The Big, Unsettling Picture Behind Shen Yun

Shen Yun is a dance and music show that plays at some of the country’s most extravagant theater venues.

It has toured the U.S. since at least 2011, and just released its national tour schedule for 2025.

So frequently do Americans hear about Shen Yun through its mass promotional mailings, billboards or social media ads that there are memes and jokes about whether anyone really sees it.

On first receiving the mailing in 2013, I crumpled it up. “Commie propaganda,” I thought.

Seeing an online video advertisement for Shen Yun, I thought “Yeah, nice acrobatic dance and costumes, but how did I get targeted?”

It turns out I was wrong about Shen Yun.

Not only is it not pro-Chinese Communist Party, Shen Yun is a celebration of what was before Mao, and is a gadfly at the current Chinese regime. The performances use the free expression of art to remind us of the losses the CCP has cost.

To then find out that the top supporters of Shen Yun also support The Epoch Times, members of an organization called Falun Gong, made more sense.

To ask a Democrat hardcore activist, Falun Gong is no more respectable than American Christianity. This helps rapidly orient one in the right direction.

Falun Gong is a banned spiritual practice in modern China that has 70 million adherents or more. After having experienced 26 years of persecution, practitioners of Falun Gong recognize a spirit above the chairman’s position of the Chinese Communist Party.

The CCP continues to look furtively at Falun Gong, though President Xi’s changed line of attack appears to focus on personally besmirching the founder, Li Hongzhi.

Falun Gong emerged out of the ancient Qi Gong tradition inside mainland China in the 1990s. To the minds of Falun Gong practitioners, divine life energy, or Qi, is available to flow to everyone regardless of partisan loyalties.

After violent government attacks, members realized that a principled character requires a cultural, social and religious movement to be born and grown that will not abide the CCP’s totalitarian viewpoint.

Estimates say at least 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been executed by the Chinese Government since the religion was officially banned in 1999. Charges of torture and organ harvesting against practitioners have been made and cases brought to light.

The present headquarters of Falun Gong is in upstate New York, though many practitioners remain in China. Hongzhi escaped China to live in upstate N.Y., and is respected for linking the embodied spiritual experience to an organization that stands its ground against communist expansion.

Just as one thing you can say about the Falun Gong-founded Epoch Times is that its stances are principled. One comment you can make about Shen Yun is that its passionate leaps and bounds are athletically precise.

A lawsuit targeting @ShenYun is raising serious questions about Chinese communist influence here on American soil. pic.twitter.com/p2uEeMywzL

— EpochTV (@EpochTV) December 9, 2024

Training and rehearsals for the Shen Yun performance season occur at the upstate NY center as well. Performer pay and upkeep of the 427-acre facility are the major expenditures of the Shen Yun Foundation.

In other words, that’s where your ticket price goes.

But let’s be honest–when TV series, movie rentals, anime, comedy and replays of virtually everything are online, only a small fraction of Americans buy tickets to live dance and classical orchestras.

(That all changed for me, since I married a classical dancer. Sure, I fell asleep at my first symphony as an adult, with all the harmonies and the comfortable chairs, but live classical performances have certainly grown on me.)

We miss venues resonating with instruments and well-trained dancers’ feet echoing smoothly across hardwood floors.

The dancing in Shen Yun is classical Chinese, not “ballet.” Yet the style, like all that’s truly classical, draws out the sinews of evocative ability that the human body, mind and spirit have to offer the heart.

There is perfect toe balancing, walking “on air” gracefully and an ascending center of gravity during jumps while also somehow keeping that center of gravity, all in spades of rhythm!

Shen Yun doesn’t begrudge the West; it’s about classical friendship filled with virtues such as faith and divine love and wisdom. The narrative of the dance performance is that those virtues shine through 5,000 years, only to be carelessly halted by the ongoing atheist communist period and religious oppression in China.

There are reports that China banned not just affiliation with Falun Gong, but all public gatherings of Qi Gong. Apparently, the Chinese people have to practice Qi Gong in an approved housing unit or building.

With China repressing spiritual practice in park areas of their massive cities, American media critics should–but won’t–stop mocking Falun Gong, just as does the CCP. Some of the accusations are more serious, with company officials denying the reports in question.

The acclaimed global show faces allegations of operating as a forced labor enterprise. The dance company is refuting these claims.
https://t.co/yckyGlo77V

— KTNV | Channel 13 News Las Vegas (@KTNV) January 23, 2025

The Bible says this age will not last forever. The people will, in the final say, get to glorify the Holy Spirit, and sing out a new song to the God who created us. People will be judged as to whether they built and rang that liberty bell or slandered and hindered those who aspire.

In China the “official” Bible is heavily edited to hate Jesus Christ and glorify the state only, whereas The Epoch Times takes the side of Christian tradition.

Shen Yun seems to be a candid performance about the enduring urge for the Holy Spirit. By offering a Falun Gong-based performance in nations of Christian audiences without the slightest smear on Christian faith, it is doing an honest thing: expressing the desire for God in a way that speaks for the people in China.

Even the motto, “5,000 years of civilization, reborn” sounds open to the Gospel.

Indeed, Hongzhi writes affectionately about the Christian period of history and its importance today. It can seem as if Falun Gong is exploring Christianity without giving up certain key cultural and lifestyle aspects.

Discerning the right approach to what is syncretism and what is, rather, living by the Holy Spirit in the lands where the apostles traveled, was and is part of rich conversations in the Book of Acts and other epistles. Perhaps a massive spiritual awakening to Christ will span the Pacific Rim; maybe it’s happening now.

Aside from the visual, spatial and audio beauty of the show itself, you might have seen the mini-interviews with celebrities and politicians’ that are Shen Yun’s main advertising assets.

Frankly, amid liberty’s travails abroad and in America, “advertising” as to whether to see and support a show like Shen Yun comes from the Spirit. The Gospel of Mark says:

When they arrest you and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but it is the Holy Spirit.

Falun Gong members, like many Christians, face arrest and complete reliance on the Holy Spirit, right now. Both take heart from knowing:

We do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is.

(Romans 8:26-27)

And understanding:

“For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials

(Acts 15:28)

A Shen Yun performance is searchable by city, state, or ZIP via its web site.

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