The Little Town Being Taken Over by Falun Gong

When Diana, the second-floor clerk at the New Middletown shopping center, hears I’m visiting from the city, she insists I see Shen Yun at Lincoln Center.

“It’s traditional Chinese culture,” she tells me. “No communism!”

Shen Yun, of course, is the traveling agitprop dance troupe controlled by Falun Gong, a religious movement born in China in the early 1990s that today has its headquarters at a 400-acre estate in the woods of upstate New York. Two other well-known mouthpieces of the movement are The Epoch Times newspaper and its television affiliate, New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, notorious trumpets of right-wing disinformation. Both outlets made news in June when Epoch CFO Weidong “Bill” Guan was indicted for allegedly running a $67 million money-laundering scheme and the media conglomerate’s founder, Zhong “John” Tang, subsequently resigned.

But for all the noise Epoch has made lately, much of Falun Gong’s business operates silently, like this bright, glossy shopping center on a weekday afternoon. Shelves of Falun Gong literature bank the stairhead, and the rest of the store, laid out like a flea market, offers a panoply of imported foods and kitchenware products — most from East Asia — as well as jewelry, stationery, accessories, and apparel.

Located 20 minutes east of the main Falun Gong compound, Middletown is experiencing a slow-motion annexation by the sect. Through its various arms, it has acquired over $18 million in real estate in this working-class town of 30,000 residents — not counting the many more properties its adherents and their companies have purchased in recent years. As with many things here, peel back the veneer and you’ll find Guan, Tang, and the Epoch media operation behind them. Shen Yun Collections acquired the shopping center last year from Universal Communications Network, the company through which the two men ran NTD.

Next to the New Middletown checkout counter are promotions for Gan Jing World, a “clean content” app that lifts videos from YouTube and splices them with NTD, Epoch, and Shen Yun content. Gan Jing World’s headquarters is a squat four-story office building a five-minute walk from the store, facing a fossilized factory plastered with chiropractor ads. One of the start-up’s vice-presidents moved to Middletown from San Francisco, where she had worked as president of Epoch’s branch there. Earlier this year, Gan Jing World assured an inquiring reporter from Columbia Journalism Review that the company is just “friends” with Epoch and not formally affiliated. Yet an executive from Epoch’s Texas office helpfully undercut this claim by filing incorporation paperwork for the “Falun Dafa Gan Jing World Foundation” at the app’s new Middletown digs in 2023. That entity, in turn, bought two adjacent properties from Universal Communications: a storage facility that today provides extra parking to the app’s employees, and a defunct Honda dealership that’s now a soundstage called GJW Studios.

Meanwhile, across the street from the New Middletown center is Dayes Coffee Roasters, which is undergoing renovations and slated to reopen soon. The windows may be papered over, but it’s easy to peer through the façade. Trademark records show Dayes belongs to a firm called World Fortunes Inc., which Guan and Tang founded in 2015. (World Fortunes also, until recently, operated an auto-repair shop in Middletown’s south end.) The Epoch Times extols the brand’s “enzyme-fermented” brew, which is supposedly free from the toxic mold that festers in regular coffee.

Dayes’ website boasts a roastery on the town’s western fringe, on a stretch of scabby road populated mostly by aluminum-sided Cape Cods. Universal Communications owns this location, too. The gleaming café space wasn’t operational yet, but a man sat in an adjoining garage amid packing detritus and chrome roasting equipment. He pointed me up a hill, advising I would find an open Dayes shop in a former psychiatric center the city sold in 2017 to Falun Gong’s Fei Tian College, which last fall turned it over to a nonprofit controlled by Tang and Guan.

The cluster of brick buildings in various stages of rehabilitation reflects the extent to which Epoch has insinuated itself into the community. Under the leadership of Mayor Joseph DeStefano, Middletown continues to buy abandoned structures at the former sanitarium from the state and transfer them to Falun Gong–linked entities. The city also sold off a former community center in 2021 that now serves as the recording studio of the Epoch-affiliated Sound of Hope radio network.

DeStefano told me all deals had gone through a formal public-approval process.

“They’re spending millions and millions of dollars renovating buildings that were abandoned by the State of New York and that nobody else was interested in, I might add,” the mayor said. “I’ve never dealt with a more straightforward and honest group of people in my life.”

Sadly, the Dayes café on campus was empty except for one guy painting the ceiling. “We open tomorrow,” he said.

No matter, though: Dayes beans are available online — and online is where the greater part of Epoch’s dominion lies. Dayes, for instance, is sold on a site called BestGift.com, which is controlled by yet another Tang-founded company based in the Epoch offices. BestGift calls itself “an official retail partner of The Epoch Times” and offers discounts to the paper’s paying subscribers. The target market is evident in the lead image on the site: a group of white senior citizens toasting with white wine outdoors. Besides java, it hawks garden products, decorative mailboxes, soaps, and joint-pain supplements.

Meanwhile, World Fortunes, the owner of Dayes, also operates Beauty Within, a website on which a pair of 30-something podcaster-influencers push various skin-care products for young women — ones often similar to cosmetics that shipping manifests show World Fortunes has imported from South Korea to a Middletown address. Epoch and NTD promote Beauty Within content, while the hosts promote Falun Gong. Their YouTube account has over 2 million followers.

Another World Fortunes project is Youlucky.biz, which is aimed at the Chinese-speaking diaspora. Paying subscribers can watch translations of Epoch’s YouTube series American Thought Leaders, featuring interviews with the likes of Grover Norquist and Christopher Rufo. They can also shop its “Mall” section for beauty products, clothing, and electronics.

Gan Jing World, meanwhile, offers not just the app content but a subscription service called GJW+, which streams low-budget-looking animated programming and documentaries, and a Gan Jing Campus product that provides Falun-flavored educational videos.

Even more ambitious is one of the last ventures Guan launched before his arrest: Epoch Studios’ first feature-length film, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and conservative favorite Kevin Sorbo (a.k.a. Hercules, if you grew up in the 1990s). Called The Firing Squad, it is loosely based on Indonesia’s 2015 execution of a group of drug traffickers, some of whom had converted to Evangelical Christianity. “I found Christ in here,” Sorbo’s character relates over the trailer’s stirring strings. “I found Christ too,” rasps Gooding.

The trailer boasts that the film has the same marketing team as The Passion of the Christ and Sound of Freedom, and its website has adopted the latter’s strategy of urging supporters to buy out multiple seats or even whole theaters in a campaign to “bring one million souls to Jesus.” The flick hit screens, including two movie houses in Middletown, on August 2.

The question, of course, is why: Why all the side hustles, why take over an upstate town?

A former Epoch Times staffer who requested anonymity recalled the business struggling when they worked there a decade ago. Reporters labored for paltry salaries at Ikea desks they assembled themselves, and they depended in part on meals a Falun Gong practitioner cooked for them at the office. Epoch toggled through consecutive unsuccessful business models — free content with ads, paywalls, print delivery — and survived on donations from wealthy believers. “It has all the problems other companies face in digital,” the former staffer said, suggesting that all the ancillary companies represent efforts to find additional revenue.

Epoch simply might have arrived at the same conclusion as other 21st-century publications: The news business just isn’t business enough, and a media venture must become a lifestyle brand for its consumers. Seen this way, Middletown — where your shopping and coffee and education and entertainment and even, till recently, your oil change can send money back to Falun Gong and its media affiliates — begins to look like the Epoch empire in microcosm.

There are means of taking in cash besides operating a profitable enterprise, however, and having numerous corporate faces can prove useful for this, too. For instance, The Firing Squad website urges supporters to invest in the movie — and to mail checks to a Guan company located in Epoch’s offices. This has reaped more than $2 million to date.

That’s a pittance compared to the $46 million and counting in federal grants and loans that Epoch, Shen Yun, Falun Gong, and assorted subsidiaries obtained during the pandemic. Further, federal prosecutors in the money-laundering case against Guan allege he had “fraudulently procured unemployment insurance benefits obtained using stolen personal identification information” via various “media entities.” Epoch, Guan’s attorney, and Tang did not respond to requests for comment.

Working behind various corporate curtains also grants a degree of secrecy. A woman walking her dog in the park, the elderly couple I accosted en route to dinner, the bartender at the local brewpub (every Hudson Valley town has one) all told me they hadn’t noticed much that had changed around town except the Chinese names appearing over local businesses and some additional Asian Americans on the streets.

“Everything honestly seems like the same,” Meghan, the woman with the dog, told me.

Ignorance was also Mayor DeStefano’s plea. Enjoying regular friendly coverage and his own tag on Epoch’s website, the long-reigning Democrat cut the ribbon at the opening of the New Middletown center, appeared at multiple Gan Jing World events, and has issued repeated proclamations for “World Falun Dafa Day” — even praising the sect’s work toward a “peaceful, tolerant, more compassionate society.”

Through Election Day, the campaign headquarters of the Orange County Democratic Party will be housed in a freshly renovated property opposite the shopping center, owned by a Flushing-based Falun Gong activist who has repeatedly appeared in The Epoch Times. The refreshed façade is owed to a $25,000 city-administered loan to the new owner that DeStefano signed off on in 2019.

DeStefano, the former party chair, admitted to helping arrange the lease but said he had shown his fellow Democrats several locations and underscored the official protocols the loan went through.

He denied knowing that the property owner is linked to the movement — in fact, he denied knowing that many of the new investors in Middletown are involved in Epoch and Falun Gong. He also denied any awareness of Falun Gong’s founder having denounced homosexuality as “filthy” and “repulsive” or of the cult’s history of alleged racial discrimination. He added that he had never met Tang or Guan, even though companies the two created control growing swaths of his city.

What matters, DeStephano argued, is that new residents and “several millions of dollars” are pouring in and that down-in-the-mouth brick storefronts are getting fixed and filled. He said he’d never had any interest in tracing Epoch’s web, even as it entangled his town. “I don’t do a background check on people we’re dealing with,” he said. “That’s none of my business.”