New York Times：Lifting the Curtain of Shen Yun to Reveal a Dark Side

New York Times：Lifting the Curtain of Shen Yun to Reveal a Dark Side

Two New York Times reporters spent about 10 months investigating claims that the dance group had emotionally manipulated young performers and left many of their injuries untreated.

Advertisements for Shen Yun, the traditional Chinese dance troupe, can be seen throughout New York City and elsewhere, though they don’t indicate its link to a spiritual movement.Credit...  The New York Times By Nicole Hong

For an article about Shen Yun, Nicole Hong, along with her colleague Michael Rothfeld, interviewed more than 80 people, examined hundreds of pages of records and reviewed secret recordings made from inside the group’s guarded headquarters in upstate New York.

Aug. 23, 2024

The posters intrigued me, but I never really gave them a second thought.

Then, in October, my Metro desk colleague Michael Rothfeld received a tip: Someone familiar with the inner workings of Shen Yun wanted to share information about the group’s operations.

Michael asked me to partner with him.

We had been colleagues at The Wall Street Journal and knew how to work together as an investigative team.

The article would also require some proficiency in Chinese language and culture, and I speak intermediate Mandarin.

After making some calls, we realized there was an urgent story to report about concerns over Shen Yun’s treatment of its young performers.

The tipster put us in touch with a former dancer, who told us about living inside Shen Yun’s training compound in upstate New York as a teenager. 

We listened as she described a deeply coercive environment.

Of course, we couldn’t rely on the account of one person.

So we set out to find other former Shen Yun performers to learn if hers was an isolated experience, or if it was part of a systemic issue within Shen Yun.

We contacted anyone we could find on social media who had shared a history with the dance group, and spoke with 25 people who had participated in the group, including some who had left in the past 18 months.

They lived across four continents, so there were a lot of early-morning and late-night video chats.

Their accounts corroborated a pattern of abusive behavior by Shen Yun across nearly two decades.   Former performers said they had danced through injuries and that they lacked routine access to medical treatment.

Some of our sources backed out, fearing potential retaliation.

After months of conversations, nine former performers and instructors agreed to be quoted on the record.   Many of them said they decided to go public because they wanted to hold the institution accountable, and they hoped that sharing their stories might help others.

To corroborate their accounts, we obtained hundreds of pages of public records, including police reports, voter registration records and enrollment reports from the Department of Education.   We analyzed nonprofit tax filings and court records.

Injuries described by former performers were corroborated by people they had told contemporaneously, eyewitnesses, photos of the injuries and medical records from doctor’s visits after they had left Shen Yun.

In December, Michael and I went to see a Shen Yun performance in Boston.   The theater was packed.

This surprised me, because the show’s marketing does not provide any indication of its link to a spiritual movement.

Much of the two-hour show had a clear political and religious message. A soloist sang: “We see now what drives the world’s decline / Atheism and evolution are the chief culprits.” 

During a dance number, a performer dressed as a member of the Chinese state police beat a Falun Gong practitioner with a baton. The finale depicted a tsunami destroying the Shanghai skyline.

The performance may have had its intended effect on the man sitting next to us. At intermission, I watched him pull up an article on his phone headlined, “What is Falun Gong?”

In March, we asked Falun Gong’s representatives if we could interview Shen Yun’s leaders, as well as current performers of their choosing. They denied our interview requests, and The Epoch Times, a newspaper founded by Falun Gong practitioners, published an article attacking our reporting. In the ensuing months, a number of other articles and videos targeted our work, repeatedly and falsely suggesting that we were pawns of the Chinese government.

For Shen Yun, The Epoch Times article had an adverse effect: Some former performers whom we had been trying to reach for months decided to speak with us after reading it, saying they were angered by it.

Representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong did provide a statement, in which they denied that injured performers routinely went without medical care, and said that the performers who spoke to us presented a picture that distorted reality.

Shen Yun also denied our request to tour its training compound in Cuddebackville, N.Y., a hamlet about a two-hour drive from New York City. So, we visited the area on our own. It was fascinating to see how Shen Yun’s influence had spread: 

We visited a department store that sold Shen Yun-branded items including clothing and a leather bowl that read “I love Shen Yun.”

Over about 10 months of reporting, we spoke with more than 80 people, including current and former Falun Gong practitioners, labor lawyers and sports medicine doctors.

Our article published last week, and we plan to continue our reporting in the coming months.