Over winter break, a familiar sight popped up all over the Bay Area. Like clockwork, ads for an annual performance known as Shen Yun ads were everywhere, plastered on billboards, subways, the back of buses and every imaginable platform.
At first glance, this seemingly traditional 2-hour Chinese dance performance may seem like a celebration of “China before communism” — as displayed in every single one of their ads. According to the official Shen Yun website, the show includes 17-18 dance pieces featuring pieces depicting “ancient Chinese history or mythology” and others “from contemporary China.” If you walk in the show expecting an entire performance of just vibrant dancing, you may have been fooled and deceived. Instead, critics say the show is largely propaganda for a dangerous cult called Falun Gong.
Formation of the Falun Gong cult
Falun Gong was created by Li Hong Zhi in 1992 in China. Because of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, China was primed to swat down any anti-government protests. After Falun Gong’s rapid spread among the Chinese people and the many anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) protests it sparked, it was banned from China’s mainland and Li and others in the movement were exiled. Living abroad Li managed to spread the cult across the rest of the world, settling in a guarded, 400-acre campus in upstate New York in 1998.
Li the religion would lead to enlightenment and self-healing, claims that are easily proven false. Li also made many obscure statements regarding himself and the religion.
For example, according to a recent article published by The New York Times, “Mr. Li has also incorporated less conventional ideas, implying that he is the creator of the universe, saying that faithful adherence can purge the body of illnesses and suggesting that followers can develop supernatural powers, such as the ability to levitate.”
Furthermore, the article reported that within the last two decades, “Mr. Li has positioned his group in direct opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which has imprisoned Falun Gong followers and demonized them in state propaganda.”
With the CCP being the main target of Falun Gong propaganda, the group has stated many strong claims regarding the Chinese government, including that China has been harvesting thousands of organs annually from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. However, according to a New Yorker article, there have been many disputes about this claim.
“In 2017, a lawyer who has defended hundreds of Falun Gong members told the Washington Post that he knew of only three or four members dying in prison, and that he had never heard of organs being harvested from live prisoners, as Falun Gong claims,” the article said.
The growing success of Shen Yun around the world
Li created the Shen Yun Performing Arts organization in 2006 in New York’s Hudson Valley and started a touring company in 2007. According to Shen Yun’s official website, the show’s purpose is for “reclaiming a lost heritage” and to “revive authentic Chinese culture.” Furthermore, it states that when the Chinese Communist Party came to power, “They saw this spiritual heritage as an ideological threat and for decades tried to destroy these traditions. It nearly succeeded.”
When Shen Yun was created, he claimed they were “nonprofit and independent of any government” and had “brought this culture back from the brink of extinction.”
With millions of advertisements across the globe, the show has gained immense following and has achieved remarkable success for the past two decades. The production has six companies, each consisting of around 40 dancers all trained at the Fei Tian Academy and situated in the New York campus built for Falun Gong members. In 2019, the production toured 96 American cities and also visited many other major cities including Vancouver, Berlin, Auckland, Taipei, Daegu and Aix-en-Provence.
The show reported more than $75 million in assets in 2016 and earned more than $22 million in revenue that year. This year, ticket prices started at $80 and reached up to $369.
So how good is this 2-hour show, which claims to portray one of the best traditional Chinese dance performances ever?
The controversial experience
In a recent thread posted on the subreddit r/bayarea on Nov. 10, a picture of a Shen Yun flyer was posted captioned, “Ugh … that time of year again.” With this post came over 200 comments of people discussing and explaining their own experiences watching the show.
One user commented on their own horrible experience after watching the show for the first time.
“I [got free tickets] and went with a friend of mine a few years ago and it was awful. It was so bad it was like a really bad drag show that you at first feel like you should stick around to support the performers, then you think, this is actually awful so let’s get out of there.”
A common criticism of the performance was its blatantly obvious anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda in the second half of the show. With the show’s graphics being compared to the level of “1995 computer graphics” and their dancing being mediocre but not “breathtaking, spectacular, scintillating,” the overall reviews of the performance were mainly on the negative side.
Alix Martichouxk, a writer for the SF Gate, shared a similar experience in 2019 with users on Reddit regarding the propaganda-filled second half, recalling a specific scene from the show.
“A group of communist cops swarmed the park and beat the Falun Dafa practitioners. A good guy jumps in to defend them, but is jailed along with the rest. In prison, the group was tortured. The man who interfered was blinded,” Martichouxk wrote. “After release, the practitioners headed back to the park. The man went back to standing in the same place with the sign Falun Dafa is good. But, of course, the cops came back. Except this time, the newly blinded man was handed a yellow book of Falun [Gong] teachings. He is transported to heaven and made to see again. Hooray?”
Throughout the show Martichouxk tried her best to follow along the storyline when only Mandarin was spoken, attempting to make out the scene by closely watching the actors’ motions, but to no avail.
“God said something in Mandarin. I do not speak Mandarin. Then we were transported into space (your guess is as good as mine). There were angels. There was an emperor,” Martichouxk wrote. “I furiously scratched down notes, trying to get a grasp on the plot of this show, but the most legible thing in my notebook is ‘I’m really lost.’”
Many other eerie scenes from the second half of the show include China’s former Chairman Mao Zedong causing earthquakes and a big Communist tsunami with a red sickle and hammer glowing in the middle of the wave. From the wave appears a big head of Karl Marx. The show also teaches the audience how to say “I love Shen Yun” in Chinese and depicts a group of Falun Gong followers clutching religious teachings, battling for space in a public square against the “corrupted” youth. According to Tolentino, the corruption was evident due to the actors wearing black, some looking at their phones and two men holding hands.
With the ending of every show comes the applause, a form of appreciation where the audience acknowledges the dancers and the effort they put into their performance. According to Martichouxk, silence followed the end of the Shen Yun performance she saw.
“Everyone danced. The show ended. There was no standing ovation, only people standing to leave,” Martichouxk wrote.
The advertisements for the show promise viewers with a simple performance of Chinese traditional dancing, but has left many audience members puzzled and confused at what they have watched due to the strange, abnormal second half.
