The New York Times: The Dark Side of Shen Yun

 The New York Times: The Dark Side of Shen Yun

Aug. 19, 2024,   By James Barron

The popular Chinese dance troupe has toured all over the world. But young performers described a culture of untreated injuries and emotional manipulation.

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at findings from The Times’s investigation of the Shen Yun dance troupe. We’ll also see what’s in the waters off New York through the eyes of divers who look for shipwrecks and treasure.

The dance group Shen Yun sends troupes of Chinese dancers swirling in colorful costumes to cities like New York, Paris, Toronto and Taipei. Shen Yun’s mission is more than entertainment: The shows amplify the anti-Communist message of Falun Gong, a religious movement that the Chinese Communist Party has tried to stamp out. Shen Yun has been led in exile by Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, from a 400-acre compound in upstate New York, where many of the performers live and train.

What Shen Yun audiences may not have realized was that offstage the performers paid a price in untreated injuries and emotional abuse. A New York Times investigation found that Shen Yun routinely discouraged them from seeking medical care and demanded obedience to rigid schedules. I asked Nicole Hong, who with Michael Rothfeld interviewed 25 former Shen Yun performers and instructors and reviewed hundreds of pages of records, about their findings.

What is the atmosphere like at the Shen Yun compound in upstate New York? Are the performers under a lot of pressure?

Our reporting showed that it was a controlling atmosphere and that the young student performers were subject to a long list of rules. They were limited in the books they could read, the music they could listen to and the news outlets they could access. They needed special permission to leave the compound and often saw their families only once a year.

They faced a tremendous amount of pressure to serve their spiritual leader, who has a residence inside the compound and helps oversee their training. They were told that performing with Shen Yun was part of a holy mission to save humanity — and that any mistakes onstage could doom their audiences to hell.

What about body shaming? Isn’t that part of the culture?

Yes, for female dancers in particular.

The ones we interviewed told us that they were subjected to regular weigh-ins and that their instructors would yell at them in front of their classmates for being too fat.

Some of them had their eating monitored by classmates. One former dancer said that in her troupe everyone’s weights were recorded on a sheet posted in a classroom, with the names of dancers deemed to be too fat written in red.

This is one of the biggest differences between Shen Yun and other dance companies we examined. The former Shen Yun performers we interviewed told us that they did not have routine access to doctors or physical therapists. They said this was because their spiritual leader says in his teachings that true believers can expel illness from their bodies without medical treatment.

When Shen Yun performers were injured, they were told to heal themselves by “sending forth righteous thoughts,” or they were told that the injury signaled something was wrong with their spiritual state. Shen Yun’s representatives have denied discouraging medical treatment.

What about the performers’schedules?

Their schedules were grueling. They often worked 15-hour days, sometimes performing two shows a day. While on tour, they had bus rides between venues that could drag on for 16 hours at a time.

On top of rehearsing and performing, some of the performers also had to set up and break down heavy orchestra equipment before and after each tour stop for no extra pay.

Even though many of them were high school and college students, they spent months out of the year on tour. Just to give you a sense of their workload, the eight Shen Yun troupes staged more than 800 shows in a five-month period for their most recent world tour.

If a performer wanted to quit and leave the compound, what happened?

Many of the former performers we spoke to were terrified to quit because they were told that they would go to hell — or would be in physical danger without the protection of their spiritual leader. One former dancer told us that after she left she genuinely thought she might die at any moment in an accident.

Several former performers told us that when they tried to quit, they were told that they would have to repay the cost of the full scholarships they had received for their schooling, an amount that could have reached into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one ever followed through on seeking repayment.

How difficult was it to convince former dancers and instructors to be interviewed about their experiences?

It was an incredibly challenging process. Almost all of them were terrified to be quoted using their real names because they were fearful of retaliation and harassment from other Falun Gong practitioners. It took several rounds of interviews across many months to get nine people to share their stories on the record. We know they risked a lot to speak to us, and we’re so grateful for their courage.