NEW YORK CITY—Beds in Chinese prisons are not just for sleep, as Shen Yun conductor Chen Ying can attest.
In the hands of prison guards, a bed roughly 1.5 feet from the floor became a torture device. Guards tied up Chen’s brother, who was 29 years old, taped his mouth to prevent him from crying out, then shoved him underneath it, folding his body in half. One tormentor then stepped on the bed to increase the pressure on his back.
The potentially spine-breaking torture was only one of myriad abuses Chinese authorities contrived in targeting people like them: practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, which espouses the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance along with meditation exercises.
“It’s just unspeakable the kind of crimes that they did,” Chen told The Epoch Times.
Her soft-spoken brother was dragged out of their Beijing home in the middle of the night and put in a labor camp for 18 months. Chen said he was lucky to have survived—another Falun Gong practitioner he knew became permanently paralyzed under the same torment.
As Chen’s brother struggled near the verge of death, his hair turning gray, a distraught Chen, who lives in the United States, was calling local media outlets to bring attention to his plight. It pained her to know such torture was only too common in China.
“This is very real to us,” Chen said.
Stories such as these don’t make it into the headlines in the communist-controlled media landscape. Unless it happens to a close friend, Chen said, people—whether they are inside China or abroad—have no idea it’s happening.
After her brother fled China in 2003, Chen, the daughter of two elite musicians who both had three decades of experience at China’s national orchestra, felt that she couldn’t just stand by and watch similar abuses continue.
In New York in 2006, Chen and her parents joined a group of like-minded artists who aspired to elevate artistic expression in a way that was impossible in communist-ruled China—and Shen Yun Performing Arts was born.
A Cultural Renaissance
The origins of Shen Yun run in parallel with a grassroots dissident movement in China, according to Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center.The CCP’s Cultural Revolution, carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, destroyed China’s treasured cultural relics and many ancient temples. By the 1990s, people were turning to Qigong—a traditional Chinese practice of combining breathing, meditation, and slow-moving exercises to improve well-being—to fill the resulting spiritual void.
When Falun Gong was introduced in 1992, it exploded in popularity, with practitioners sharing the benefits to their mental and physical health with their families and friends, and in seven years, an estimated one in every 13 people was practicing in China.
“This was a resurgence of traditional Chinese spirituality that hadn’t been allowed for decades under the communist regime,” Browde said, calling it a “renaissance.”
Since the persecution began in 1999, Falun Gong practitioners across China have been printing out pamphlets at home to reveal what the regime has been doing to the practice and its adherents in an effort to counter an overwhelming state propaganda smear campaign. Under the cover of night, practitioners disseminated pamphlets in their local neighborhoods.
In that process, the community collectively realized that it had a larger problem than persecution.
“In a way, it kind of freed their minds, to listen not only to the plight of Falun Gong, but to sort of look around and go: ‘Is this China? What have we become?’” he said. “There was a great awakening.”
Browde observed that Shen Yun embodies a similar purpose. Aside from spotlighting the tragedies still happening in China, the company chooses every element of the performance with great care. Dance moves, music, costumes, and stories are all crafted with the goal of filtering out any communist influence and presenting China’s 5,000-year traditional heritage.
“I think they saw that there is something to the CCP’s culture and the way it manipulates and controls things even outside China that is very dark and heavy,” Browde said.
The ancient Chinese culture, by contrast, “has universal gems in it.”
“It has universal principles. It has ways of reconnecting people to their own humanity, the good part of their humanity, to reconnecting them to the divine, and it kind of lifts people up,” he said.
‘Unprecedented Anti-Falun Gong Campaign’
The Chinese regime has been open in its hostility toward Shen Yun, waging a years-long campaign to pressure venues to cancel performances and demand that government officials withdraw their support and not attend the show. The company has regularly found the tires on their tour bus slashed in a way that would have caused them to burst when driving.
Lately, the sabotage campaign has taken another sinister turn.
Accounts of whistleblowers in recent months and court records show that Beijing’s officials have followed the directive to the letter.
In at least three high-level meetings since May, including one conducted after the U.S. presidential election, top Chinese political and law enforcement authorities have repeatedly emphasized a desire to discredit the Falun Gong community and alienate them from supportive Western officials.
Increasingly, the regime appears to be favoring more covert tactics, such as funneling distorted information through clandestine channels. Efforts on this front have appeared in documents of at least two active federal prosecutions against Chinese operatives.
In other high-level meetings, officials expressed full support for a Chinese American YouTuber based in the United States who has made threatening comments toward Shen Yun personnel and has supplied materials in support of recent attack articles by Western outlets such as The New York Times, many of which Chinese media and Chinese officials have amplified.
“We are in the midst of a very determined, unprecedented anti-Falun Gong campaign, right here in America,” Browde said.
Making the World a Better Place
Xi, in the 2022 secret meeting, cited the growing influence of Falun Gong as a vocal critic of the Chinese regime globally. But there’s a more specific reason for the Chinese regime’s obsession with Shen Yun, according to Browde.“You have to look at Shen Yun from the CCP’s perspective—this is a communist totalitarian regime that came to power based on a great lie,” he said.
The lie, he said, is that the CCP is China.
The CCP posits itself as the “true shepherd of the Chinese people” and insists that “there would be no modern China without them.”
Shen Yun makes it abundantly clear “just how beautiful and spiritual and rich China was before communism,” Browde said.
“In the CCP’s mind, the implication is that’s what China would look like after communism, and so they see that show as an existential threat,” he said.
Browde said that he is proud of his decision to send his two sons to study at Fei Tian College and Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, the school that trains Shen Yun’s dancers and musicians.
“I graduated high school at the top of my class,” he said. “Both my boys got higher SAT scores than I did, and they spend all this time dancing and training, doing all these other things, and they still outdid me.”
Both are now touring with Shen Yun as students on practicum, a special program that allows them to gain school credit through performance experience. With eight companies traveling the world simultaneously, Shen Yun is seen live by more than a million people each year.
The performers captivate audiences because they are showing a glimpse of their real selves, Chen and Browde said.
“It’s not really an act,” Browde said. Be it loyalty or compassion, the artists are “working moment to moment” to embody the values they portray, and “that’s one of the things that the audience feels.”
Chen said her vision is to “share with the world something full of hope and inspiration, and how wonderful the world can be without communism.”
“We want to make this world a better place.”
