Global Campaign to Target Shen Yun Hits Close to Home in New York

China-linked group using environmental law, dubious claims to target arts group persecuted by CCP

Students practice meditation on the campus of Fei Tian college in Deerpark, New York. (Courtesy of Shen Yun Performing Arts)

DEERPARK, N.Y.—Shen Yun is one of the world’s most recognizable performing arts companies. Its classical Chinese arts performances are met with high acclaim and each year draw audiences of more than a million people globally.

What many theatergoers don’t know, however, is that the company is being targeted in a systematic harassment campaign—both around the world and on U.S. soil—by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Over the years, the CCP has gone to great lengths to target Shen Yun, a U.S.-based company that seeks to revive traditional Chinese culture as it existed before being largely destroyed under communism in China.

Recently, the CCP sentenced the mother of one of Shen Yun’s principal dancers to four years in prison for her religious beliefs. In November 2022, the local Chinese Embassy unsuccessfully pressured the government of the Dominican Republic to cancel the company’s performances. Similar efforts this year in South Korea resulted in multiple theaters dropping the show.

Shen Yun principal dancer Steven Wang's mother was sentenced to four years in prison by the Chinese regime for her religious beliefs last month. Wang has been unable to travel to China himself because of security concerns. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

There also have been life-threatening incidents.

In 2021, a tour bus carrying performers in California came under gunfire. In multiple other incidents, the tires of the company’s buses have been sliced such that they would have exploded on the road had the sabotage not been detected.

The main target of the CCP’s efforts, however, has been the performing arts company’s schools and training facilities at a campus in downstate New York, located at a site called Dragon Springs. Internal CCP documents previously obtained by The Epoch Times revealed that the CCP issued orders to “attack” the site "systematically and strategically.”

Over the past 15 years, the campus has faced security intrusions, harassment, and vandalism.

The most elaborate effort to target the campus, however, has been a string of unsuccessful environmental lawsuits filed by a group with links to China.

Alex Scilla (L), founder of New Paltz-based NYenvironcom, and Grace Woodard at the Mamakating Farmers Market in Wurtsboro, N.Y., on Sept. 2, 2022. (Epoch Times)

The group, operating as a nonprofit called NYenvironcom, was founded by Alex Scilla, an American who lived in China for about 15 years and maintains business interests there. He moved back to the United States in 2019 with what appears to be a singular focus of running the group, which is almost wholly dedicated to the campaign against Dragon Springs. The group has financially supported a local activist, Grace Woodard, who also became one of its board members. Scilla’s ties to China were the subject of an investigation by The Epoch Times last year.

NYenvironcom lists as a “partner” on its website a China-based company branded as Frontier Environ. Scilla set up the company in 2019, shortly after he moved back to the United States and started his nonprofit. His wife, who is Chinese, serves as the company’s supervisor, Chinese official records show. The company appears to be Scilla’s only business venture that could provide a source of income. Yet the company doesn’t appear to be performing any actual work.

Scilla and Woodard have engaged in a pattern of meritless environmental lawsuits against Dragon Springs. Although all the lawsuits were dismissed in court, they were used to spur negative coverage in local media.

They didn’t respond to previous inquiries about the group’s ties to China and its sources of funding.

Lawsuits Dismissed

Woodard filed the first lawsuit in 2019, claiming that improvements to one of the entrances to the Dragon Springs property would disturb a wetland and damage her property—a vacant lot across the road.

The suit was dismissed in 2020 by an Orange County Supreme Court judge, who ruled that there was in fact no wetland, that Woodard and her co-plaintiffs had “made no showing of any harm whatsoever,” and that they had “failed, in all respects” to provide evidence to back their claims.

Woodard appealed the ruling the next year and failed again.

Grace Woodard talks during a press conference in Cuddebackville, N.Y., on Jan. 20, 2022. (Kelly Marsh/USA TODAY NETWORK)

In early 2022, Scilla and Woodard filed a suit alleging that Dragon Springs had released wastewater with fecal coliform into a local river. They announced the action at a news conference and managed to get several negative articles about Dragon Springs published in local media. Chinese media immediately picked up the news.

However, the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal court later that year.

In his dismissal, the judge ruled that the required letter of notice sent by the group before filing the suit was insufficient and too vague.

That doesn’t appear to have deterred Scilla and Woodard. Earlier this year, Scilla’s group sent Dragon Springs another notice of intent to sue.

But according to Dragon Springs representatives, the newest notice is again faulty.

“Their letter was so incoherent and illogical that one couldn’t even say for certain what the exact allegations were,” George Xu, vice president of Dragon Springs, told The Epoch Times in a statement.

“The flaws in this latest notice to sue fit a very clear pattern. The previous lawsuits they brought against Dragon Springs were all dismissed because they were formulated around obvious false statements and irrational conclusions.”

According to Xu, the lawsuits instead are used to attack the school’s campus and its development.

“They were not genuinely protecting the environment. Instead, they want to do anything they can to inhibit our development and generate negative news about our campus,“ he said. ”So, while their lawsuits are failing before the law, they keep trying to hijack our legal system in order to attack Shen Yun.

Students at the Fei Tian College campus in Deerpark, N.Y. (Courtesy of Fei Tian College)

“What is so ironic about these baseless lawsuits is that, from day one, our campus was designed and built in the ancient Chinese ideal of being in harmony with nature.

“We are responsible and capable stewards of the environment, and we take this responsibility very seriously.”

Scilla’s group is based about 40 miles away in New Paltz, New York—a fertile ground for environmental advocacy because of the nearby Ashokan Reservoir, which provides drinking water for New York City. The group, however, has shown little interest in environmental issues in its own backyard.

As for Woodard, her own neighborhood in Godeffroy has struggled for years with toxic algae bloom on Guymard Lake. In 2021, the lake was included on the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) “list of impaired waters” for excessive phosphorus levels. Neither NYenvironcom nor Woodard appears to be interested in that issue.

‘Frivolous’ Suit

Scilla’s latest letter mentions water samples with elevated levels of coliform, but it isn’t clear where exactly the water comes from and how it was polluted.

The Dragon Springs campus is served by its own wastewater treatment plant, which eliminates bacteria in the wastewater, including coliform. Moreover, none of the treated wastewater is released into the river.

The plant operated “in a satisfactory manner,” according to a report from a September 2022 DEC inspection reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Scilla and Woodard claimed to the court last year that one sample that showed elevated coliform presence was collected in a “ponded area” on the Basher Kill river adjacent to the Dragon Springs property. Security camera footage reviewed by The Epoch Times indicated that the “ponded area” didn’t exist at the time the sample was supposedly collected. Because of drought, the river had receded and the area dried up, save for a few puddles.

A dried up area on the Basha Kill riverbank in Deerpark, N.Y., on Aug. 30, 2022. (Courtesy of Dragon Springs)

“There’s no telling what may have been soaking in these tiny, isolated puddles, given the densely wooded area is teeming with wildlife, and animal feces contain coliform, too,” Xu previously told The Epoch Times.

It appears Scilla and Woodard again refer to that sample in their latest letter.

“This latest notice contains flaws that border on the ridiculous,” Xu said.

“The samples they present are taken from puddles on the river bank that have no connection with our wastewater treatment plant. Their sampling method is very questionable, has no credible chain of custody, and their assertions lack the specificity required by law in order to sue under the Clean Water Act. We were advised by legal counsel that any legal action based on what is presented in this notice is not viable and is, in fact, frivolous.”

CCP Strategies

Using U.S. groups, environmental laws, or local ordinances as tools to achieve its goals would be fully in character for the CCP, according to Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist infiltration in the West.

“We know that the Chinese will use American groups to help them economically or help them militarily,” Loudon told The Epoch Times in an interview last year. “Why would they not use Americans to shut down cultural opposition, too?”

If somebody with strong China ties exerts a focused effort against Shen Yun’s home base, “it would seem the most obvious conclusion” that the CCP is involved, he said.

Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, agreed that such a move would be right out of the CCP’s playbook.

The regime pursues the strategies of “unrestricted warfare” and “hybrid warfare”—using any and all aspects of society as tools to achieve the same objectives as a war, to defeat and dominate the enemy, he told The Epoch Times in an interview last year.

“They use all methods—‘religious warfare,’ ‘economic warfare,’ ‘drug warfare,’ ‘education warfare,’ ‘family warfare'—everything you can possibly imagine,” he said. “So yes, culture is absolutely critical for them to unwind our society for takeover.”

Environmental activism also can be exploited for the purpose of frustrating economic development and serving as a cover for intelligence gathering, he said.

A crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation inside the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC, on Aug. 3, 2007. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The FBI has placed significant focus on investigating CCP influence in the United States in recent years.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, in a July 2020 speech at the Hudson Institute, said that “of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.”

“We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours,” he said.

Wray also warned that the Chinese diplomats were targeting “federal, state, and even local officials” across the nation as part of their influence operations.

“All of these seemingly inconsequential pressures add up to a policymaking environment in which Americans find themselves held over a barrel by the Chinese Communist Party,” Wray said in his speech.

Fleeing Religious Persecution

Shen Yun was founded by adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, who face severe persecution in China. The practice consists of slow-moving exercises, meditation, and spiritual teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Falun Gong was widely popular in China in the 1990s, with 70 million to 100 million people practicing by 1999, according to state estimates. That popularity, however, was perceived as a threat by a few leaders of the ruling communist regime, which started a Cultural Revolution-style campaign to eradicate the practice in 1999.

Human rights advocates estimate that millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to illegal imprisonment and torture. In 2019, the London-based China Tribunal concluded that the Chinese regime had been systematically harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience for years and “on a significant scale,” with the primary target being Falun Gong practitioners.

Hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners hold a vigil near the Chinese Consulate in New York for World Falun Dafa Day on May 11, 2017. (The Epoch Times)

The Dragon Springs site has in part served as a sanctuary for those escaping the persecution and has seeded a significant Chinese community in the area.

The campus is something of an architectural marvel. It includes a Tang dynasty-style Buddhist temple built using the ancient technique of interlocked wood joints, without any nails or screws. It also hosts rehearsal spaces for Shen Yun and two arts schools, Fei Tian Academy of the Arts and Fei Tian College, which teach classical Chinese dance and music, orchestral music, and operatic singing.

“Essentially, Dragon Springs is the only place in the world where such a wide spectrum of authentic Chinese culture exists and is being nurtured, free of any communist influence,” Xu previously told The Epoch Times.

“All of our work here at Dragon Springs shows to the world how wonderful Chinese culture was before it was suffocated by the CCP, and that is why the CCP is so afraid of our site. ... Our very existence exposes it as the tyrant and fraud that it is.”