Hundreds in America have experienced Beijing-linked harassment and intimidation in the past few years as the Chinese regime escalates a systematic campaign to silence dissents on U.S. soil, a new report finds.
Shared with The Epoch Times ahead of time and released on June 30, the report details more than 600 cases of transnational repression over a five-year period from 2020.
These cases span more than 30 states, with the number surging by the year, according to the report.
The figures speak for themselves, said Mark Yang, one of the Falun Dafa Information Center researchers who compiled the report.
He noted that the credible reported cases shot up 10-fold from 2020 to 2025.
“We are really seeing that transnational repression is really not a one-off thing. It is not a human rights repression in a distant space,” he told The Epoch Times. “Instead, it is happening around us, right here in the United States, and it is on a pretty significant scale.”
The 44-page report condenses findings from surveying more than 1,000 practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual faith incorporating meditation and three values—truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—which the Chinese Communist Party has aimed to eradicate since 1999. The sampling size represents around 10 percent of the estimated Falun Gong population in the United States, the report said.
‘Commonplace’ Intimidation
Nearly half of the respondents have personally experienced persecution in China, including detention, forced labor, and torture. Around 12 percent of the surveyed are Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, American Indian, or other races.
The incidents they described range from harassment of families in China to violence on the street.
In April 2025, a Chinese man kicked a Falun Gong booth table with such force that it caused the shelves and table to tilt, nearly knocking over a Falun Gong practitioner standing behind.
“I don’t like the sight of you,” the aggressor told the practitioner.
Months later, another woman, who gave the name Jingjing, experienced something similar at an information booth in New York’s Queens borough. As she tried to raise awareness about the ongoing abuses in China, a man verbally attacked her faith, attempting to seize Falun Gong leaflets and ignite their tent with a lighter.
Yang said that what struck him was the tone Jingjing chose in recounting the intense moment.
The way she describes it makes it sound “really commonplace”—so much so that she’s not making a huge deal out of it, he said.
This is the reality for people on the front lines doing grassroots advocacy, trying to tell the people about what is really going on inside China, he said.
Vandalized Car, Death Threats
Violence also takes place in other forms.
A California woman said her car was vandalized four times over three years in incidents that could qualify as hate crimes under the state law.
The car prominently displayed the messages “Falun Dafa is Good. Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance is Good. End the CCP. God Bless America.” The vandals stole her roof sign in the first attack, then repeatedly painted profane graffiti messages on the vehicle that echo the malign propaganda messages the regime often uses in China to justify its persecution of the faith.
The propaganda messages demonstrate the “potency with which the regime has successfully hijacked loaded terminology and cultural sensitivity to incite hatred against American Falun Gong practitioners,” the report states.
A major target of the CCP’s repression campaign is New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance company that Falun Gong practitioners founded in 2006 to revive traditional Chinese heritage lost under communist rule. Shen Yun performances also highlight the CCP’s violent suppression of Falun Gong in modern China.
In a survey that formed the basis of the report, dozens of Shen Yun staffers and performers mentioned violent threats to their personal safety, vehicle tampering, Chinese consular pressure, and out-of-context media attacks intended to sabotage their company’s tours and tarnish its reputation.
The Falun Dafa Information Center’s executive director, Levi Browde, is also a victim of death threat messages.
In August 2024, one individual using a Chinese name sent an email declaring that Browde will “meet God.” Attached to it are images of shotgun shells and a loaded shotgun. The Falun Gong community and Shen Yun have faced hundreds of similar threats, with one of them leading to an evacuation ahead of Shen Yun’s 2025 opening at the Kennedy Center.
In all, the report counted roughly 140 incidents traced back to Chinese authorities or affiliated entities. The repression intensified in 2022, following a secret directive from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to weaponize social media influencers and news outlets in the West to silence Falun Gong.
‘Very Real’
The CCP’s campaign of increasing hostility and the spread of misconceptions has caused distress.
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed described emotional distress. Hundreds said they experienced verbal harassment in public or online, or felt discriminated against at work, school, or in their community because of their faith, the report said.
They used words such as “worrying,” “insecure,” “discrimination,” “hatred,” and “social isolation” in characterizing their environment.
A Georgia teacher cited in the report, while taking a Chinese language class in a local college, said her Chinese language coach from the mainland repeated vilifying words about Falun Gong in a conversation, apparently buying into the regime’s indoctrination.
The teacher sometimes visited her friend in another school to study Falun Gong books together.
When they did so, the friend would close the door of their room, careful not to be heard. The friend, who had family in China, would not go to the quad even during the night for fear of being seen with the books, she said.
“She wasn’t as much frightened for herself—she was frightened for her family back in China,” the Georgia teacher said of her friend. “Her father was tortured and imprisoned, and she was afraid it would happen again if word got back to China that she was a practitioner.”
The teacher said that this is a reminder that “the tentacles of the CCP really are here.”
“It’s easy for us to feel safe or complacent, but not everybody is safe, and it really is having an effect,” the teacher, who did not reveal her name out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times. “Transnational repression is very real.”
Targeting families is a major avenue, said Yang. One-third of the survey respondents said their family in China experienced Chinese police harassment because of their activism in the United States.
The findings in the report, he said, should “alarm every American who cares about civil liberties, religious freedom, and the integrity of U.S. institutions.”
“These are happening to American citizens, to our neighbors right now,” he added. “It is a direct attack on our sovereignty, on our national security, and the very freedom and liberty that we hold so dear.”
