The cold reality sank in when Nancy Zhang was an 8-year-old waiting for her parents to pick her up from school.
There was no one coming for her.
The ever-present Chinese police, stationed just next to her school, had arrested both her parents that day for practicing Falun Gong. They sent her father to a Chinese brainwashing center—a facility designed for the namesake purpose of instilling hate propaganda against their faith and inculcating Party loyalty. Zhang’s mother ended up in Chinese jail for three years.
Zhang waited for hours. The day turned dark as her classmates went home one by one. In the end, it was just her and a security guard.
“It felt hopeless and helpless,” she told The Epoch Times. “But when I knew what I was waiting for, it made me feel even worse.”
Grief, fear, darkness—words almost antithetical to a normal childhood—shadowed Zhang for as long as she was in China. Her grandfather died without being allowed one last moment with his daughter. Two years after Zhang’s mother was freed, police again forced their way into their home and dragged her off as Zhang watched, terrified.
“For a child, this kind of fear becomes normal. But it should never be,” Zhang later said.
The family eventually fled to the United States, and Zhang embraced her newfound freedom. She joined New York-based dance company Shen Yun Performing Arts, which spotlights communist China’s persecution targeting her faith, the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.
But now, despite being far from China’s borders, Zhang and others at Shen Yun are facing another campaign of fear aimed at stopping them.
‘Surreal’
An hour before Shen Yun’s performance was due to start on March 29, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto received an email.“Many explosive devices have been placed at the Four Seasons Theatre and Parliament Hill in Canada,” it read. If the performance went on, it claimed, the bombs would go off.
The theater was evacuated. Although authorities found no credible threat, the Four Seasons Centre called off the show.
Canadian parliamentary lawmaker Roman Baber was one of thousands deprived of the chance to see the sold-out matinee.
“It’s regrettable that an apparent bomb threat has derailed the ability to showcase thousands of years of Chinese culture and dance like it was before communism,” he told The Epoch Times.
The threats now tally more than 150 and counting.
The Four Seasons incident, though, marked a global first: The tactics succeeded in stopping Shen Yun’s performance. Following more threats, the theater canceled all five remaining shows, affecting more than 10,000 would-be audience members.
Tears glided down Zhang’s cheek as she stood in front of a microphone shortly afterward, recounting in a press conference the persecution of faith that devastated her family and many more like hers.
Many performers left the theater in such a hurry that they were still wearing their stage costumes.
“It was surreal,” said Zhang, who is an emcee for the show. “We have prepared for this for half a year. Everything was ready. Everyone’s in place.”
Living in a free country now, she said, it shocked her that the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could still reach her.
“You can say and do whatever suits the Party’s liking, but for anything that doesn’t fall in line, they will try every means to stop it and shut you down,” she said.
And “China before communism,” the vision behind Shen Yun’s annual global tour, is precisely what the Party doesn’t want people to see, she added.
“The CCP targets its critics around the world, and its harassment and intimidation should be condemned by all who support free expression,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, told The Epoch Times.
He called the threats “horrifying.”
The Party’s ‘Tentacles’
Following the cancellations, the intimidators gloated over their “'accomplishments,” bragging in two emails to the show’s organizers that the “Four Seasons battle” was their most successful yet.“What can you do with me?” one email read. The sender identified with the “motherland’s Communist Party” and mocked police worldwide for their inability to act.
“I’m so in awe of myself.”
The comments only showed how “twisted” the intimidators’ thinking is, Zhang said.
Many of the emails were in Chinese. One frequently used email address, [email protected], consists of four Chinese characters spelled out along with a number. The threat actors used the address roughly two dozen times in recent months to send messages attempting to inhibit Shen Yun or spread fear by impersonating supporting groups, emails shared with The Epoch Times show.
As the Toronto incident was being investigated, the threat actors were going after Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, which hosted Shen Yun in early April. They used the same email account connected to the Toronto threats.
The Vancouver Police Department’s cybercrime unit deemed the emails to have come through a VPN with an Asian IP address. The phone number associated with the account is Chinese and is based in China, they said.
What happened in Toronto should set off warning bells, according to Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“We better start paying attention,” he told The Epoch Times’ sister outlet NTD. “Clearly,” he said, the Party’s “tentacles” are “into Canada as well as into this country.”
Tug of War
It disturbs Zhang to think that threats of violence have become a daily reality for her company.“We’ve gotten so many that it almost feels normal for us, but it really shouldn’t be,” she said.
The lack of meaningful pushback so far from authorities is now worrying organizers and some China watchers.
At a Canadian parliamentary hearing on global transnational repression on April 20, Grace Wollensak, national coordinator for the Falun Dafa Association of Canada, warned that to cancel Shen Yun’s performances is to fall into Beijing’s “trap.”
If the regime sees success with its efforts, she said, it can apply the same suppression playbook elsewhere against other groups that don’t toe the Party line.
Burchett likens the situation to a tug of war.
“Anytime you yield to them, they see how far you‘ll push, and they’ll push you a little farther,” he said.
Zhang, now in South America on the last leg of Shen Yun’s 2026 tour, has been learning more about Beijing’s transnational repression footprint.
During a stop in Argentina, she came across a documentary that detailed an incident of transnational repression against a Falun Gong demonstration in Buenos Aires during a 2018 visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
That day, the demonstrators held up banners behind barricades calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in China. Soon, throngs of people wearing red polo shirts and waving large Chinese flags surrounded them. They jabbed at least one demonstrator with a flag pole and crumpled up Falun Gong informational materials.
“It’s like being in China,” Zhang said.
The demonstrators told her that what they experienced was nothing.
“We were only detained here for one day, but in China, the practitioners are jailed for so much longer,” she recalled them saying.
Then and now, she said, the regime has been exporting its abuses.
“If we can’t speak freely even overseas, then isn’t the West turning into China?” she said.
Zhang also sees the brighter side.
The Toronto show cancellations will reverberate, she said. For each of the roughly 10,000 audience members who had hoped to see the show, the incident has provided a window into the communist regime’s true nature.
In that light, the intimidators won’t win, she said. “They are effectively shooting themselves in the foot.”
