Hungwei Sun escaped the Chinese communist regime twice. Now, in the United States, the regime is still trying to silence him.

Born in the era of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) one-child policy, his mother refused to give him up. Then when the family was being persecuted for their faith, she shipped him off to safety at the cost of missing his childhood.

Today, Sun remains among the CCP’s top targets, for entirely different reasons.

In 1979, the CCP had implemented a “one-child” population planning policy, with vicious penalties for those who violated it.

That meant Zhu, in 1995, would have been forced to have an abortion if she was found to be pregnant with a second child. But because her father-in-law lived in Taiwan, the family applied to leave the country for the purpose of “visiting relatives” and successfully traveled to Taiwan. There, Zhu gave birth to Sun, who received Taiwanese citizenship. A few months later, they traveled back to China.

In May 1999, Zhu took 4-year-old Sun to a seminar about Falun Gong, where a recording of a lecture given by founder Mr. Li Hongzhi was played for the attendees. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, teaches the three principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance, and gained widespread popularity after it was introduced to the public China in the 1990s.

But just a few months after Zhu took up the practice herself, the CCP banned the Falun Gong and launched a violent persecution campaign against it on July 20, 1999.

Sun was too young to understand what Falun Gong, or the persecution, was all about. But he remembers the night in 2002 when his father took both his sons to a room upstairs and closed the door, telling them not to come out no matter what.

Police had come to detain Zhu for practicing Falun Gong, and she was later sentenced to seven years imprisonment for refusing to denounce the practice. By the time Sun’s father opened the door to face his sons, their mother had already been taken away.

A gloom settled over the once-happy family. Sun remembers how lost his father seemed now raising two sons himself with their mother gone, snide comments from neighbors, and how propaganda defaming Falun Gong was even taught in his elementary school classes.

The once playful and active child could now barely bring himself to raise his head, wondering why this was happening to his family, or why his mother had been detained even though she was a good person.

He would see her during yearly visitations and tell her how much he missed her, and she would always promise she would be back soon, but it would be seven years before she was released. Zhu might have been released earlier if she denounced Falun Gong and its principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. She did not believe that would be the right thing to do.

In 2009, Zhu’s sentence had ended and she was released, but she said the harassment from Chinese authorities did not stop. Suddenly, the family was told that as a Taiwanese citizen, Sun would no longer be allowed to attend school. The matter of his nationality had never been an issue before, and the denial of schooling was made in tandem with ongoing pressure that she renounce her faith.

By then, Sun’s grandfather in Taiwan had passed away, so they did not have relatives overseas, but Zhu believed Sun’s best chance at having an education and future free from the CCP would be if they went to Taiwan.

Sun, with his Taiwanese passport, would have no issues doing so, but Zhu was placed under an exit ban because she had been detained for not denouncing Falun Gong. Deciding to have Sun travel to Taiwan would be a leap of faith and one of the hardest decisions the family would have to make. The people around Zhu, from family to neighbors, would criticize her for the decision.

“It was very heartbreaking,” Zhu told The Epoch Times. “And Hungwei [Sun] was so understanding.”

“In fact, he kept trying to reassure me ... but the two days before the trip he was wrought with anxiety, and couldn’t even eat,” she said.

“He asked me, ‘Will I ever see you again?’ Every time I talk about this the pain is as fresh as ever; it brings me to tears,” an emotional Zhu said. “I said, ‘Yes, we will see you soon again in Taiwan’ ... even though we had no idea if we would actually be able to go, to see each other again.”

“I remember after seeing it, I was in awe. I wanted to be part of this mission,” Sun told The Epoch Times. He couldn’t recall the specifics of how the performance so moved him, but along with bringing five millennia of Chinese civilization to life on stage, Shen Yun programs also include a story-based dance showing Falun Gong practitioners in China holding onto their faith in the face of CCP persecution.

The persecution of Falun Gong that had made Sun unable to even raise his head as a child was something these artists were expressing proudly on stage, and he was deeply inspired.

At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Sun to pursue a career in dance. But when the family friend he was staying with him encouraged him to give it a try and join the local classical Chinese dance studio, Sun thought, why not? There he discovered that classical Chinese dance demands of male dancers a strong, masculine, and valiant form.

Sun was always athletic, and after less than a year at the studio, he was accepted into Fei Tian Academy of the Arts in New York, a school affiliated with Shen Yun.

“Coming to America was a huge turning point,” Sun said. He has nothing but gratitude for the Falun Gong practitioners who welcomed him in Taiwan and the family friend who raised him like their own, but when he joined Fei Tian, and later Shen Yun, he experienced a sense of camaraderie for the first time that “felt like home.”

He felt it was the opposite of his experience in China, where people gossiped about Sun as the child with no mother because Zhu would not give up Falun Gong.

“Here, everyone genuinely wishes the best for you,” Sun said. “Looking back, I’ve changed a lot without realizing when it happened; I’ve become more open, and happier.”

Zhu could see immediately how Sun had changed in the five years since she saw him. In 2014, Zhu’s exit ban had expired and the family was able to come to the United States. She spotted Sun immediately as he stepped out of a car. It wasn’t just that he had become so tall and handsome, she said, but he now carried himself with a dignity that the cloud of the CCP’s religious persecution had tried to stamp out of him.

Zhu added that Sun may have been surprised at his path in becoming a dancer, but she remembers he was always an adept performer as a child, asking her to watch him as he repeated an athletic trick or performance he had seen earlier in the day.

When she saw him on stage for the first time, “I was so impressed seeing him dance so well—and so grateful,” Zhu said. “Falun Gong has brought so much into his life, as he shared: a mission, purpose. He’s become a voice for the voiceless, using dance to speak truth to the world.”

“We want to give audiences something that is compassionate and beautiful,” Sun said. “We want to restore traditional culture.”

“Of course there are hardships, and lots of them, but knowing what I’ve already overcome, I feel I can handle it,” he said. “There is pressure, but I find what I’m doing to be so meaningful that  it’s not a burden but an honor, something that I’m grateful for.”

“I’ve experienced the persecution and that environment myself back in China, so I feel even stronger about speaking out for the people still experiencing what my mom went through,” Sun said.

Shen Yun’s members practice Falun Gong, and many have personally or have had friends or relatives suffer persecution at the hands of the CCP.

“The CCP has persecuted Falun Gong, but also the Chinese people altogether,” Sun said, pointing to the decades of terror under CCP rule and the lies the people have been fed by the CCP about Falun Gong and other issues. “So we also want to expose the persecution the CCP is committing.”

One year, Sun was cast as a Falun Gong practitioner in China being persecuted by the CCP, and the story included the regime’s practice of live organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.

“In China, everyone knows this is happening on a wide scale,” Sun said. “But outside China, people sometimes don’t know [the extent of this persecution].”

“I felt honored to bring this story to life, to tell people the truth of the situation,” he said.

The artists of Shen Yun do so at tremendous risk. Shen Yun presents “China before communism” through a two-hour performance of music and dance, something the CCP has tried to erase since it took power.

The Epoch Times, other media, and human rights organizations have, over the years, documented the CCP’s ongoing efforts to prevent Shen Yun from performing, whether through leveraging diplomatic pressure on theaters and governments, hiring proxies to protest performances and harass audience members, or threats upon Shen Yun members’ family members residing in China.

Last season, theaters around the world experienced a significant increase in harassment for hosting Shen Yun, according to several Shen Yun members who recalled conversations with theater personnel. In particular, they have consistently been on the receiving end of threatening messages, like the false bomb threat that resulted in an evacuation and thorough sweep of the Kennedy Center Opera House earlier this year.

Sun said these threats must be condemned at the highest level. Although the threats have not stopped any performances, the senders can spend the minimum amount of effort in sending a message and that results in theaters and law enforcement having to expend maximum effort on security. It’s a travesty, he said.

Sun and many other Shen Yun members harbor a hope that they may one day perform in China.

“Actually, most of us are from China, maybe two or three generations removed if not directly, and many experienced persecution first hand. Of course we really want to go back—it’s still our homeland, and we want to bring the truth to the Chinese people,” he said. “We very much want Shen Yun to perform in China.”