An American dance company has become a victim of a string of hit pieces by The New York Times. Since its inception, New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts has been on the receiving end of a relentless sabotage campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Through classical Chinese dance, ancient Chinese myths and legends are brought to life in theaters across the globe. Beyond the flips and tumbling, Shen Yun’s mission is to revive the beauty of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, a culture long forgotten under the CCP. For performers, much like Olympians, years of discipline and hard work bear fruit on stage.
What gives the dancers strength is a spiritual practice based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Many Shen Yun performers are practitioners of Falun Gong—a peaceful meditation practice embraced worldwide, but over the past two and a half decades has faced brutal repression in communist China.
“It really does change you slowly in a way when you really try to live by these values,” says veteran Shen Yun dancer William Li. “You try to help people around you. You want to be compassionate, you want to be truthful and honest.”
Shen Yun features stories about the CCP’s ongoing campaign to eradicate Falun Gong—from labor camps, to torture, to state-sponsored forced live organ harvesting.
“Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to eliminate Falun Gong practitioners,” Li says. “They don’t want people to have their own beliefs, they don’t want people to have their own faith. And they want people to only believe in the CCP.”
Similar to Falun Gong, Shen Yun has been a target of the CCP. Since the company’s inception, Beijing has employed multiple tactics, including pressuring theaters to cancel performances, and threatening performers and their families who live in China.
The dance company also became a victim of a string of hit pieces by The New York Times, many of which rely on sources with known ties to the Chinese regime.
The latest uses vague language and inaccurate examples to target Shen Yun’s practicum program, which allows students to tour with adult performers and is approved by the New York State Department of Education.
Li, who has been performing with Shen Yun since 2007, is one of the dancers who received the chance to go on tour as part of the practicum program.
“I got to go to Japan on my first year of tour and Korea and I think Australia as well, so I got to see the world when I was pretty young,” he said.
“Someone who actually wanted to learn more about dance, it was like the best chance that I could have asked for. And a lot of musicians also get that same opportunity.”
Reminiscing about the company’s early days, former dancer Liu Mingye said there’s always been a real connection between performers and the management.
“We had real interactions with each other, we had real interactions with our management,” he said. “And we worked hard but so did they. And they took care of us you know, from day one.”
In response to The New York Times, Shen Yun put out a statement saying, “These reports continue a trend that goes back 25 years in which the Times has consistently perpetuated CCP propaganda about Falun Gong [and] ignored terrible human rights abuses against the group.”
It goes on to say that the goal of Shen Yun remains the same: “to bring hope and inspiration to millions of people around the world” by showcasing the beauty of traditional Chinese culture.
