Awing and entertaining, neglected and shames
C. Beachy contributed research. Liu Yi contributed translation.
The New York Times (International Edition)
24 Aug 2024
They began appearing about two decades ago, often around the holidays and often at high-end venues: troupes of Chinese dancers swirling gracefully in colorful costumes.
First in New York City, then in Paris, Toronto and Taipei, the dancers — mostly teenagers and young adults — flipped and vaulted onstage in soaring routines meant to awe and entertain and also to spread the message of Falun Gong, the persecuted Chinese religious movement behind the performances.
Since then, the dance group, Shen Yun Performing Arts, has grown into an economic engine for the movement and its leaders, with brisk ticket sales on five continents and holdings of more than $265 million.
But for the young people who powered the show, the success has come at a steep cost.
In pursuit of ever larger audiences, Shen Yun has treated many of its performers as an expendable commodity, a New York Times investigation has found. It has routinely discouraged them from seeking medical care when their bodies have broken down and commanded their obedience to grueling rehearsal and tour schedules through relentless emotional abuse and manipulation.
In interviews, some former dancers have recounted performing through dislocated kneecaps, sprained ankles or other serious injuries, unwilling to seek medical treatment because the group’s belief system regarded such care as a crutch of the unfaithful.
Others were racked with emotion as they recalled being made to participate in regular weigh-ins by instructors who publicly berated them for being too fat.
Most described feeling used by a religious movement that was focused on
spreading its views even if performers were harmed in the process — while raking in money from ticket sales.
Many of the dancers and musicians who spoke to The Times hesitated to share their stories publicly, fearing retaliation by Falun Gong and its spiritual leader. That leader, Li Hongzhi, introduced the movement in China in 1992, at a time when ancient energy-based exercises were surging in popularity. He has led it in exile while presiding over the guarded compound in upstate New York where many of Shen Yun’s performers live and train.
In a statement, representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong said the performers who spoke to The Times were presenting a picture of the dance group and religious movement that distorted reality “in bizarre and dramatic ways.” They said that The Times was playing into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, which has sought to stamp out the movement.
Based in part on elements of Buddhism, Falun Gong holds that people who practice its poses and meditation regimen can attain enlightenment. But in speeches and writings, its founder, Mr. Li, has also incorporated less conventional ideas, implying that he is the creator of the universe, saying that faithful adherence can purge the body of illnesses and suggesting that followers can develop supernatural powers, such as the ability to levitate.
And for the past two decades, Mr. Li has positioned his group in direct opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which has imprisoned Falun Gong followers and demonized them in state propaganda.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Li’s movement has put Shen Yun forward as a propaganda tool of its own, amplifying the show’s anti-Communist message through a network of companies founded by Falun Gong practitioners, including a widely read newspaper, The Epoch Times.
Inside Shen Yun, the group’s leaders tell their young performers that each show is an urgent spiritual mission, and they lead them to believe that anyone who speaks out against the movement will face dire consequences.
Even so, 25 former dancers, musicians and instructors spoke openly to The Times about their experiences in Shen Yun, including a handful who had left the group within the past 18 months.
Their accounts, along with hundreds of pages of public records and dozens of photos and recordings smuggled out of the group’s headquarters, offer an unusually candid look at life inside the productions, which Shen Yun’s ubiquitous advertising bills as “entertainment of the highest order.”
Nothing in the advertisements signals that the show is aimed at promoting a religious movement. And audience members, who pay up to $309 a ticket, have little indication that the performers are laboring for that movement.
But many of the former dancers and musicians said they pushed themselves to their physical and mental limits because they were taught that performing a flawless Shen Yun show would save their audiences from an approaching apocalypse.
Often, they worked 15-hour days — rehearsing, performing, even setting up and breaking down heavy orchestra equipment — for low or no pay, toiling under the impression that they were indebted for the cost of the schooling, food and lodging that the movement provided them.
Nearly all the performers had been sent to Shen Yun by family members who were ardent Falun Gong practitioners. Some had arrived at the movement’s New York State headquarters, known as Dragon Springs, before they had turned 12.
They were unable to leave the compound without special permission and were typically limited in how often they could see their families. Many had traveled to New York from across the United States and other countries and remained in the complex well into their 20s.
Cheng Qingling, a former dancer who grew up practicing Falun Gong with her mother in New Zealand, arrived at Dragon Springs at age 13. Now 27, Ms. Cheng said she rationalized her bad experiences there — the untreated injury that made her left arm go numb, the constant yelling by instructors, the shaming of her classmates for breaking minor rules — by giving them a higher meaning.
“They’re just testing our devotion,” Ms. Cheng said she told herself. “But then I thought, if I use normal human values and judge this, this is wrong.”
Some performers who wanted to quit before the group was ready to let them go faced threats and intimidation. Their managers told them they would go to hell or face danger if they left, because they would lose Mr. Li’s protection. Seven former performers said they were also told that they would have to repay the cost of tuition if they quit Shen Yun.
The representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong declined to make Mr. Li and other Shen Yun leaders available for interviews.
In their statement, the representatives, Ying Chen and Levi Browde, called the performers who spoke to The Times a “relatively tiny, disgruntled group” who shared “fantastical stories.”
They denied that performers who were injured routinely went without medical care, and they said that any suggestion of a toxic environment at Dragon Springs was “highly subjective and smacks of cultural bigotry.”
“We are, essentially, a big family with a shared faith,” they said.
The Times’s reporting on Shen Yun, they added, would most likely be “the crown jewel” in the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to discredit Falun Gong.
The Chinese government banned Falun Gong after more than 10,000 practitioners staged a silent protest outside the Communist Party’s headquarters in Beijing in 1999. Since then, many practitioners have been detained and have died in police custody. Chinese officials have continued to persecute them. Still, the movement has flourished, amassing a global following whose members can be seen practicing gentle movement exercises in public parks worldwide.
As Falun Gong spread, Mr. Li gained influence as well. He helped create the Shen Yun performance group in 2006. Now, with his wife, Li Rui, he presides over Dragon Springs, the compound that is fitted with a towering pagoda and a giant golden statue of Buddha — with a face that bears a striking resemblance to his own.
Students living on the mountain, as the compound is also known, are taught to greet Mr. Li as “shi fu,” the Chinese word for “master.”
Many of the former performers reached by The Times said that Shen Yun gave them the opportunity to travel and improve their Chinese language skills and that they appreciated the work ethic it instilled.
“Personally, I cherish the time I spent at Shen Yun. I learned and matured a great deal,” said Susan Zhou, a former dancer with the company, in an email to The Times.
But the vast majority said it also exposed them to unyielding indoctrination.
During a lecture last year, Mr. Li, who is in his early 70s, told students in Chinese that he created the earth and “established the music of mankind,” according to a recording of his remarks provided to The Times by an audience member.
Questioning such rhetoric was seen as a grave offense.
“What I experienced there is tremendous psychological pressure to conform,” said David Fiedler, 66, who taught violin at Dragon Springs from 2013 to 2016. “You have to either leave or you have to be willing to abandon your reason, because you can’t hold onto both.”
“THE BEST PLACE TO BE”
At age 11, Kate Huang dropped out of school in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and traveled with her mother to rural Cuddebackville, in Orange County, N.Y. — the home of Falun Gong’s headquarters.
There, she enrolled in Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, the boarding school where Shen Yun performers are trained.
Ms. Huang had no dance experience, but she grew up around Falun Gong followers who had told her to seize the chance to be closer to Mr. Li.
“Everyone said it was the place you should be, because it’s the best place to be on earth,” said Ms. Huang, now 26, who asked to be identified by her English first name.
Soon afterward, she was in a dance class, lying on her back for a flexibility exercise. Hovering over her, a teacher gripped her ankle and began pushing it toward her head — moving it farther and farther until Ms. Huang heard a snap from her thigh that seemed to echo across the classroom, she said.
Her teacher notified Mr. Li and the school principal, who touched her leg as if to see if anything was broken. She limped for weeks, she said.
A few years later, before a performance in Seattle, Ms. Huang was landing a front flip when she felt a searing pain in her right leg. She had dislocated her kneecap, she said. A classmate popped it back into place.
One of her managers gave her a bag of ice and asked if she could still perform, Ms. Huang said. She danced in excruciating pain for the next two hours.
She said that she was not offered treatment for either injury, nor did she seek it, because Mr. Li says that true healing occurs only by following his teachings.
“If I ask for the hospital, I will be labeled as not a fervent believer,” Ms. Huang said. “I didn’t want to stick out or become a target of everyone.”
Ms. Huang was one of 14 former Shen Yun performers who told The Times that they suffered untreated injuries or ailments — or saw others get hurt without receiving care.
Performing in any competitive dance company carries a risk of injury, sports medicine experts said. But unlike many other major companies, Shen Yun does not provide routine access to physical therapists or doctors, The Times found.
And the group’s reliance on teenage dancers, whose bones and muscles are still developing, has meant that they were more prone to getting hurt, the experts said.
The risk was increased further by the group’s punishing schedule. Often, they put on two shows a day. On its most recent tour, Shen Yun’s eight troupes were scheduled to perform more than 800 shows in five months.
Encouraging people to dance in pain or discouraging them from treatment is “pretty barbaric and old school, to say the least,” particularly with minors, said Dr. Donald Rose, an orthopedic surgeon and founding director of the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries at NYU Langone Health. “Especially in that age group that doesn’t have the ability to advocate for themselves.”
Some Shen Yun performers who suffered severe injuries did receive treatment. When Sam Pu, one of the group’s highest-profile dancers, ruptured his Achilles’ tendon, he underwent surgery to repair it, he said in a video posted online last year.
In their statement, the representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong denied discouraging medical treatment.
“Shen Yun performers are offered and receive medical treatment whenever it is needed, and we have the medical records to prove it,” they said.
But former performers and instructors told The Times that such interventions were rare.
Daisy Wang, who started touring with Shen Yun when she was 13, said she sprained her ankle five times in eight years but never asked for a doctor.
Doing so, Ms. Wang and others were told, would mean that something was wrong with their spiritual state.
“It’s supposed to self-heal if you just send forth righteous thoughts,” said Ms. Wang, now 28, referring to the meditation technique Mr. Li prescribes to purge the bad karma he says causes illness.
Dancers were not the only members of Shen Yun who performed through the pain of injury.
A former musician who asked to be identified only by his last name, An, said he frequently sliced his hands on metal instrument cases when packing the dance group’s cargo trucks after performances. One cut was so severe that he had to stitch himself up with a hotel sewing kit, he said.
After playing in Shen Yun’s orchestra for about four years, another musician, a violinist named Joshua Lin, began to feel sharp pains near his right shoulder. He was taken to see Mr. Li, who touched his head and shoulder and told him he was healed.
The pain persisted for years — a sign, his classmates told him, of his weak faith.
He did not see a doctor until he left Shen Yun. Only then did he learn the likely cause of the pain: a bulging disc in his spine.
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Former students also said they suffered emotional abuse and manipulation.
Five former dancers said they were humiliated by instructors in front of classmates when they failed to lose weight.
One of the dancers, Chang Chun-Ko, said that when she was 13, stood 5-foot-5 (165 centimeters) and weighed about 110 pounds (50 kilograms), her dance teacher singled her out for being heavier than others in her troupe. The teacher told her classmates to report Ms. Chang if she bought snacks — in line with Shen Yun’s broader culture of encouraging students to inform on one another, she and others said.
Still, she desperately wanted to fulfill what she considered to be her oath to Mr. Li.
“Master told us he had endless magical powers,” said Ms. Chang, now 28, in Chinese. “We were little children, and we believed.”
Another former dancer recalled weekly weigh-ins that felt like walking to a guillotine. Her weight was recorded on a sheet posted in a classroom, with the names of those deemed to be too fat scrawled in red.
A third recalled Ms. Li telling her to eat only cucumbers and tomatoes to lose weight, she said. At 16, she developed an eating disorder.
Ms. Huang, the former dancer from Taiwan who dislocated her kneecap, was repeatedly told by teachers that she was becoming too heavy. At 17, she was reassigned to a job on campus designing patterns for Shen Yun costumes on a computer.
Near the end of high school, she was notified that she would not be accepted into the postsecondary school in Dragon Springs, Fei Tian College, and would have to leave the compound.
The focus on image was reinforced by Ms. Li. Some former students said they were confused to see her in designer clothes, given that Mr. Li’s teachings were critical of material attachments.
Ms. Li sought to manage not only the students’ appearances, but also their dating lives.
Dating required permission from Ms. Li’s office, another way in which Shen Yun’s leaders exerted control over their performers, former students said. Eleven of those students said that Ms. Li and her lieutenants tried to arrange relationships between foreign students and American citizens, which they believed were encouraged for visa purposes.
The school also controlled the music they listened to, the movies they watched and the books they read. They were barred from looking at “ordinary media,” the movement’s name for unapproved news outlets.
And their sense of obligation to the movement led many of the performers to tolerate long hours and low pay, they said. Eight former Shen Yun performers said they were not paid at all in their first year on tour.
In their second year on tour, students were typically paid a few hundred dollars a month, with the rate increasing over time.
A former violinist who asked to be identified only by his last name, Liu, said he came to feel exploited as cheap labor.
“The amount of money we were making them, and also saving them, was pretty ludicrous,” said Mr. Liu, who moved to Dragon Springs in 2012, at age 12, and left in 2017.
By their early to mid-20s, most of the former performers were being paid $12,000 a year or less, they told The Times. After graduating college at Dragon Springs, some of the student performers remained with the group as professionals and earned more. The group also recruited some outside professional musicians for its orchestra.
The representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong said that the accounts of low pay for underage performers were a “gross mischaracterization” of the group’s employment practices.
“Shen Yun Performing Arts is a professional arts company staffed only by professional adults,” they said, adding that qualified students at Dragon Springs are allowed to tour with the group as part of their studies.
“The program is legal, transparent and a highly sought-after opportunity for aspiring artists,” they said. “The stipend that students receive while on practicum is an industry standard.”
LEAVING THE FOLD
The tactics used by Shen Yun’s leaders often terrified those performers who thought about leaving.
They were told that they would go to hell, or face stiff financial penalties, or be put in physical danger if they lost Mr. Li’s spiritual protection.
When Nathan Xie, a former cellist, announced he was leaving in 2020, Ms. Li angrily told him he would have to repay eight years of tuition — an amount that might have exceeded $200,000. It was a threat that six other performers said they also had received. The group never followed through, but the episode rattled Mr. Xie. He was 22 and had just a few hundred dollars in the bank.
When Joshua Lin, the violinist, began to have doubts about the movement around 2012, he tried to push them aside.
He had lived at Dragon Springs since he was 15. But by 2017, at age 24, his devotion had waned. He watched a YouTube video about cults and was caught sharing it with another musician soon afterward. He was expelled midtour.
Only later did he come to view his expulsion as a blessing. He has worked as a swim teacher and co-owned a chain of chicken restaurants, and he hopes to open an auto repair business. Now 31, Mr. Lin wonders what he might have done with his life had he not spent nine years at Dragon Springs.
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