Subminarea din interior a Americii de către Partidul Comunist Chinez

Welcome to our special report on the CCP's covert war inside of the United States. I'm Steve Lance. The Chinese Communist Party has been working for decades to infiltrate American institutions, and now it's carrying out a major test of its effectiveness. If it succeeds, the CCP could target any individual or group inside of the U.S. The scope of this operation ranges from media and academia to our legal system and even our federal agencies. For decades, the CCP has waged an aggressive campaign of political warfare, a strategy to weaken our nation without ever firing a shot. The end goal is clear, to weaken and defeat America. The Chinese Communist Party is pouring massive amounts of resources into shaping U.S. media coverage of China, activating proxies and even unwitting allies to spread false or misleading narratives. At the heart of this campaign is a strategy to weaponize American institutions against American values. And if the CCP succeeds, it will be able to manipulate public opinion inside of the United States at will. China is engaged in a highly sophisticated, malign foreign influence campaign, and its methods include bribery, blackmail and covert deals. We've now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. To understand the full picture, we have to take a step back to 1999. This is when a brutal persecution began inside of mainland China, targeting the Falun Gong spiritual discipline. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation practice with a spiritual component based on the three principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. The persecution began when the practice rapidly grew in popularity, surpassing Communist Party members. Over the past 25 years, millions of Falun Gong adherents have been detained inside of China. Over 100,000 have been sentenced for refusing to give up their faith, and over 5,000 have been confirmed killed by torture. Hundreds of thousands more have been killed by live, forced organ harvesting. This is a brutal practice which is state-run by the Chinese Communist regime. And of course, what you've got with China is complete denial, cover-up, obfuscation, counter-narrative. I mean, the most implausible sort. But unfortunately, the problem isn't too little evidence, it's too much. The CCP actually pioneered its playbook of mass surveillance and organ harvesting on Falun Gong. Along with this unprecedented crime against humanity of organ harvesting, the CCP also launched a massive disinformation campaign to turn public opinion against Falun Gong both inside and outside of China, labeling the group as an evil cult and fabricating an onslaught of propaganda to demonize the practice. But unlike the Uyghur Muslims or house Christians or even Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong was uniquely vulnerable to this propaganda, simply because it was relatively new to the public, being introduced in 1992 by its founder, Mr. Li Hongzhi. In response to this persecution and disinformation campaign, the overseas community of Falun Gong practitioners founded companies and non-profits to raise awareness. You may have heard of some. The Epoch Times, which is not just in English, but also happens to be the largest Chinese language newspaper independent from the CCP outside of China. Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance company with the tagline, China before communism, along with the Sound of Hope radio and our very own NTD television. At every turn, the CCP has opposed these efforts by activating diplomats to pressure governments, threatening family members in China of Falun Gong practitioners, and even waging cyber attacks. As non-profit Freedom House puts it, China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. The CCP targets entire ethnic and religious groups, including Falun Gong practitioners. But now the CCP appears to be shifting tactics, focusing on American media, social media, and even our own legal system, all in an effort to target the Falun Gong community. America's ability to fend off such attacks is a test run for how Beijing can influence or even dictate our own institutions. The Chinese regime is afraid that the full scope and scale of its atrocities committed against Falun Gong will be exposed widely and on the world stage. At the same time, they see the rise of Falun Gong's voice across America becoming stronger and more credible. For Beijing, this is a race for survival. To destroy Falun Gong's voice before knowledge of its atrocities against the group reaches a tipping point that could wind up toppling the CCP. Human rights abuses in China, particularly against Falun Gong, are a third rail for the Chinese Communist Party, or looked at another way, the Achilles heel of the regime. Now picture this. You have a ticket to see Shen Yun at the Kennedy Center in the nation's capital this year, perhaps with a family member or a friend. Then you see on the news that the Kennedy Center has been evacuated for a bomb threat. As the president is putting an emphasis on arts and culture, what's the administration's message to potentially foreign state actors who are trying to disrupt that in the U.S.? Don't disrupt it. This administration will take that very seriously and hold you accountable. We obviously condemn any violence or threats of violence against American institutions. Now Shen Yun has multiple touring companies, eight to be exact. Fortunately, their evening not canceled. The show proceeds as planned without any real danger. But the very same evening in Milwaukee, the same show received the same threats. And over the next weeks in Alabama, California, Canada, Taiwan, and across Europe, something bigger is going on. The bomb threats are only the tip of the iceberg. In late 2022, Xi Jinping ordered a dramatic escalation in the campaign against Falun Gong, especially inside of the United States. Leaked notes from the Chinese Communist Party's Ministry of Public Security revealed the bottom line. Attract the continuous attention of the entire United States society and force the U.S. government to strike on all fronts, eliminating the force of Falun Gong. Leading the effort, China's Ministry of State Security, or MSS, China's equivalent of the CIA. MSS chief Chen Yixin heads this CCP state apparatus, which oversees foreign intelligence collection, espionage abroad and wages influence campaigns, as well as transnational repression on U.S. soil. The big new directive is to activate CCP special agents and proxies in the West to spread disinformation and trigger lawfare against Falun Gong-affiliated entities. The plan includes attacks on social media, manipulating search engines, activating embedded CCP spies, and getting Western mainstream media to demonize Falun Gong. It involves not only just the social media and mainstream media aspects, it also involves, they talked a lot about activating what looks like to be a large network of spies to create division, both in our community and but also with Falun Gong and the U.S. government and other governments. So it's some pretty alarming stuff. The CCP nearly succeeded in one of its operations back in 2024. However, due to an FBI sting operation, two CCP agents were convicted for trying to bribe an IRS official to revoke Shen Yun's nonprofit tax-exempt status. The IRS official, however, was an undercover FBI agent. The end goal is using U.S. federal agencies to do the bidding of the CCP. This is a playbook that could be directed to sabotage any individual or group in the United States, including American politicians or anyone deemed to be a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. A major piece of the puzzle, legal warfare, also known as lawfare. Chinese Communist Party, that has already squashed freedom at home, now seeks to export its authoritarian model of control across the globe. It is now trying to exploit the American legal system. So let's take a closer look at how this operation is actually working. In one telling 2024 case, a New York judge dismissed a series of environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun's headquarters as both vague, illogical, and an oxymoron. But the lawsuit still succeeded in drawing resources and generating negative press against the Shen Yun and Falun Gong community. Meantime, Beijing-backed social media influencers are now leveraging their audience with the goal to bait mainstream U.S. media and trigger U.S. government investigations. Let's take a look. One Chinese-American YouTuber has declared Falun Gong his enemy. He bragged on social media about helping the New York Times reporters by introducing them to disgruntled former Shen Yun performers, some of whom have since developed suspicious ties to Beijing upon being let go from Shen Yun. So what about the New York Times reporters? These same two previously won a Pulitzer Prize while working as a team at the Wall Street Journal. That series was later used to form the basis of the so-called hush money case against then former president Donald Trump. One of these reporters, Nicole Hong, is the daughter of a man with decades of ties to the CCP's United Front Work Department, an organization that reports directly to the Central Committee of the CCP and works hand-in-glove with the CCP's Ministry of State Security, carry out influence operations and suppress dissident voices abroad. For the past 25 years, Falun Gong practitioners have been rampantly detained tortured and killed inside of mainland China. The New York Times has been deafeningly silent on this, not much dedication at all to time, resources or print space inside of their publication. In fact, in 2019, when an international tribunal in London exposed evidence of forced organ harvesting, a New York Times journalist based in Beijing at that time shared that she was forbidden from covering this story by her editors at the New York Times. Suddenly in 2024, over the span of a few months, the New York Times has since published 12 articles that are completely hostile toward Falun Gong and specifically the dance group Shen Yun Performing Arts. This is a remarkable amount of editorial ink and attention for the New York Times to give, not to mention on an American performing arts company acting as a soft power tool to stifle communist influence on American soil. So if we look at what these articles about Shen Yun leave out, we see a serious breach of journalistic standards. The interviewees documented ties to the CCP are not even mentioned. Lengthy communications with Shen Yun performers with positive experiences and doctors who have treated Shen Yun performers are also not brought up. And cultural context about common Asian practices also omitted, leaving behind a sinister narrative painting Shen Yun in a dark light. Bias by omission is what responsible journalism strives to avoid. Instead, the timing and substance of these reports eerily helps building Beijing's endgame. Back on social media, thousands of accounts on X heavily promoted the New York Times articles. After an internal investigation, X removed the accounts as inauthentic propaganda accounts, but not before they made one article set the yearly record for shares for the New York Times. It uses our own media. One good example is its attack on the Falun Gong. It's basically convinced the entire academic university system in the United States that they are a brainwashed cult. They've done the same thing to our media institutions. And so, you know, that is the way they do it is by controlling our own narratives. And you're saying that they're not a brainwashed cult? I think they're just a group of people that are dissidents of the Chinese communist regime. But this won't stop with Shen Yun nor Falun Gong. This is a playbook that once proven effective, Beijing could run against any individual or organization in America. Rebuffing this campaign is therefore a critical issue of national security, national sovereignty, and democratic resilience in the face of a foreign dictatorial regime. Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S. are actively working to expose the CCP's persecution and let the American people know just how serious the threat from the CCP is to the American way of life. If the CCP can silence Falun Gong in the U.S., there's a lot less standing in the way of future operations in America. For example, a single performance by Shen Yun can leave audience members with a vastly different view of China, Chinese history, the CCP, and Falun Gong in stark contrast from the one that the regime has invested billions of dollars to shape. Shen Yun publications say the show doesn't just present China before communism, but a world without communism. Xi Jinping's 2022 plan has now become a reality on every front, from bomb threats to frivolous lawsuits, to bribery, attacks on social media, from fronts we didn't even get into, like cyber attacks and violence against Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S., to the even more unthinkable, manipulating mainstream American media and exploiting U.S. government agencies. We're now at the point where the CCP is using the media and legal system in the United States to persecute Falun Gong and companies started by Falun Gong practitioners. While this is going on, the CCP is still actively torturing and killing practitioners in China at scale. Using American institutions to cover up its horrendous human rights violations is a deep violation of American values and American sovereignty. For the CCP, this is not a sideshow, but a central existential dilemma. The question now becomes, how will the United States respond? To quote U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, if we stay on the road we're on right now, in less than 10 years, virtually everything that matters to us in life will depend on whether communist China allows us to have it or not. The U.S. House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Falun Gong Protection Act to sanction those involved in forced live organ harvesting in China. Let us affirm that the United States will always, will always champion truth, compassion and tolerance. But now the major concern about Beijing's influence operation is its focus on baiting or weaponizing federal agencies right here in the U.S. The Falun Dafa Information Center calls for a federal task force to assess the CCP's malign influence campaign and an investigation into the origins of the New York Times reporting and related governmental investigations. Shen Yun says officials may have good faith questions based upon recent media articles. We believe that those accusations have no merit and that they are part of the CCP's campaign. Shen Yun also says they welcome discussion that includes voices from the Falun Gong community. For the CCP, this is a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. If the CCP is able to weaponize our institutions and silence Falun Gong on American soil, we risk not only a propaganda victory for Beijing, but the erosion of the very freedom of belief our nation was founded upon, a betrayal of our core values and a dangerous precedent for all who cherish liberty. I'm Steve Lance. Thank you for joining us for this special report on the CCP's covert war in America.