KEY FACTS:
- Shen Yun performers faced harsh treatment, including untreated injuries and emotional abuse, to spread Falun Gong’s message.
- One woman who grew up practising Falun Gong in New Zealand, before moving to Dragon Springs at age 13, has spoken of untreated injuries and emotional abuse.
- Shen Yun and Falun Gong representatives denied the allegations, calling them distortions and attacks on their faith.
As the popular dance show grew into an international juggernaut, some of the group’s young performers paid a steep price.
They began appearing about two decades ago, often around the holidays, and often at high-end venues: troupes of Chinese dancers swirling gracefully in colourful costumes.
First in New York City, then in Paris, Toronto and Taipei, Taiwan, 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 US$265 million ($438m).
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 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 400-acre 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, by committing a “bigoted attack” on a faith that promotes good health, moral living, and strong families and communities.
Based in part on elements of Buddhism, Falun Gong holds that people who practise its poses and meditation regimen can attain enlightenment. But in speeches and writings, its founder, 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, Li has positioned his group in direct opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which has imprisoned Falun Gong followers and demonised them in state propaganda.
Against that backdrop, 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 told their young performers that each show was an urgent spiritual mission, and they led them to believe that anyone who spoke out against the movement would face dire consequences.
Even so, 25 former dancers, musicians and instructors spoke openly to The New York Times about their experiences in Shen Yun, including a handful who had left the group within the past 18 months. They described a pattern of abusive behaviour by Shen Yun’s leaders that spanned nearly two decades and occurred as hundreds of performers cycled in and out of the dance company.
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 has billed 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 may pay US$309 ($510) a ticket, have little indication that the performers are labouring for that movement. They see smiling dancers who leap onstage and spend the next two hours performing synchronised spins and flying splits. Some scenes portray Falun Gong followers being beaten by Chinese state police.
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. It was a message that was constantly reinforced in lessons that instilled a fierce sense of obligation, as well as mistrust of the outside world, they said.
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 were 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, having not yet 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 travelled to New York from across the United States and other countries and remained in the complex well into their 20s.
Cheng Qingling, who grew up practising Falun Gong with her mother in New Zealand, arrived at Dragon Springs at age 13. Cheng, a former dancer, now 27, said she rationalised 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,” 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 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 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 got hurt 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”.
“The community at Dragon Springs is a close-knit, predominantly Asian community that values disciplined study and training, and is characterised by open, honest and direct interactions,” they said. “We are, essentially, a big family with a shared faith.”
The Times’ reporting on Shen Yun, they added, was likely to become “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 died in police custody. Chinese officials have continued to target them.
Still, the movement has flourished, amassing a global following whose members can be seen practising gentle movement exercises in public parks worldwide.
As Falun Gong spread, 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 upstate 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 Li Hongzhi as “shi fu,” the Chinese word for “master,” while clasping their hands and bowing. They quickly learn that Li Rui is a primary enforcer of his rules.
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,” Susan Zhou, a former dancer with the company, said in an email to the Times. “I think it’s a wonderful institution that creates an inspiring show for people all around the world.”
But the vast majority said it also exposed them to unyielding indoctrination.
During a lecture last year, Li Hongzhi, 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 offence.
“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 on earth’
At age 11, Kate Huang dropped out of school in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and travelled some 12,975km with her mother to rural Cuddebackville, in Orange County, New York – 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.
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 Li. Her grandmother had practised the exercises every morning at 4am. Her mother had sold tickets to Shen Yun shows.
“Everyone said it was the place you should be, because it’s the best place to be on Earth,” said 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 Huang heard a snap from her thigh that seemed to echo across the classroom, she said.
Her teacher notified 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, 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, 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 Li says that true healing occurs only by following his teachings.
“If I ask for the hospital, I will be labelled as not a fervent believer,” said Huang, who added that her knee has never felt the same. “I didn’t want to stick out or become a target of everyone.”
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 especially acute given Shen Yun’s demanding choreography, which calls for back-bending moves that incorporate elements of ballet and gymnastics. It was increased further by the group’s punishing schedule, which sent the student performers on tour for months out of the year, with bus rides between venues that could drag on for 16 hours at a time.
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. One played 14 shows in 12 days at New York City’s David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.
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 orthopaedic 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, permanent damage can definitely be done.”
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, 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 Wang, now 28, referring to the meditation technique 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 brought to see 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. “I just kept playing through the pain,” Lin said.
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 (1.67 metres) and weighed about 50kg, her dance teacher singled her out for being heavier than others in her troupe. The teacher told her classmates to report 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. More than once, classmates physically blocked her from entering a market on campus, she recalled.
On another occasion, the teacher called her shameless for buying three cans of Pringles on her day off. When the teacher questioned whether Chang wanted to stay in Shen Yun, Chang began to cry.
Still, she desperately wanted to fulfil what she considered to be her oath to Li.
“Master told us he had endless magical powers,” Chang, now 28, said in Chinese. “We were little children, and we believed.”
By the time she was 20, she was usually eating just one meal a day. As she sipped rice porridge one day, a different teacher asked why she was eating at all. She ran to the bathroom and kicked the walls.
Another former dancer recalled weekly weigh-ins that felt like walking to a guillotine. She put her body into “starvation mode,” she said, and would strip off clothing before stepping onto the scale. 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 Li telling her to eat only cucumbers and tomatoes to lose weight, she said. At 16, she developed an eating disorder.
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 warehouse 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 culture of body shaming reflected a fixation on the part of Shen Yun’s leaders on outward appearances, former students said.
During a 2016 Falun Gong conference, Li said Shen Yun was crafting its aesthetic to appeal to “those in the middle class and above,” including “people who are well educated, civilised and high-calibre,” according to a translation of his remarks.
The focus on image was reinforced by Li Rui, who often wore designer clothes and took dancers shopping on their days off. Some former students said they were confused to see her dress so fashionably given that her husband’s teachings were critical of material attachments. One former dancer said Li once gave her a Chanel wallet.
Li sought to manage not only the students’ appearances, but also their dating lives.
Dating required permission from 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 Li and her lieutenants tried to arrange relationships between foreign students and American citizens, which they believed were encouraged for visa purposes.
Ron Luo, who played viola for Shen Yun until 2021, said he thought the matchmaking was a tactic to tie young people more closely to the movement.
“It’s like keeping your labour,” he said. “Getting a person that fits the mould of what they want is quite difficult. You need the religious background. You need to be subservient to unreasonable demands.”
‘Can’t you endure hardship?’
From the moment Sun Zan enrolled at Dragon Springs at 15, he heard Li Hongzhi preach about the holy mission Sun and the other performers were undertaking: to save nonbelievers by allowing them to watch a Shen Yun show.
Compounding the pressure, Sun and six other former performers said, Li and his subordinates told them that any mistakes onstage might eventually doom their audiences to hell.
It made them approach each show with unswerving seriousness.
Sun, a former principal dancer, said he typically slept just five hours a night so he could rehearse routines to perfection. He danced through the grief of his grandmother’s death and the pain of a sprained ankle that, offstage, left him barely able to walk.
“It’s actually the mental trauma that still affects me until today,” Sun, who left in 2015, said. “If you don’t do it right, then it’s on you. Then the universe is not saved because of you.”
Some troupe managers would seize on errors after shows ended and shame those who made them in front of their peers. Often, they cast the mistakes as spiritual failings.
Nathan Xie, a cello player, once played the wrong notes at a performance in Mexico City, and afterward, his orchestra manager grilled him for an hour. She accused him of focusing too little on Li’s teachings and reading other things too much, he said. She confiscated his Kindle.
Such chidings were commonplace. In an audio recording from last year obtained by the Times, an orchestra manager can be heard chastising a group of performers for more than an hour, saying that they needed to work harder to reach Li’s standards.
“Didn’t we all make a promise to Master?” she asked in Chinese. “Can’t you endure hardship?”
Li and his wife encouraged students to view him as a father figure, they said.
Some recalled celebrating Li on Father’s Day and his birthday. They said they wrote poems for him and gave him gifts like folded paper cranes.
At the same time, some former students said, they were instructed not to share aspects of their Shen Yun experience with their parents. Many students saw their families only once a year, during a two-week summer break.
Their supervisors at the mountain also exerted control over their access to outside information, discouraging dissent and critical thinking, they said.
Students typically were not permitted to have a smartphone before they reached their early 20s. In recent years, those without phones were allowed to browse the internet for just 15 minutes a day, and only from designated computers.
The school 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. One former musician said her orchestra manager explained that this was because newer performers had not yet saved enough people.
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 labour.
“The amount of money we were making them, and also saving them, was pretty ludicrous,” said Liu, who moved to Dragon Springs in 2012, at age 12, and left in 2017. “At the time, I definitely was very concerned about the fact that we were getting nothing, and they were getting lots of money.”
Shen Yun spends a far smaller share of its revenue on salaries than several other large nonprofit dance and theatre companies based in New York, a review of tax filings shows.
Students often worked six days a week and were made to feel like they should be grateful for any pay, some of them said.
By their early to mid-20s, most of the former performers were being paid US$12,000 ($20,000) 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.
In their statement, the representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong said that the accounts of low pay for underage performers were a “gross mischaracterisation” 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 practice.”
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 Li’s spiritual protection.
When Daisy Wang, the former dancer, was caught texting with an outsider in 2017 about life off the mountain, Li Rui interrogated her for hours until Wang gave up the other person’s identity. She quit a few months later, but it took years, she said, for her to get over her fear of going to hell.
Nathan Xie, the former cellist, announced he was leaving in 2020, and Li Rui angrily told him he would have to repay eight years of tuition – an amount that might have exceeded US$200,000 ($330,000). It was a threat that six other performers said they also had received. The group never followed through, but the episode rattled Xie. He was 22 and had just a few hundred dollars in the bank.
Chang Chun-Ko, another former dancer, feared that she would die in an accident at any moment after leaving Dragon Springs in 2020, convinced that she had lost the mystical protection Li Hongzhi was said to have extended to the Shen Yun performers assisting him in saving the world.
And 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 and for years had poured himself into studying Li’s teachings. But by 2017, at age 24, his devotion had fully waned. He watched a YouTube video about cults and was caught sharing it with another musician soon after.
He was expelled mid-tour. On the plane home to Australia, he thought of all the friends he had grown up with on the mountain, and how he might never see them again.
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 now he hopes to open an auto repair business. Lin, 31, said he wonders what he might have done with his life had he not spent nine years at Dragon Springs.
He worries about the students still living on the mountain.
“It’s just not good for the people that are coming in, being taken advantage of now, especially the younger ones,” Lin said.
“It’s just going to be an ongoing cycle.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nicole Hong and Michael Rothfeld
Photographs by: The New York Times
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
