The Chinese Communist Party is targeting Shen Yun Performing Arts, a U.S.-based non-profit, with the most aggressive global campaign of Beijing-driven artistic censorship documented to date. The effort is a key dimension of the regime’s broader transnational repression aimed at Falun Gong practitioners, their peaceful activism, and their supporters around the world. More than 130 incidents of harassment, sabotage, disinformation, and physical attacks by Chinese officials or their proxies targeting Shen Yun have been documented in 38 countries—including the United States—since 2007.
The mission of the Falun Dafa Information Center is to document and expose the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners inside and outside China, of which Beijing’s campaign against Shen Yun is a prime example. As such, the Center is publishing this policy brief, which outlines key dimensions of the campaign, its impact, pushback from democracies, and recommendations for action by the U.S. government. A more comprehensive report on this phenomenon will be published in early 2024.