Just days before the New Tang Dynasty TV's Chinese New Year Global Spectacular opens in Houston this weekend, agents of the Chinese regime work nonstop to undermine the show.
Chinese agents have been jamming the show's ticket-purchasing and information hotlines in an attempt to prevent legitimate customers from seeing the show. The repeated calls to the hotlines are all made using recordings from a phone number from mainland China, 86-17911022000. Epoch Times reporters calling this number receive either busy signals or are told it is an invalid number.
Other cites hosting the touring Chinese New Year Spectacular, such as New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta, have received similar harassing phone calls during the last two days.
On February 1, the ticketing hotlines of the New Tang Dynasty TV's (NTDTV's) Spectacular in New York received harassing phone calls every other minute. These calls continued throughout the night. This incident has been reported to the police.
The ticketing hotlines in Washington DC were also the target of harassing phone calls throughout the last two days. These calls jammed the phone lines, making it impossible for customers to ask for information.
According to Ms. Liu from the NTDTV New Year Spectacular's preparation committee, Chicago's three Spectacular ticketing hotlines also received large number of recorded calls from a China number, 86-17911020000. One minute of the recording is in Chinese and one-and-a-half minutes in English. The calls have severely interfered with ticket sale.
This year, NTDTV has hosted the Chinese New Year Global Spectacular in Vancouver, San Francisco, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Taiwan. The Spectacular will tour more cities around the world for a total of 76 performances, reaching a projected audience of 200,000 people. The show, which highlights traditional Chinese culture through music and dance, has been received enthusiastically and has been highly acclaimed by viewers. While bringing joy to the Chinese audience during the holiday, NTDTV's New Year Spectacular has attracted increasing attention among western viewers.
The Chinese communist regime has severely interfered with the New Year's celebration show. According to NTDTV Los Angeles, the Chinese consulate there used various means to undermine the Spectacular, including writing to media and government officials to defame the show and pressuring sponsors to withdraw their support for the show.
The Chinese Consulate General in Sydney sent large number of letters to members of Parliament of Australia and New South Wales, attacking NTDTV and urging the legislators not to record or write New Year's greetings for NTDTV, and not to attend the NTDTV reception and New Year's show.
In South Korea, the Chinese communist regime pressured the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Culture and Tourism, and the National Theater of Korea to cancel the NTDTV New Year Spectacular, using the National Theater's scheduled June 2007 China performance as a bargaining chip. As a result, NTDTV's Chinese New Year Spectacular was canceled in Seoul the day before its was scheduled to open.
NTDTV hosted a press conference on January 29, inviting reporters from the Associated Press, Reuters, New York Post, Bloomberg Radio, New Yorker TV, and several other media companies. At the press conference, NTDTV exposed the underlying reasons for the Chinese regime's suppression and interference.
Dr. Samuel Zhou, Vice President of Programming at NTDTV, pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long maintained a philosophy of struggle and violence, and cannot coexist with authentic traditional Chinese culture. This is the underlying reason for the CCP's suppression of NTDTV's Spectacular show. The CCP not only uses economic pressure to threaten the show's sponsors, it has also intimidated participating performers.
Epoch Times columnist Heng He expressed his dismay at the CCP's actions. He said it is hard to imagine the Chinese communist regime harbors such a deep hatred of the Spectacular, which promotes pure traditional Chinese culture overseas, so much so that the regime has mobilized the nation's resources, such as international trade, cultural exchange, foreign diplomacy and non-governmental exchange, to suppress the show.
Wu Fan, editor-in-chief of China Affairs magazine, strongly protests the CCP's illegal activities. He said these activities violate U.S. law, and has called for the U.S. government's attention.
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