The Media’s Shen Yun Blind Spot

How critical reports miss the real story—with grave consequences.

Shen Yun dancers perform on stage during a show. Courtesy of Shen Yun

Commentary

I sat in the audience at a Shen Yun performance last year, watching dancers in flowing silk glide across the stage, their every move a whisper of something ancient and unbroken.

The theater was packed—it was another sold-out show, one of thousands performed worldwide in recent years.

Afterward, people couldn’t hold it in—“inspiring,” “hopeful,” and “moving,” they professed, echoing what I’ve heard from audiences in Italy, Taiwan, and everywhere Shen Yun lands. It gave a glimpse into Shen Yun’s meteoric rise and growth.

You’d think that kind of impact would earn respect, or at least curiosity. Instead, Shen Yun’s been getting snide headlines and attempted exposés.

Since August 2024, The New York Times alone has churned out more than 10 pieces tearing into Shen Yun. Jabs about too many hours, too much rigor, whispers of “cult” this and “propaganda” that.

Are you kidding me?

Sure, Shen Yun gets praise, too—waves of it. But the hit pieces try to drown it out. And they distract from—or even bury—the real story.

As these pieces obsessively critique Shen Yun, our Falun Gong brothers and sisters in China are counting their last breaths—detained, tortured, dying every single day.

This isn’t just a performance for us. It’s a lifeline.

And a great American success story that the media are too blind or biased to see.

That’s a disservice to every reader—and to the tens of millions of people in China who suffer unthinkable oppression, for whom Shen Yun is a beacon of hope.

The China Not Told

Let me paint the picture they’re missing.

Right now, in a sprawling web of prisons, black jails, and brainwashing centers across China, Falun Gong practitioners—people who meditate and strive to be honest and kind—are locked in cells, beaten, starved, and tortured.

It’s happening this very minute, as you read this sentence.

Ever since 1999, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) banned our practice, the numbers have been staggering: millions detained, tens of thousands tortured or abused, thousands tortured to death. And that’s just what slips through the CCP’s information chokehold.

Worse still, the China Tribunal, a 2019 independent inquiry led by Sir Geoffrey Nice, ruled that forcible organ harvesting had been “committed for years throughout China on a significant scale.”

The tribunal estimated 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants had been performed annually since the late 2000s—way past the regime’s laughable claim of 10,000—and concluded that Falun Gong prisoners of conscience were the main source of organs. Tens of thousands, they believe, had been killed each year for their organs.

That’s the testimony of survivors, hospital whistleblowers, and cold hard data talking—not conjecture.

A friend once told me he imagines their screams every night. I do, too. And here we are, reading New York Times pieces fretting over whether Shen Yun dancers living exceptional lives in America are being subjected to—and I’m not making this up—“body shaming.”

The Real Shen Yun

Shen Yun isn’t just art. It’s urgency in motion.

Every leap on stage, every note from the orchestra, every ticket sold carries a message we’ve been screaming for decades: China’s dictatorship is evil and unhinged, and a threat to us all.

The blood of our family and friends is being spilled in China as we fight to wake people up on distant, more placid shores.

Those dancers? They’re not clocking overtime for a paycheck.

They are pouring their souls into something bigger: a chance to show the world beauty that the regime wants to extinguish, a spirit of freedom it seeks to crush, a persecution that the headlines ignore.

And this, too, the critics miss: Shen Yun is a triumph born on American soil, a shining example of the American dream.

Founded by Chinese immigrants—well-educated, cultured, mainstream folks who came here legally—Shen Yun was built from nothing. No government grants, nor corporate sponsors to get things started. Just vision and grit.

What started as a flicker of hope has grown into a global phenomenon, now with eight touring companies traveling the world in an era of shrinking casts and strained budgets. Audiences everywhere can’t get enough of Shen Yun. It’s a testament to what freedom and faith can make possible.

What the NY Times Doesn’t Get

The New York Times can tally hours all it wants—more than 20 shows across New York state last season, sold out—but it’s blind to why this matters. This isn’t a job. It’s survival and hope.

I get it, sort of. To an outsider, Shen Yun’s drive as an elite dance company looks intense—hundreds of performers, multinational tours, a pace that doesn’t quit. And a group that’s less understood than it should be.

Of course, the media love a juicy angle: Aren’t they overworked? Isn’t it too disciplined? Aren’t those young artists being manipulated?

But take a step back.

Under the CCP, “overworked” means forced labor until your body gives out. “Discipline” means electric shock batons on your skin if you won’t renounce your beliefs. “Manipulated” means you are expelled from school for your faith, denied an education, and condemned to poverty simply for your identity.

Shen Yun’s rigor isn’t exploitative—it’s defiance.

It’s a community saying, “We won’t break.” It’s artists saying, “We want to be the best, for a greater purpose.” China’s regime has tried to silence us for 25 years, and every leap or smile on stage proves they’ve failed.

Why isn’t that the story? Why aren’t we talking about the torture chambers instead of rehearsal schedules?

The New York Times has unloaded multiple “investigations” into our structure and taken jabs at our anti-authoritarian stance, even calling it “political.” Political? Tell that to the young woman dancer whose father vanished into a Chinese prison for meditating in his living room, and was dead months later from torture. Tell her that dancing the stories of people like her father is political.

Another of its reports delves into our funding—as if passion, ticket sales, and immigrant hustle can’t explain a phenomenon that’s touched the lives of millions.

The New York Times is missing the forest for the trees—or maybe it’s choosing not to see it?

For 25 years, China’s communist regime has smeared Falun Gong, our faith, by slapping a “cult” label on us in order to justify our extermination. Xinhua, its propaganda machine, churns out the lies; The New York Times, meanwhile, picks up the tune, with polished prose.

Shouldn’t the congruence give them serious pause? Journalism doesn’t operate in a vacuum, consequence free.

The New York Times has spent more time and ink “investigating” Shen Yun’s backstage than it ever did digging into a quarter-century of torture, detention, and organ harvesting—a genocide it has barely touched.

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal’s hardscrabble coverage of these events won it a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Sure, it cost the reporter access to China, but speaking truth to power has never been easy. Picking on immigrant artists in your own backyard is a lot easier.

The Real Stakes

The China Tribunal in London laid it raw: “Very many people have died indescribably hideous deaths for no reason.”

Survivors from China recount blood tests, X-rays, and a bevy of unusual exams in custody—prep for a butcher’s block, not a checkup.

One doctor, Enver Tohti, testified that he cut into a living man to remove both kidneys and the liver. He recounts the blood pulsing as the heart still beat.

That’s the reality: Organs ripped out to fuel a billion-dollar transplant trade, while China’s regime, in typical fashion, denies it all.

Shen Yun doesn’t just entertain—it raises our consciousness. It shines a light on all this, where few dare tread. Case in point: One former New York Times correspondent, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, testified to the tribunal that her attempt to report on forced organ harvesting was suppressed by her Times editors.

At the theater, I’ve seen it countless times—audience members in tears, asking how they didn’t know about the organ harvesting, the camps. One woman told me she felt hope for the first time in years, seeing something pure outlast such darkness.

That’s what The New York Times misses: Shen Yun isn’t about us. It’s about them—the detained, the tortured, the dead. It’s about you, too, by extension, whether you realize it or not. The regime’s reach isn’t staying in China; it’s in your phone, your supply chain, your newsfeed.

This isn’t abstract to me. It’s personal. I’ve watched Shen Yun grow from a seed into a sequoia. And I know that every day we don’t speak up, more die. The critics say we’re too political, that art shouldn’t preach.

But silence is political, too—letting the CCP’s shadow creep unchecked while we sip lattes and scroll X.

Shen Yun is a force for good, cutting through the lies, showing a culture they want erased, a spirit they can’t kill.

That’s why we push. That’s why we don’t stop.

We’re at war, with beauty and truth as our weapons. Every sold-out show is a battle won.

Which Side Are You On?

So, to The New York Times and every outlet wasting pixels and ink on Shen Yun’s supposed flaws: You’re not just off the mark—you’re complicit.

Look harder. You’re counting trees while a forest burns.

We’re not perfect—who is?—but we’re fighting for lives, not headlines, and striving our utmost to do good in a troubled world.

Imagine if those media resources went to exposing the Chinese regime’s brutality, injustice, and censorship instead of echoing—and amplifying—their smears.

Imagine if the writers saw the blood behind the beauty—livers cut out in Henan, screams muffled in Beijing—or the dream of these immigrants lifting these stories onto the world’s stage.

We don’t have time for this noise. Our people are dying. Our world’s at stake.

Shen Yun dances on, not because it’s easy, but because it’s urgent.

Step out of your bubble and listen.

The real story’s been screaming all along.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.