Over the last decade plus, Shen Yun advertisements and performances have become a familiar sight in cities across the United States and many other countries, primarily in North America, Europe, and East Asia.
Behind the name, which translates prosaically from Chinese as “the beauty of divine beings dancing,” is a story not just of artistic and commercial success, but also resilience in the face of unfathomable repression.
Shen Yun Performing Arts was founded in 2006 by adherents of Falun Gong, a meditative discipline of the Buddhist tradition that is harshly persecuted by the communist regime in its native China. From its headquarters in upstate New York, Shen Yun’s companies tour hundreds of cities each season, bringing classical Chinese dance to a global audience of roughly 1 million people annually.
During the 1990s, Falun Gong — also called Falun Dafa — was practiced freely by tens of millions of people in China who took up the discipline and its teachings of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. In July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abruptly declared Falun Gong a state enemy, and launched an all-out campaign to stamp out the practice.
Falun Gong practitioners have pushed back with their own efforts to clarify the truth about their faith and the persecution against it, as well as the ravages that communism has brought to China and the world.
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On top of the persecution Falun Gong suffers in mainland China, where believers are imprisoned, tortured, beaten to death, and even murdered for their organs, the CCP has also pushed to defame and silence the community overseas.
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A 2021 report by Freedom House states that “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world,” much of which is directed at Falun Gong and Shen Yun, especially in recent months.
The CCP has severely persecuted religion and faith since coming to power in 1949, imprisoning and executing believers and establishing Party-controlled front organizations to control and distort religious institutions.
Guided by Marxism-Leninism, an atheist ideology, the CCP sees faith, “and Falun Gong in particular, which has an authentic Chinese voice, as an existential threat,” Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times for a recent piece.
“They want to eradicate Falun Gong from the face of the earth and not just from China,” she said, highlighting the importance of this goal for helping the CCP exert and solidify its global power.
“It’s a threat, and it’s frightening for all Americans.”
One-sided coverage from a ‘paper of record’
While depicting China’s ancient artistic and cultural heritage, Shen Yun’s mission, to showcase “China before communism,” has long incurred the ire of Beijing — and more recently, influential voices in the free world.
On Aug. 15, The New York Times published a feature article on Shen Yun that characterized the company as exploitative and abusive. It also disparaged the belief system of Falun Gong and its founder, Master Li Hongzhi, through misrepresentative and inaccurate language, according to observers in the Falun Gong community.
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A second article published by The Times at midnight on Aug. 16 included similar “inaccuracies or glaring omissions regarding the faith and the deadly persecution practitioners face in China,” a statement by the Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) reads.
Focusing narrowly on interviews with a handful of disgruntled former Shen Yun performers, The Times “uses accounts from this unrepresentative sample to portray the entirety of the Falun Gong faith through a limited and biased secular lens, while excluding robust academic research that affirms the reality of organ transplant abuses and challenges the Chinese regime’s portrayals of the group as a cult,” FDIC wrote of the articles.
Falun Gong, like Buddhism, teaches supernatural concepts like the existence of karmic ties — that one will be rewarded for good deeds and punished for evil ones — and advocates moral values that may be seen as conservative, similar to religions like Christianity.
In a report released earlier this year, FDIC noted that the New York Times’ coverage, not just of Shen Yun but Falun Gong in general, has hewn strikingly close to the language used in Chinese state media to outcast the faith as backward, fanatical, or anti-science. Meanwhile, The Times has released few articles covering the human rights abuses against Falun Gong practitioners over the years, while running multiple pieces casting the CCP — including its former leader Jiang Zemin, who ordered the persecution of Falun Gong — in a sympathetic light.
One of the main rhetorical weapons the Communist Party used to justify its actions against Falun Gong was the false claim that the practice and its founder, Master Li Hongzhi, forbade disciples from receiving medical treatment.
The New York Times echoed and amplified the CCP’s rhetoric, claiming without evidence that Shen Yun performers were barred from seeking treatment for injuries they sustained while pursuing their craft. Shen Yun has refuted these claims, and is backed up by the bulk of current and former Shen Yun performers, many of whom cite the strong culture of faith as pushing them to hone their skills and improve themselves as individuals.
Playing into the CCP’s agenda
Shen Yun has long been targeted by the CCP in its propaganda and through active measures to undermine the company and its mission.
While “it is not entirely clear why the NY Times would engage in such deceitful and hateful reporting,” its handling of Shen Yun and “Falun Gong matches the disinformation playbook of the [CCP’s] propaganda machine,” FDIC noted in its statement.
In a report released this January, FDIC noted over 100 incidents targeting Shen Yun, including pressure from Communist China’s diplomatic missions, anti-Shen Yun ads in major newspapers, slashing tour bus tires, imprisoning performers’ relatives in China, and sending fake bomb threats to theaters and Shen Yun’s principal training ground.
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“Our goal has always been, and continues to be, to bring hope and inspiration to millions of people around the world by showcasing the beauty, depth, and spirituality of traditional Chinese culture. It is sad to see media companies in the West, wittingly or not, get caught up in the CCP’s illicit, global campaign to destroy the American company we built, and in so doing, deprive untold millions around the world from experiencing a vision of the China that once was, as well as a vision of a more hopeful and compassionate world,” Shen Yun said in a statement addressing The Times’ article on its website.
Recent years have seen the CCP step up its transnational repression, as described by human rights organizations and the U.S. government, particularly the State Department.
In recent months, the CCP has launched a renewed campaign to “expand the intensity, depth, and breadth” of the regime’s efforts to “fight Falun Gong” overseas, according to leaked internal documents reviewed and compiled by researchers at FDIC in an Aug. 7 report.
In particular, the campaign focused on weaponizing social media, as well as embedded CCP spies in the Falun Gong community, to attract negative attention “from the entire American society, forcing the U.S. government to take comprehensive action to eliminate Falun Gong.”
The report notes that two Chinese YouTubers associated with the CCP bragged about recruiting former Shen Yun performers with grudges against the company or ties to Beijing, and putting them in touch with The New York Times for its months-long research on the topic.
Upon the anti-Shen Yun article’s publication, one of the YouTubers took to X to thank The New York Times for their “hard work.”
