In late February 2026, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was evacuated from his residence in Canberra after an anonymous message warned that explosives had been planted on the grounds. The threat was sent to the local organizers hosting a touring dance company, Shen Yun Performing Arts, and it demanded that the shows be called off.
About five weeks later, a similar email cleared out the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto shortly before a Shen Yun matinee. Police found nothing, but the venue canceled the remaining performances in the run, citing safety concerns and a pattern of escalating threats.
The two incidents were the most attention‑grabbing episodes in a widening campaign of intimidation that has followed the company around the world — one that has gained new currency this summer, as President Trump's warnings about communism in the United States put the word back in American headlines. According to leaked information, the campaign traces to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party and includes a wide range of tactics to silence the performing arts company, including lawfare, disinformation, media influence, and attempts to manipulate United States government agencies to work on behalf of the Chinese regime.
Shen Yun Performing Arts was founded in New York in 2006 by practitioners of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice persecuted by the Chinese regime. Touring with multiple companies each year, it stages classical Chinese dance, an orchestra that blends Chinese and Western instruments, and story‑dances drawn from Chinese history and mythology. Some numbers also depict the persecution of Falun Gong in present‑day China — the element Beijing has objected to most.
In recent years, federal prosecutors have won convictions against people who admitted working inside the United States at Beijing’s direction — with Shen Yun and Falun Gong among their targets.
In May 2023 the Department of Justice charged John Chen and Lin Feng in a bribery scheme aimed at Shen Yun. Prosecutors said the two tried to bribe someone they believed was an IRS official — in fact an undercover FBI agent — to strip the nonprofit of its tax‑exempt status. Both pleaded guilty in July 2024 to acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government and to bribery; Chen was sentenced to 20 months in prison and Feng to 16. According to the department, Chen said on a recorded call that the bribes, funded by the Chinese government, were meant to help carry out its aim of “toppl[ing] . . . the Falun Gong.”
Chen’s case does not stand alone. In February 2026, Yaoning “Mike” Sun of Chino Hills, California, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of Beijing while advising a Southern California city‑council candidate. Prosecutors said Sun took direction from Chinese officials, and, in a report to Chinese authorities, described countering “anti‑China forces” that included Falun Gong.
A third case reached further into the diaspora. Ping Li, a Florida information‑technology worker, was sentenced in November 2024 to four years for conspiring to act as an agent of China. The Justice Department said Li supplied the Ministry of State Security with information on Chinese dissidents, pro‑democracy activists, members of Falun Gong, and U.S.‑based nonprofits.
Prosecutors and analysts place the cases within a phenomenon the FBI calls transnational repression: efforts by foreign governments to reach across borders to intimidate, silence, coerce, or harass diaspora and exile communities. The bureau says it can take the form of threats, surveillance, harassment, cyber activity, pressure on relatives back home, and the misuse of legal or bureaucratic processes. For Shen Yun, the campaign against them now holds several of those elements at once — threats against performers and their family members, pressure on venues, surveillance of their headquarters, and attempted corruption of the U.S. tax system.
Shen Yun and the Falun Dafa Information Center, a human rights organization that tracks the incidents, say the company, practitioners, and their supporters have been targeted by over 200 incidents worldwide since March 2024. Many of these include bomb, mass‑shooting, and death threats emailed to theaters and ticketing services. Nearly all proved to be hoaxes, and no one has been hurt. But they have triggered evacuations and police responses across North America, Europe, and Asia.
In at least one instance, investigators have traced the threats to China. Taiwan’s Liberty Times reported in April 2025 that the country’s Criminal Investigation Bureau had examined bomb threats to Shen Yun and traced technical indicators to a Huawei‑linked research institute in Xi’an, in central China.
The threats have not stopped at the theater door. Some have named federal targets — the FBI, Congress, and the White House — and in February 2025 a bomb threat forced the evacuation of the entire Kennedy Center complex in Washington ahead of a Shen Yun performance.
Some of the pressure has come from individuals operating openly online. One U.S.-based commentator built a following attacking Shen Yun and Falun Gong. Beginning in 2023 his output escalated from criticism to menace, including videos in which he handled a loaded handgun. On September 7, 2023, the Justice Department issued an “Officer Safety” alert to law enforcement in New York and Massachusetts, warning that he was “potentially armed and dangerous” after he was seen near Shen Yun’s headquarters; he was later charged with illegal firearms possession. In videos the following year he warned the company’s dance instructors that “you should be afraid of me.”
He also cast himself as a conduit to the press, writing on X in August 2024 that he had introduced former Shen Yun performers to The New York Times for its reporting on the company — placing him at the intersection of the campaign’s two faces: the threats, and the effort to shape how Shen Yun is portrayed.
For some in Shen Yun, the campaign is not abstract. Steven Wang, a former principal dancer who now teaches, has spoken publicly about his family in China. Testimony compiled by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom states that his mother, Liu Aihua, was sentenced in Hunan Province to four years in prison in March 2023; the commission lists her in its database of religious prisoners of conscience.
For a New York–based company whose performers are Americans and U.S. residents, a threatening email in New York or Toronto is irrevocably bound to China. But the federal cases make clear that the campaign is no longer only a foreign matter: agents of the Chinese regime are operating on American soil.
This summer's argument over communism is not only a matter of political speech. The government behind these cases is a communist party-state, and its activity here has been established in court, through indictments, guilty pleas, and prison sentences.
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