The Chinese Communist Party needs little excuse to arrest and imprison somebody. Suppose a laptop that regime police find in a targeted home happens to be displaying an article about Shen Yun. This is the successful dance troupe associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement that the CCP regards as anathema. The Party has been struggling to stamp out Falun Gong for more than a quarter century (Epoch Times, November 6, 2025).
Local Chinese police had followed a woman they knew to be a Falun Gong practitioner, with the intention to arrest her for her faith, as she headed to an acquaintance’s house. The police entered the residence and found the two reading the article on a laptop. This interest in an American performing arts company was used as key evidence in both their arrests, as it was highlighted in court documents that recounted the incidents.
Authorities seized two copies of Falun Gong texts and the laptop during their raid of the residence. According to court documents, the woman also said she had asked her acquaintance to quit the Chinese Communist Party, a request that’s part of a grassroots effort to encourage Chinese people to sever all ties with the regime’s crimes against humanity.
The woman surveilled was known to police to be a Falun Gong practitioner, because she was first detained for practicing Falun Gong in 1999, according to court documents, and had subsequently been detained several times for refusing to give up her faith.
Prosecutors argued that because the woman had previously been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for her faith and yet was still practicing Falun Gong, she was a “recidivist” warranting a higher sentence.
These and many similar examples are drawn from court documents that the Epoch Times says “span more than a decade.” The publication does not say how it obtained them.
One man, a farmer, was sent to a labor camp for one year in 2002 for practicing Falun Gong. Ten years later, he was detained in February 2012 because he was “suspected of the same crime,” court documents said. He was only formally arrested a month later, while he remained in detention. According to court documents, he was caring for an elderly mother and young son at the time of arrest, and his lawyer pleaded for leniency.
Police found in the farmer’s possession a satellite TV receiver that would have allowed him to watch programs blocked by the CCP’s internet firewall, as well as many DVDs the police believed were intended for distribution. Some included Falun Gong content, and thousands of DVD case covers bore names suggesting they might be used to distribute discs with Shen Yun content.
Any scrap of information that enables the Chinese Communist Party to associate a target with an officially persecuted group, or confirm a known or suspected association, counts as evidence for the CCP—not of a crime but of the fact that the person belongs to the verboten group.
Practitioners of Falun Gong have at least two strikes against them. One is that Falun Gong is not an officially approved religion, i.e., not a religion the institutions of which the Party oversees and regulates to such an extent that they become an adjunct of the Party. The other is that Falun Gong works nonstop to counter CCP propaganda and otherwise resist the party-state.
Also see:
3 Musketeers: “Truth Revealed by Shen Yun Dancer”
