Illustration credit: Max Nadler.
Driving through San Francisco, one is likely to spot billboards featuring graceful dancers leaping across a stage in bright, billowing costumes. These advertisements are for Shen Yun, a two-hour long dance and music performance that has recently faced public scrutiny for allegations of abuse.
Shen Yun Performing Arts is a nonprofit entertainment company founded in 2006 by Buddhist religious movement Falun Gong members. Rooted in a mixture of traditional Chinese medicine and self-cultivation practices, the movement began in China in 1992 and grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. By the end of the century, Falun Gong had reached 70 million followers in mainland China.
As Falun Gong grew, so did tensions between Falun Gong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP feared that Falun Gong could challenge its authority and in 1999 banned Falun Gong in mainland China. This has been mostly successful; as of 2022, there are estimated to be seven to 20 million Falun Gong practitioners in China.
In an interview with The Urban Legend, retired lawyer Carol Merchasin, who represented a former dancer suing Shen Yun, explained the downfall of Falun Gong’s followers in China. “They were being persecuted for their religion, and there was [e]migration [out of China],” she said.
In China, some sects of Buddhism are not allowed by the government. This could include any sect that disagrees with the CCP, or any sect determined to be a cult, like Falun Gong.
Falun Gong and Shen Yun’s political views trend towards extreme mainstream American conservative views rather than traditional Buddhist beliefs. Falun Gong’s followers do not believe in evolution and reject homosexuality.
Additionally, they support a wide range of right-wing conspiracy theories, including QAnon, which posits that the military is working with Trump to fight a liberal deep state. Following the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Falun Gong also supported several anti-vaccine theories.
Falun Gong communicates its ideas through various media outlets. It is affiliated with a newspaper called The Epoch Times, based in New York City, which primarily reports on conservative politics. The newspaper was originally founded as a reaction to China’s censorship of Falun Gong, though they claim to not speak on behalf of Falun Gong now. Like the Falun Gong movement itself, China banned The Epoch Times’ website.
Shen Yun performances are another way the Falun Gong movement expresses its anti-communist ideals. In a 2019 New Yorker article, reporter Jia Tolentino described a Shen Yun performance. “Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black; the city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake, then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave,” Tolentino wrote.
For many Shen Yun performers, training starts at Shen Yun’s high school and college campus, Dragon Springs. Dragon Springs recruits high school and college students to study and rehearse at their New York boarding school. The 400-acre campus has a performing arts center, where students practice Shen Yun performances. The campus also has a school and a Buddhist temple.
Others begin training earlier. Aspiring dancers can attend Shen Yun summer camps or after-school programs.
Annica Westien ’28 first attended a Shen Yun summer camp in the summer of 2016, at age seven. Westien enjoyed the summer camp and soon joined an after-school program associated with Shen Yun. The program required a time commitment. “It was two times a week [for an] hour and a half to two hours. [We took] dance classes for that whole time,” Westien said.
Alongside dance classes, Westien’s program included tumbling, stretching and flexibility work. Though she enjoyed her dance classes, the flexibility work proved challenging. “I was the least flexible kid there,” she said. “It was miserable.”
Westien’s physical inflexibility led to unhealthy social dynamics at the after-school program. Though she described having good relationships with the teachers due to her ability to speak Chinese, something seemed off to Westien. “Once they realized that I wasn’t flexible, they demoted me lower in the class,” she said. “I was always with my age group, but I was never [included socially]. It was like all of [my peers] were one group, and then I was by myself.”
These kinds of dynamics occurred on a larger scale at Dragon Springs, where many students lacked freedom and faced abuse. According to LAist, former Shen Yun performer Cheng Qing Ling left her home in New Zealand for Shen Yun’s training center at Dragon Springs when she was 13 years old in 2010. Cheng’s mother was a devout follower of Falun Gong, and Cheng hoped to make her mother proud by joining the cast of Shen Yun.
Cheng arrived at Dragon Springs in 2010 and discovered that Dragon Springs — and Falun Gong — was not the paradise it appeared to be. She and her husband, who also danced with the company, are now involved in a lawsuit against Shen Yun, in which she describes many of the struggles she faced while at Dragon Springs and on tour.
Her primary complaint is that the expectations for Shen Yun training and performances were unreasonable. “The Academy and the College [at Dragon Springs] enforce a grueling training schedule that runs 15 hours each day at least six days a week,” Cheng’s attorneys wrote in the Nature of the Action section in the lawsuit.
Shen Yun has rejected these claims as CCP propaganda. “While a small number of individuals who were performers with Shen Yun many years ago are now helping to spread the CCP’s narrative, we are grateful for the large number of our performers who are publicly standing up for us despite CCP pressure,” Shen Yun said in a statement to National Public Radio (NPR).
Yet dancers continue to issue complaints that contradict Shen Yun’s narrative. Some dancers have accused trainers of physical violence. “I was in such a survival mode,” Cheng said in an interview with NPR. “‘Oh, thank God at least I’m not the one that’s being hit this time. Oh, thank God I’m not being verbally abused this time.’ That was the only thing you could focus on and not really, ‘Hm, could I have been treated better?’”
Beyond grueling schedules, some Shen Yun dancers felt a lack of freedom. “[Shen Yun is] a very high-demand, high-control group,” said Merchasin, who represents Cheng. “[Students] must obey the Grand Master [of Falun Gong], whose name is Li Hong Zhi.”
To some, obeying the Grand Master felt like aligning their own political ideals with Falun Gong’s.
According to Merchasin and the lawsuit, medical treatment for dancers was highly limited. Part of Falun Gong’s conservative mission involves meditation as a form of healing, rather than medicine or science-based treatments. “[Dancers] had many injuries including torn muscles. Not everyone was allowed to go to [get] medical care,” Merchasin said.
Beyond medical care, some question the lack of autonomy the kids had. Leaving Dragon Springs for any reason — medical attention or otherwise — is very difficult. “[The students] were isolated. They had no access to the internet. Any internet that they had was controlled by the organization, so they had no outside world,” Merchasin said.
Furthermore, wages for dancers are low. “They were working for no money and with difficult conditions,” Merchasin said. “These were children; they were not there of their own free will, or they did not remain there of their own free will.”
Even after leaving Shen Yun, dancers still suffer trauma years later. “Many of them have been in therapy,” Merchasin said. “They’re not kids anymore, but these young adults are very resilient, and they are very brave. It’s sad to me that people took advantage of their faith [and] their parents’ faith.”
