The original article is from: https://www.shenyun.org/challenges-we-face
Most people are shocked when they hear that not only are we banned from performing in China, but that the CCP is constantly trying to sabotage us and stop us from performing around the world. It doesn’t seem to make sense—why would the political leaders of China want to stop a Chinese cultural show?
Ever since Shen Yun Performing Arts was established in 2006, the Chinese Communist Party has never stopped trying to interfere with us and dictate to the world what they can and cannot watch. They try pressuring theaters to cancel our contracts, try bribing local politicians to do their bidding, harass performers’ families back in China, attack us with an army of online commenters, send fake bomb threats to theaters, and even dangerously slash our touring buses’ tires.
Over 130 such cases of interference have been documented around the world and you can see the evidence and details of them here. In July 2024, two Chinese agents pled guilty in New York to a scheme targeting Shen Yun, but who knows how many other agents are out there.
So why is the CCP so afraid of Shen Yun?
Shen Yun’s explicit mission is to revive traditional Chinese culture, the very culture the Communist Party has spent decades trying to destroy in order to make room for its own ideology. To better understand Shen Yun’s role in a renaissance of traditional culture, we need to go back at least to the Cultural Revolution, a time when the CCP razed temples to the ground, burned traditional books and artwork, and cut off an entire nation from its heritage. Shen Yun is now turning that around, and Chinese people who see the performance often say that this is where they found real Chinese culture. By performing “China before communism,” as our tagline says, Shen Yun also allows people to envision a China without communism.
Moreover, as part of Shen Yun’s showcasing of five thousand years of Chinese civilization, every year we also perform dance stories set in today’s China, including ones depicting the story of people who practice Falun Gong. We show both the persecution they face and the courage of their faith and peaceful resistance. This is a human rights atrocity that the CCP claims does not exist, and yet here we are depicting it on stages worldwide through beautiful and moving art.
And that is how you end up with bizarre situations like Chinese diplomats chasing a country’s president through the airport begging him to cancel Shen Yun.
But when the CCP’s attempts to stop Shen Yun failed, it pivoted to try to change public opinion. Chances are that if you heard strange things about Shen Yun, they can be traced back directly to narratives originating with the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department in Beijing.
They placed paid content attacking Shen Yun in major newspapers like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal that appear to the undiscerning eye as a regular article written by the paper. They have an entire “50 cent army” of online commenters attacking Shen Yun wherever they can—sometimes with hundreds of nearly identical comments on a single video within a day. And a series of articles attacking Shen Yun mysteriously appeared all at once in Western press, often by authors with direct links to China.
Inside sources report of CCP organizations supporting Chinese YouTube influencers attacking Shen Yun and there’s even evidence of coordination between some of these individuals and a few Western journalists. The list goes on and on.
It’s our hope that you watch the performance and judge for yourself what kind of company we are and what values we stand behind.
Here we provide some resources for you if you want to look more into what we’ve had to deal with as we stave off the world’s biggest dictatorship:
Weaponizing Social Media: The CCP’s global war on Shen Yun and Falun Gong.
faluninfo.net/weaponizing-social-media
Our website’s overview and timeline of the CCP’s sabotage attempts.
shenyun.org/spirituality/challenges-we-face
Report from the Falun Dafa Information Center about how the CCP targets Shen Yun.
faluninfo.net/ccp-targets-shen-yun
Evidence chart documenting evidence of over 100 incidents of CCP interference around the world.
leeshailemish.com/on-shen-yun/whos-afraid-of-shen-yun
The strange story of how PRC diplomats chased after the President of the Dominican Republic to try to cancel Shen Yun.
leeshailemish.com/on-shen-yun/2023/03/20/dominican-chasing-the-president-to-the-airport
Article in The Hill: The real reason communist China is afraid of Shen Yun
thehill.com/opinion/international/4500639-the-real-reason-communist-china-is-afraid-of-shen-yun
What is Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong?
https://faluninfo.net/what-is-falun-gong-falun-dafa/
Escaping to the Spotlight – stories of Shen Yun artists who fled persecution
shenyun.org/news/view/article/e/5uc3EAnhUUQ
More persecuted artists stories
shenyun.org/tag/name/t/Persecuted-Artists
Shen Yun thank you letter to the European Parliament
shenyun.org/news/view/article/e/cH3InWOPmGw
