A laptop was open to an article about audience reactions to a recent Shen Yun Performing Arts performance at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington. This was apparently incriminating evidence for Chinese authorities.
Local Chinese police had followed a woman they knew to be a Falun Gong practitioner, with the intention to arrest her for her faith, as she headed to an acquaintance’s house. The police entered the residence and found the two reading the article on a laptop. This interest in an American performing arts company was used as key evidence in both their arrests, as it was highlighted in court documents that recounted the incidents.
The woman surveilled was known to police to be a Falun Gong practitioner, because she was first detained for practicing Falun Gong in 1999, according to court documents, and had subsequently been detained several times for refusing to give up her faith.
Prosecutors argued that because the woman had previously been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for her faith and yet was still practicing Falun Gong, she was a “recidivist” warranting a higher sentence.
An Epoch Times review of court documents of prisoners of conscience arrested by the Chinese communist regime found that among the supposedly illegal material in the dissidents’ possession were CDs, images, and articles related to Shen Yun Performing Arts.
Shen Yun was founded by practitioners of Falun Gong, a peaceful spiritual practice that has been violently persecuted by the CCP since 1999.
The performing arts company was formed in New York in 2006 and has since become the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company. Today, it has eight groups that tour simultaneously, performing for an audience totaling about 1 million each year, with the tagline “China before communism.”
Shen Yun has drawn broadly positive reviews over its two decades, leading many to question why the Chinese regime is so set on opposing the performance, going to great lengths to contact local theaters and governments ahead of performance dates in a bid to persuade people to cancel or boycott the show.
In two hours, Shen Yun aims to show “5,000 years of Chinese civilization,” through approximately 15 vignettes. These include showcasing dances from some of the 50-plus ethnic minorities of China—cultural identities the CCP has sought to suppress—such as those of the Mongolians and Tibetans. It includes stories about heroes, emperors, and other eminent figures in Chinese history—a history the CCP has sought to rewrite or erase for decades. And it includes a scene or two set in contemporary China, showing practitioners of Falun Gong who refuse to give up their faith in the face of persecution by the CCP.
According to Chinese regime defectors and the FBI, the CCP considers Falun Gong one of the “five poisons”—groups the regime believes are poisonous to its rule because they offer the Chinese an alternate vision of China. The others are Tibetans, pro-democracy activists—including those in Hong Kong—supporters of Taiwan independence, and the Uyghurs.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, teaches the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. It spread widely upon its introduction to the public in China in the early 1990s, and official estimates put total practitioners between 70 million and 100 million by the end of the decade.
However, the CCP only recognizes state-sanctioned versions of religions and criminalizes religious activity outside of state control.
Beijing’s standard of applying its laws extraterritorially also results in transnational repression that involves CCP agents’ and proxies’ attempts to criminalize and defame Falun Gong overseas. Insiders told The Epoch Times that in 2022, CCP leader Xi Jinping ordered agencies to ramp up persecution of Falun Gong in foreign countries, focusing on organizations founded by practitioners, such as Shen Yun.
Although the persecution has continued unabated for 26 years in China, today, Falun Gong is freely practiced in about 100 countries around the world.
The documents reviewed by The Epoch Times span more than a decade, demonstrating that the regime’s efforts to persecute practitioners of Falun Gong have little changed in the past quarter-century. To protect the prisoners of conscience, some of whom may have since been released from detention, their real names will not be published.
Many of the practitioners whose cases were reviewed had been detained several times for reasons related to their faith. Up until 2013, the CCP had in place a law that allowed the regime to impose forced labor for up to five years on suspects without trial or conviction. In the few years after the persecution began in 1999, mass arrests took place nationwide, and many of the cases reviewed for this article showed the practitioners had been detained in forced labor camps in the early 2000s.
One man, a farmer, was sent to a labor camp for one year in 2002 for practicing Falun Gong. Ten years later, he was detained in February 2012 because he was “suspected of the same crime,” court documents said. He was only formally arrested a month later, while he remained in detention. According to court documents, he was caring for an elderly mother and young son at the time of arrest, and his lawyer pleaded for leniency.
Police found in the farmer’s possession a satellite TV receiver that would have allowed him to watch programs blocked by the CCP’s internet firewall, as well as many DVDs the police believed were intended for distribution. Some included Falun Gong content, and thousands of DVD case covers bore names suggesting they might be used to distribute discs with Shen Yun content.
In 2013, a female student was charged with possessing and distributing materials related to Falun Gong, including “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” and a handful of DVDs with Shen Yun content. The student had been detained several times in the early 2000s for her faith and sent to labor camps twice, totaling three years of forced labor. It was only in 2012 that she was formally arrested for her faith. In a statement she submitted in her case, she detailed incidents of assault in police custody and torture during her detention, both physical and psychological. Her mother had spent her last years petitioning for the student’s release and passed away without being able to see her again.
In 2014, a business manager was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for practicing Falun Gong and possessing Falun Gong content that he said he had shared with others, according to court documents. They included 123 CDs with Falun Gong content, songs, or Shen Yun content, and 1,200 stickers that read “Truth, Compassion, Tolerance” and “Falun Dafa is good.”
In 2017, a farmer was sentenced to a year and six months imprisonment for practicing Falun Gong. According to court documents, the verdict was based on evidence that over a 15-year span (between 2000 and 2015), the man produced 17 discs with Falun Gong content, 55 images of Shen Yun, four images of “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” and 102 charms related to Falun Gong.
