on the balcony of the Seoul National Theater of Korea – they had snuck in during intermission and set up their protest with banners before being removed by theater personnel.

We just had our first-ever performances in the Dominican Republic in a couple of gorgeous theaters. Our performers certainly enjoyed both the time at the beach and on stage. I got to watch all the shows in the audience and can attest the houses were completely packed with people who were impeccably dressed and left much impressed.

But, of course, the Chinese Embassy tried hard to make none of this happen in one of the craziest stories of their behavior that I’ve heard so far.

On November 9, 2022, Shen Yun’s performances in the Dominican Republic’s Santo Domingo and Santiago were publicly posted online on the company’s website, with seven shows in five days. Once the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Santo Domingo got the news, it immediately began trying to block the performances.

As both theaters (Eduardo Brito National Theater in Santo Domingo, and Grand Theater of Cibao in Santiago) are subordinate to the Ministry of Culture, the Chinese Embassy’s first move was to contact the theater managers and the Ministry of Culture and ask them to cancel the shows. When that proved unsuccessful, it then immediately scheduled an appointment with the office of the president of the Dominican Republic and strongly demand the shows be canceled. The president’s reply was that the contracts were already signed and there was no way to nullify them now.

According to an advisor to the president who relayed to us this information, the Embassy then contacted the Santiago theater manager, offering him a monetary bribe and promises of future investments. The Embassy also slandered Shen Yun and Falun Dafa. The manager then wrote a letter to the presenter, Asociación Falun Dafa de la República Dominicana, saying that due to theater renovations, Shen Yun’s two performances in Santiago will need to be canceled (looking at cases in other countries, this is a common explanation used by theaters, perhaps at the embassy’s suggestion, to cancel performances). The presenter then reported this to the Ministry of Culture, and the Minister directly stated that the shows will not be canceled.

The Embassy then began contacting a range of influential individuals – legislators, ministers, media. The Embassy wrote them letters seeking their help to cancel the performances. These efforts did not lead to any results.

Finally, in January, one week before Shen Yun was set to arrive, the Embassy learned that Dominican President Luis Abinader was set to depart from Santo Dominigo’s Las Americas International Airport. According to information from someone who was present at the scene, the PRC Ambassador and Consular General rushed to the airport, found the President and again strongly insisted that the President must cancel the shows. The President replied: The situation is not reversible. Later that day, due to a mechanical problem, the President’s plane had to return to the airport. When the Ambassador and Consul General learned of this, they again rushed back to the airport. They told the President that if he insists on not canceling the shows, this will negatively impact the countries’ bilateral relations, and the PRC will discontinue its investment of over 100 million dollars. Their tone was directly threatening the President and he became very unhappy. Putting his hands up he said: “Whatever.”

With all this having failed, unknown individuals tore down Shen Yun’s advertisements in front of both theaters.

In the end, all these efforts were for not. The seven Shen Yun performances took place as scheduled and were sold out. Many VIPS attended and issued public statements of support, such as former Minister of Culture Carmen Heredia and Rosa Santos, Governor of the Province of Santiago de los Caballeros.

With Shen Yun getting ready to perform in five cities in Mexico, the Chinese Embassy in Mexico made a last-ditch effort to cancel the shows or at least limit attendance from VIPs.

The Embassy contacted via Instagram the office of the Mayor of Queretaro, following up with email as well. On May 5, a letter was stamped and sent to the municipality of Queretaro, signed by the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China (a copy of the letter is on file and available upon request). It is believed to have been sent to other cities in Mexico as well.

The letters’ contents were very similar to previous PRC letters around the world, calling upon the mayor’s office to use measures to block Shen Yun from performing in the city, so as to not “undermine China-Mexico friendly relations.”

Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the next stop on Shen Yun’s Mexico tour, the Auditorio Nacional, received a phone call from the Chinese Embassy asking them to cancel the show. The theater refused.

And then the mayor of San Luis Potosi, where Shen Yun was headed next, received an email from the Chinese Embassy asking the city not to promote the Shen Yun performances. All performances took place as scheduled.