After more than a decade of using diplomatic intimidation, Beijing is now primarily sending bomb and mass shooting threats to scare theaters and lawmakers.
On Feb. 3, the Zénith de Dijon theater in France received an alarming email. “I placed multiple bombs in the theater,” the sender claimed.
The email demanded that an upcoming show by the New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts be canceled or else the theater would be “blown into rubble.”
Some 80 minutes before the show was scheduled to start, the theater was evacuated and inspected by police. No bombs were found. The performance proceeded, albeit with a delay.
Incidents of this kind have become a recurring nightmare for the performing arts company. Over the past year, it has faced dozens of such threats—all of which have proven to be false.
The company has no doubt as to the origin of the threats: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Several experts consulted by The Epoch Times agreed.
The CCP has become notorious for exerting diplomatic pressure to sabotage Shen Yun shows; for the past 15 years, it has pressured local theaters and officials around the world to cancel contracts already signed and shows already scheduled. In a 2024 report, the Falun Dafa Information Center documented more than 130 incidents of interference by Chinese officials or their proxies targeting Shen Yun across 38 countries. Those efforts, however, have mostly failed, giving way to more brazen threats.
Beijing has directed its ire at Shen Yun because of the company’s dazzling dance and musical performances that present traditional Chinese culture free of communist influence, under the tagline “China before communism.”
The company was started by practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that includes meditative exercises and teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. The CCP marked the practice for elimination in 1999 after learning that more people had begun learning Falun Gong than there were members of the Party itself.
For the past 25 years, Falun Gong practitioners have faced brutal persecution involving imprisonment, torture, and even forced organ harvesting in China. Incessant harassment by the regime’s henchmen has extended to American soil.
