Bribery, Lawfare, and Media Smears: The CCP’s Campaign to Destroy a Religious Group in America—Erping Zhang

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is stepping up its efforts to destroy a religious group in America that it sees as a threat to its rule, according to leaked information from multiple CCP insiders.

Tactics include lawfare, bomb threats, smear campaigns, impersonation attempts, and bribing U.S. officials. The Department of Justice sentenced a Chinese agent for trying to bribe an IRS agent to target practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline.

So what’s going on exactly? And why would this be a priority for the Chinese regime?

Today, I’m sitting down with Erping Zhang, president of the International Falun Dafa Association.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Erping Zhang, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Erping Zhang:
Thank you for having me here today.

Mr. Jekielek:
Erping, here on American soil, the Chinese regime is persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, Chinese Americans. And this thing has been escalated, as we understand, from reporting that we’ve done at The Epoch Times. We’ve gotten some insider information from a dissident in Australia and then corroborated with others that Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator himself, has elevated these efforts to the level of the minister of state security in China. But there’s this focus here on Americans. What’s going on?

Mr. Zhang:
The ministry of public security and the ministry of state security have appointed someone to be in charge of anti-Falun Gong in North America, in New York City, they have the Chinese police station on American soil. Now they are using different ways to really persecute Falun Gong through lawfare. Foreign nationals using American citizens, American companies.

Then you have the disinformation campaign. The Chinese government using social media and the free media platform to defame Falun Gong here, and try to turn American society and American government
against this religious community. They really try to co-opt the US government to look into Falun Gong. We actually have evidence of that.

The Department of Justice has recently sentenced two Chinese agents who tried to bribe the IRS to strip the tax-exempt status of Shen Yun Performing Arts. They also recently indicted a former Verizon employee who spies for China on Falun Gong practitioners here in the United States. In terms of lawfare, there is someone who lived in China for over 15 years with a Chinese wife. They came back to the United States and registered a so-called environmental group. Then they started filing complaints about pollution from Dragon Springs, which is the training ground for the Shen Yun Performing Arts Group.

The judge threw out the complaints multiple times, and then finally threw out the case with prejudice, which means you cannot file the same complaint again. It’s very peculiar. And they also resort to violence here in America. They sent bomb shooting threats to American theaters that host Shen Yun Performing Arts Company and to the headquarters of Shen Yun Performing Arts Company and to individuals who support Falun Gong.

This is brutal state-sponsored terrorism in the United States, in our own backyard. This is really not a domestic issue. It’s not just a regular transnational repression act. It’s really a risk level of national security. How can we allow a foreign government, you know, making efforts to weaponize the American legal system and to prosecute American citizens and American companies. If we allow this to happen, they could do this to any American citizens or any American companies or entities they dislike.

This should not be tolerated at all. These kinds of efforts are from the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party. We have been tipped off in the spring of 2024 that they have this scheme to eradicate the Falun Gong community worldwide, especially in the United States. This is why it’s not coincidental to see all these forms of persecution efforts escalate, especially in recent months. It’s very peculiar.

While the CCP has this plan being implemented in North America, especially here in the United States, the New York Times within months has published nine articles against Falun Gong. It’s a very peculiar time. I think our government should look into what is going on. And oddly, they use the same playbook the CCP has been using against Falun Gong.

I remember in 1999, when Falun Gong was the first encounter, this persecution, Jiang Zemin, the CCP leader back then, called for three things. One is physically destroy Falun Gong, which means they’ll imprison, torture the Falun Gong practitioner if they don’t refuse to renounce their belief and faith and kill them even. And the second thing is to financially exhaust Falun Gong, which means if you are Falun Gong practitioner, you refuse to give up your faith and belief and give up the practice, you lose your job. If you’re a student, you lose your education. If you’re a military person, you lose your service. You have no financial means to survive.

Then the third thing is to tarnish the reputation of Falun Gong and to make up stories, to lie about Falun Gong. And now we have the rhetoric, the same playbook that’s been used by the CCP. Let me give you two examples of the misinformation they have been doing. Number one, they recycled the same stories. Some of these people have ties with China, come from China, and it’s not been disclosed. Why is the New York Times not recognizing and disclosing that some of the people they interviewed have ties with China?

Mr. Jekielek:
Right, like quite deep ties.

Mr. Zhang:
Yes, that’s a conflict of interest. That’s a conflict of interest. People, you know, I have friends who ask, where’s the journalist’s integrity? How can you publish on the same people who have undisclosed ties with China and then use their words. If you are a serious paper, you know, for decades, you know, people have taken the New York Times as a credible media outlet. But this is really raising questions to everyone with good conscience. How can this happen?

Secondly, on the forced organ harvesting that I just discussed, the New York Times article chose to quote someone who is not a medical professional who works at the China Center at Yale Law School, which was funded by the co-founder of Alibaba, who claimed there was no systematic false organ harvesting. At the same time, the former New York Times reporter, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, who was based in Beijing, who speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, who had meetings with Chinese surgeons, who knew there was false organs harvesting from prison of conscience, and who was trying to dig more on this topic, was under pressure not to do it.

She wrote a testimony, an affidavit, for the China Tribunal. It was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who is King’s Counsel and the former prosecutor of the former head of Yugoslavia at the ICC. He chairs the China Tribunal, which funds in the large scale of false organ harvesting against Falun Gong practitioners. And also there are peer reviewed medical journal articles about the false organ harvesting in China. And there have been hearings at the US Congress, European Parliament, and both European Parliament and the US Congress have passed resolutions condemning this horrific crime after the hearings.

And yet, the New York Times appears to be whitewashing this crime, surprising its own reporter on the story. What is going on here? Who is the New York Times helping with amounts, non-articles, against a persecuted religious community in the United States? It raises questions about the motivation, about what is going on behind all this. Is there something else we don’t know? It really raises a lot of questions.

Mr. Jekielek:
A dancer in Taiwan recently launched a lawsuit against Shen Yun. For some years after she left the company, she had very positive relations with her former professor. She was recruiting for Shen Yun and recommending dancers from her school to join Shen Yun. She got married, things changed, and she affiliated with the Beijing Dance Academy, which is the only competition really to Shen Yun in the world, right, and affiliated with the Chinese government. And suddenly she’s launching lawsuits. I mean, you would think that would be part of the story at least, right?

But the thing with the New York Times, and I have to rant a little bit here for a moment. Like you said, there’s this crimes against humanity level, if not genocide, persecution happening against a massive group of people in China. The other side of it, it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, civil active civil disobedience movement in the world that’s happening as we speak. And somehow, in nine articles across five months, the New York Times misses that part of the story and focuses just on this. I mean, that in itself, to me, seems kind of revealing.

Mr. Zhang:
This country was established by our Founding Fathers with freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression. Now, our basic rights are being violated and infringed upon by a foreign state actor, the Chinese Communist Party. We should not allow this to happen in the United States. How can we allow these violent threats to occur in this country? We need to stand up and stop this. We need to investigate and prosecute the people who are behind this. We need to find out what is really going on here.

Mr. Jekielek:
I think the thing that is the hardest to understand is the grassroots work that Falun Gong practitioners have done in China over the last 25 years. This might actually be one of the biggest untold stories. Please lay this out for us.

Mr. Zhang:
Let me give you a very brief introduction of what Falun Gong is and stands for. Falun Gong was introduced to the public in 1992 by Mr. Li Hongzhi. It has the moral principles of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance, and has five gentle meditation exercises. When Falun Gong was first introduced to the public, the people who benefited from the practice started to pass it to their family members and friends. It began through word-of-mouth.

Later on, the government found out it really has health benefits, and good for the morality of society because if people follow these principles, they become better people. So the government decided to endorse the practice and shower Falun Gong and its founder with recognition and awards. They even promoted it through the government venues at the beginning. Quickly, the practice had a big following of 70 to 100 million people.
Then when the group became so big, Jiang Zemin, who was the party leader at that time, really felt threatened and decided to persecute this group. On July 20th, 1999, a huge ruthless campaign of persecution started. I’ve been talking to a China scholar about why the Chinese Communist Party persecuted Falun Gong. And he said it’s very simple. The first word, truthfulness, will make the Chinese Communist Party disappear.

If you read all the newspapers, they’re all state-run in China. There’s no private media in China. It’s full of the communist propaganda. If everyone’s telling the truth, the regime will not be sustainable. And we have a joke in China about the People’s Daily, which is a mouthpiece of the Communist Party. The only thing that is true is the date. The resistance is widespread, sending flyers and CDs to people in their mailbox. Many individuals, they send faxes, they send emails, and they print information from their own computer, sent to the government officials.

Some of the public security bureau chiefs were so scared because they receive emails and phone calls sometimes from American Falun Gong practitioners, Falun Gong practitioners in Europe and from Taiwan, from everywhere. They got so scared and said, how did you know my name and my phone number? I don’t want to get involved in the persecutions. Please take me, take my name off your calling list. Because they keep getting called and told, you shouldn’t get involved in sending this person to jail. You shouldn’t do this.

Some of these officials have their children’s relatives leaving overseas so they are really afraid to be known to be part of the persecution. All this emailing, the phone calling, these flyers, these CDs in their mailboxes really helped to reduce the persecution pressure. Falun Gong practitioners are known to have invented two famous types of anti-censorship software. One is called FreeGate, the other one is UltraSurf. These are the two anti-internet censorship tools, very powerful, sending information into China, allowing Chinese netizens to access overseas websites, social media, and news networks. These people work in their garages and their basements, without government or private company funding.

They are the shining example of what a nonviolent resistance should be in the face of a powerful economic power, you know, communist China. And they are doing this persistently over the past 25 years. The large majority of Chinese people are informed, so it’s against the party’s interest now. They know it’s unpopular. When they see the villagers sending in from different provinces, sending in with a fingerprint, public letters.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, kind of like a signature.

Mr. Zhang:
Yes, the fingerprint signature on the public appeal letters to the government officials saying that you should not do this to our fellow Chinese citizens. So this is very powerful.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a Freedom House report on religious freedom and Falun Gong in China. They said that it’s very heavily persecuted. But in some provinces where this effort that you’re describing was the most effective, that level of persecution has been lowered because people just don’t want to do it anymore, because they realize that this isn’t something we should do.
One of the things I found most inspiring is basically millions of individual people in China going out, taking these materials like the CDs or DVDs and pamphlets and so forth, and going one by one, going to the police stations.
I mean, it’s like, really? They’re going to the police stations, talking to the leadership there. They’re, you know, putting pamphlets in people’s mailboxes.

I mean, imagine this is a massive grassroots effort. Like, you know, kind of, I don’t think anything like this has been seen before, right? And very, you know, obviously incredibly self-directed. I think that’s the other element that when I read this New York Times reporting, it sort of suggests this sort of like, you know, dark command and control structure when, you know, the reality is like, how could that even be possible? You know, people don’t do stuff like this that way, you know?

Mr. Zhang:
I should mention that Falun Gong is apolitical. It’s a traditional meditation practice. It doesn’t have a political agenda. But what we are trying to do is to end the persecution and allow this traditional Chinese culture to revive. Over the past decades, under the Aces rule, the Aces Communist Party’s rule, people have been deprived of this thirst and this need for spirituality, especially to their spiritual past. The Communist Party believes in dialectical materialism, everything is about the communist materialism ideology.

If we recall modern Chinese history, since the Chinese Communist Party took over in 1949, they immediately started the so-called anti-fault tradition campaign. Traditional values, traditional beliefs, traditional customs, and traditional thinking. And then they felt that that was not enough to eradicate the traditional values from the Chinese people. They waged the Cultural Revolution, in which they burned the Buddhist temples, the Taoist temple, and all the spiritual belief systems. They burned classic books and the classical art forms. They persecuted the intellectuals. My father was a professor and because of that our family was sent to a farm near the North Korean border in Jilin province. I personally witnessed that period of time.

What Falun Gong stands for is really reconnecting the people of China to their spiritual path. These sets of values are in contrast with what the Communist Party believes in, which is violence, class struggle, deceptions, dictatorship, atheism. History has shown that persecution of any faith-based group or community will fail. In ancient Roman times, we have seen the Christians, despite 300 years of persecution, they later thrive.

The same is true with Falun Gong. You can take away their life, take away their material things, even torture them, but you cannot take away their faith. This is why historically all the persecutions in the East or in the West are doomed to fail. This is what’s happening here today. It’s only that this persecution is now worldwide. You have transnational repression now here in America now from the CCP, and this is why this is alarming.

We are an open society and a free country. We’ve seen dozens of the mass shooting, bombing threats to American individuals and entities
such as Falun Gong practitioners, Falun Gong-run companies, and American theaters that host Shen Yun performing arts company shows. The theater receives pictures of bullets and guns, threats of mass shooting, and also bomb threats, not only in the United States, in Canada, in France, in other countries as well. How can we allow this regime to operate like this in our own backyard?

Mr. Jekielek:
The Epoch Times has written about Chinese consulates writing to theaters with veiled threats to try to prevent Shen Yun from being shown at those theaters. This has now escalated to anonymous bomb threats and pictures of bullets being sent. The Chinese regime is thrilled with this New York Times reporting, a series of articles, including even a hit piece on The Epoch Times for being a sponsor of the show. Why is the Chinese regime so obsessed with Shen Yun?

Mr. Zhang:
Shen Yun stands for what the Chinese traditional art forms and traditional Chinese culture would be like without communism. This is why people from mainland China go to Japan and Taiwan to watch the show when they get a chance. People walk away after the show, they feel, wow, this is what China is like. We are really starting a renaissance, a renaissance of culture, traditional culture movement, a movement that will allow the Chinese people to reconnect with their own past and reconnect with their spiritual roots and reconnect with their bad traditional values without communism. That’s how powerful it is.

Mr. Jekielek:
Shen Yun actually does expose the persecution of Falun Gong.

Mr. Zhang:
Yes, that’s why the show is very powerful. It shows China before communism and what happens when communists are in charge of China, and also the persecution. We’re living in a very special age where we are witnessing a huge grassroots movement where the Falun Gong has been playing a major role. People are waking up. We’re going to see a China without communism that’s different in the future.

Until then, we should support these peaceful, apolitical people who are trying to regain their right to their own culture, their past, their values, and their spiritual faith. They are also helping the world to understand what China is like under communism. They are helping the world to wake up. The Chinese Communist Party is posing a threat everywhere.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about the scale of this. The government estimate in 1998 was that 70 to 100 million people practiced Falun Gong. I remember a UN special rapporteur on torture had a report that after the persecution began, it was something half of all the inmates in many of the labor camps and prisons were Falun Gong practitioners. That was the scale of it. How has that changed? What do we know about the numbers today?

Mr. Zhang:
Actually, you can find these numbers on an old Shanghai television network. After the persecution, the United Nations Special Raporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, did a study about the Chinese torture and data on Chinese prisons. He found out two-thirds of the torture cases are related to Falun Gong practitioners. Even though the persecution has been very severe, it might force some people to stop the practice, but actually allowed other people to learn about Falun Gong and pick up the practice, in fact.

I’ve met many young Chinese Falun Gong practitioners of the Gen Z population. We are now seeing a huge following of Falun Gong practitioners from different countries. Now it’s being practiced in over 100 countries, and the teachings have been translated into 40 languages. It’s all free on the website. The Chinese government, including the New York Times, tried to insinuate that the founder is profiting from this. The truth couldn’t be further from that.

The founder of Falun Gong, Mr. Li Hongzhi, actually is giving this teaching for free to the internet. When he was introducing this practice to the public in 1992, he said that as a Falun Gong practitioner, you cannot solicit funding from individuals in the Falun Gong community. That was not allowed. We are not allowed to solicit funding from the community or practitioners. You can come, you can leave, and we don’t have official membership. Anyone can come and go as they please.

The practice relies on self-discipline and is an individual-based cultivation method. We call it cultivation. It’s really cultivating the mind and body. You’ve cultivated your mind by adhering to the principle of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. You do the meditation exercises, cultivating your body for physical well-being and for the transformation of your physical body to make it more healthy. It’s a mind-body meditation regime and a holistic approach to personal well-being.

We don’t have conversion rituals or ceremonies. We don’t have worship and we don’t have a church. We don’t have to give a certain percentage of our annual salary to a common trust. We don’t have those kinds of things like tithing. It’s actually a group of people with different political, social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. We welcome anyone from any community and background to learn about Falun Gong. If you’re interested, we welcome you to practice this ancient meditation practice.

Mr. Jekielek:
How would you respond to this insinuation in the recent New York Times reports that these are hapless people being duped by a guru figure?

Mr. Zhang:
In the Falun Gong practice, there’s no chain command or top-down hierarchy. Instead, everyone is responsible for his own actions. Everyone,
tries to adhere to the principle of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. Many people who have benefited from the practice. They volunteer at times. They make personal contribution to all the different causes and projects in the
face of brutal persecution. Many people started their own projects like anti-censorship technology projects, like The Epoch Times, and quit the CCP movement.

We have started the largest quit the CCP campaign. Over 400 million people have already quit the Communist Party and the affiliate entities, such as Communist Youth, the Young Pioneer organizations. So we are letting people recognize what a CCP is and allowing them to leave this evil organization and to be a meaningful member of society. This is one of the reasons the Chinese Communist Party is so scared of Falun Gong.

As for me, I volunteer for Falun Gong activities. I have a family friend, a professor who was a Fulbright professor in physics. She was thrown into jail in China because she refused to give up her faith and practice in Falun Gong. How can we allow this to happen? How can we remain silent when the perpetrator of the crime in China is a state sponsor and has a state policy of persecution.

They have caused so many deaths. They have committed the horrific crime of false organ harvesting, and none of them are being charged. Instead, they’re being rewarded, get promoted, and get funding for it. If we look back in history, the horrific genocide in different country, including the Holocaust, should we remain silent?

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve worked with people in government in the US, in Canada, and all sorts of countries. What is your hope for the public reaction and the governmental reaction?

Mr. Zhang:
The American public deserves the information and the facts about what CCP is all about. That’s why we are trying to reach out to the international community, including governments around the world, and tell them about the persecution and tell them about what’s going on with the CCP’s intention to eradicate Falun Gong overseas, especially here in the United States. And so these are really national security concerns. And we are seeing a state actor, in this case CCP, is behind the state-sponsored terrorism in our own backyard. I’m hoping that our government will take all this seriously and look into it and stop such terrorist acts on US soil.

Mr. Jekielek:
Erping Zhang, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Zhang:
Thank you very much for having me here.