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

Sun was born in the era of the one-child policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 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 that 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 Li Hongzhi was played for the attendees. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. It gained widespread popularity after it was introduced to the public in China in the 1990s.

But just a few months after Zhu took up the practice herself, the CCP banned Falun Gong and started 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 to not come out no matter what.

Police had come to detain Zhu for practicing Falun Gong, and she was later sentenced to seven years in prison 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 snide comments from neighbors, how lost his father seemed raising two sons by himself with their mother gone, 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. He wondered why this was happening to his family and why his mother had been detained even though she was a good person.

In 2009, Zhu’s sentence ended, and she was released, but 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 this move was made in tandem with ongoing pressure on Zhu to renounce her faith.

By then, Sun’s grandfather in Taiwan had passed away, so they did not have relatives overseas, but Zhu believed that Sun would have a better chance of having an education and a future free from the CCP if the family moved to Taiwan.

Sun, with his Taiwanese passport, would have no issues moving, but Zhu was placed under an exit ban because she had been detained for not denouncing Falun Gong. Deciding to send Sun to Taiwan without Zhu 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 [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?’” Zhu told The Epoch Times. “Every time I talk about this, the pain is as fresh as ever; it brings me to tears. 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,” Sun told The Epoch Times. “I wanted to be part of this mission.”

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 on to 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 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 state, 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. However, when he joined Fei Tian, and later Shen Yun, he said, he experienced a sense of camaraderie for the first time that “felt like home.”

It was the opposite of his experience in China, where people gossiped about Sun as a 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.”

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

Zhu said Sun may have been surprised that he ended up becoming a dancer, but she remembers that 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.

Zhu described seeing Sun 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.

“The CCP has persecuted Falun Gong, but also the Chinese people altogether,” Sun said, noting the decades of terror under CCP rule and the lies 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 from 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 perform at tremendous risk. Shen Yun presents “China before communism” through a two-hour performance of music and dance, something the CCP has tried to shut down since taking power.

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, such as 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, Sun said it’s a travesty that harassers can send a threatening message with very little effort, forcing theaters and law enforcement to respond with maximum security efforts.

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 firsthand,” he said. “Of course, we really want to go back—it’s still our homeland, and we want to bring the truth to the Chinese people. We very much want Shen Yun to perform in China.”