In October 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a secret meeting instructing top state officials—overseeing political, intelligence, and influence operations—on a new strategy to target the Falun Gong spiritual group internationally, The Epoch Times has learned.

The focus of the Chinese regime’s latest anti-Falun Gong strategy is launching disinformation campaigns via social media influencers and Western media outlets and using the American legal system to go after companies started by Falun Gong practitioners.

Details of the 2022 secret meeting were provided by Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese legal scholar living in exile in Australia who has maintained connections within the Chinese regime’s top political circles. His account is based on information he received from two sources: an individual from a veteran Chinese Communist Party (CCP) family, who now opposes Xi, and an insider with knowledge speaking out for reasons of conscience.

The meeting took place right before the 20th National Congress, which saw Xi secure an unprecedented third term as Party leader. Xi told officials at the meeting that the regime’s previous efforts to suppress Falun Gong overseas had essentially failed.

Yuan said one of the main reasons Xi deemed international efforts against Falun Gong to be a failure was the growth of media organizations started by Falun Gong practitioners, which Xi said have become the main “hostile force” against the CCP—not just in Chinese, but also in English.

Media founded by Falun Gong practitioners include The Epoch Times and NTD, which were started in the early 2000s initially in Chinese. Both outlets now report in 23 languages and have branches around the world.

Xi said that despite years of expending large amounts of manpower, material resources, and money, the CCP had not only failed to suppress these media, but watched them grow into a leading counterforce to the CCP internationally.

According to the insiders’ accounts, the CCP leader described the situation as “dire” and said it was a major oversight on the part of the responsible officials.

Xi said he believed the failure stemmed in part from a lack of “strategic planning” and “thorough, forceful coordination.”

On top of that, Xi considered the existing suppression tactics as too “reserved, conservative, and not creative enough”; and while the regime has poured a significant amount of resources into the effort, a large portion of that, upon disciplinary inspection, turned out to be wasted through corruption.

Xi said they were not sufficient.

Traditionally, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the 610 Office—an extralegal apparatus specifically charged with carrying out the persecution against Falun Gong—had carried out the campaign overseas. Xi ordered a structural overhaul, according to Yuan.

Xi assigned the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the overseer of all legal enforcement authorities, to coordinate the task both inside and outside China.

Under the commission’s oversight, the Ministry of Public Security, with its roughly 2 million law enforcement officers, was put in charge of persecution efforts in China.

The Ministry of State Security, the Chinese regime’s top spy agency, was tasked with attacking Falun Gong overseas, with the United Front Work Department, the CCP’s overseas influence operation arm, and the relevant department from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs playing supporting roles.

“To fight a snake, hit at the seventh inch,” Yuan’s source quoted Xi as saying. The phrase is a Chinese idiom meaning to strike where it hurts most.

Xi instructed officials to attack Falun Gong with lawfare and disinformation, deploying social media and media with no traceable ties to the CCP. He told them to direct their energy toward smearing Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, and to discrediting Falun Gong-founded media through inside operatives.

Xi wants to use social media and Western media in his war of public opinion because he believes using CCP state media is not effective overseas, since it is seen as propaganda.

The Western press has long been used in propaganda wars by communist countries.

“What the CCP is doing is precisely what the Soviets did in terms of trying to get their narrative, their propaganda into recognized Western newspapers, magazines, media outlets,” Ronald J. Rychlak, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Mississippi and an expert on disinformation, told The Epoch Times.

Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, said the CCP has been at this for decades and has “become very, very good at it.” He added that new technologies have allowed the CCP to scale up.

Chen had previously been the mayor of Wuhan and later the secretary-general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. During his tenure at both posts, persecution increased against Falun Gong.

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The whistleblower said Chen considers the issue his political capital and is aiming to “resolve the ‘Falun Gong issue’ by the end of the year.”

The spy chief’s ascension to the post was accompanied by a surge in human rights abuses under his charge.

Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners suffered harassment or arrest during Chen’s time as head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Hundreds of practitioners died during that period, according to incomplete estimates by Minghui.org, which collects accounts directly from China.

Meanwhile, Wuhan, the city Chen had previously presided over, became a model for persecution. The commission even dispatched people to Wuhan’s brainwashing center—a facility used to force people to renounce their faith—so that they could learn the tactics and apply them nationwide, according to Minghui.

Overseas, Chen’s ministry has a number of networks that can be readily deployed. A letter obtained by The Epoch Times from March 2021 shows that the agency and the Ministry of Public Security collectively oversee an “anti-Falun Gong North America Office.”

An individual named Wu Xiuhua was named the director of the office, according to the letter. It credits him for “planning and organizing multiple tasks to hinder” Falun Gong practitioners’ efforts to spread information about the persecution inside China and describes him as a man with “extensive anti-Falun Gong experience.”

Dozens of social media accounts have sprung up specifically targeting Falun Gong and Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance and music company founded by Falun Gong practitioners that depicts traditional China as it existed before communism.

“I was the one who introduced people [ex-Shen Yun performers] to the New York Times, especially for the initial interviews. They found additional people through that,” he wrote on X following the publication of a New York Times hit piece on Shen Yun earlier this year.

The individual also bragged about filing complaints against Shen Yun with New York state authorities in order to generate legal action against the arts group. He encouraged others to do the same.

Last year, he was tracked by law enforcement near Shen Yun’s campus. The FBI issued a warning to local law enforcement describing him as “potentially armed and dangerous.” He now faces charges for possessing firearms illegally.

The CCP also increased its efforts to target Shen Yun using the U.S. legal system.

The same two agents had traveled to Orange County, New York, where Shen Yun is based, to surveil Falun Gong practitioners and collect information that would serve as “the basis for a potential environmental lawsuit meant to inhibit the growth of the Falun Gong community in Orange County,” according to court filings.

Other legislators expressed similar concerns about the CCP exporting its human rights abuses to the United States.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he “strongly condemn[s] China’s latest series of attempts to commit human rights violations against pro-democracy group Falun Gong in the U.S. and abroad.”

“The CCP has a history of repressing pro-democracy groups beyond its borders as it seeks to strengthen its authoritarian grip on its own people,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that he commends U.S. law enforcement for “protecting democratic activists’ lives, civil liberties, and the rule of law.”

“For 25 years, the Chinese Communist Party has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners and all who seek to practice their faith without government interference,” she told The Epoch Times. “Oppressive regimes like the CCP must be held accountable for attacking human rights through disinformation and persecution.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), elected in November to the Senate, cited the Countering China’s Political Warfare Act he introduced. To tackle covert Chinese operations, Congress needs to pass the bill to “sanction CCP groups like the United Front that are waging political warfare against U.S. citizens and Chinese dissidents on American soil,” he told The Epoch Times.

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), a member of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, called the leaked instructions from Xi “disturbing.”

“We must continue to investigate the ways the Chinese Communist Party seeks to exert influence in the United States,” Carson told The Epoch Times.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), marking Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, said the occasion is a reminder that “we all need to recommit ourselves to upholding a high standard of human rights for every person on this planet.”

“The Chinese government, sadly, has had a horrific human rights record, and they have attacked numerous groups in China, and some of these attacks have come in the most vicious forms,” McGovern, a member of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, told The Epoch Times. He added that it’s important for everybody—not just lawmakers—to “stand up and denounce that.”

Only by holding perpetrators of transnational repression to account can dissidents live in the United States free of fear, he said.

Perry said that since the CCP is an adversary, the United States must be vigilant.

“We should have increased scrutiny on all their activities and with the mindset that they would do these things purposefully,” he said. “And when we find that to be the case, severe, strict, and sudden consequences need to be imposed.”

He said the situation presents an opportunity to “send a stronger message” to the CCP and Xi Jinping.

“Closing consulates and other diplomatic means can be things that we would consider,” Perry told The Epoch Times.

“The Communist Party of China is essentially a criminal organization running a country,” he said, adding that since the United States doesn’t allow criminal organizations to use government systems to persecute adversaries or violate basic human rights, “we certainly shouldn’t let the CCP do it either.”