Shortly after the launch of Shen Yun Performing Arts, halfway across the world, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials believed they had the perfect plan to drive the American arts group out of business: They would flood the market with dozens of competing groups—60, to be precise—and that would be the end of it. After all, who wouldn’t want to see a Chinese performance that was officially state-backed over one put on by a bunch of New York-based dissidents trying to revive “5,000 years of Chinese civilization”?

Very few people, it turns out.

The state-backed groups hardly made a splash, and are little remembered. Meanwhile, Shen Yun—now nearing its 20th year—draws recognition and full theaters all around the world every season.

What makes the CCP so desperate to prevent Shen Yun from performing, or, failing that, prevent audiences from attending? Why has Shen Yun reached the global acclaim it has, and are these issues related?

Spotlight on the CCP’s Greatest Fear

The CCP has had its eye on Shen Yun from the group’s inception. That means even before the regime knew the contents of its two-hour shows—the ethnic and folk dances highlighting some of the 50-plus ethnic minority groups of China, peoples such as the Mongolians and Tibetans whose cultures the regime has tried to erase; or the bel canto songs in Chinese with lyrics about the Creator, heaven, or the meaning of life in stark contrast with the atheist agenda the CCP imposes on the Chinese; or the story-based dances that paint a vivid picture of folk heroes, emperors, and other prominent figures from a Chinese history the CCP has sought to rewrite—the CCP already opposed Shen Yun.

It did so for a single, but significant, reason: Shen Yun’s founding artists practice Falun Gong.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a peaceful spiritual practice centered around the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. Outside of China, it’s widely regarded as a religion.

But in China, where religious activity outside of state control is criminalized, Falun Gong practitioners have faced violent persecution since 1999. Human rights organizations and The Epoch Times have documented cases of mass arrests, forced labor, torture, brainwashing, and even live organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese regime, and that persecution continues unabated today.

The practice was introduced to the public in the early 1990s and saw widespread popularity that put the number of people practicing Falun Gong between 70 million to 100 million by the end of the decade, according to official estimates. By 1999, most people in cities in China had seen people practicing the five meditative exercises of Falun Gong in public parks, and most people had heard of the qigong-like practice.

The persecution was initiated by then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who, insiders revealed, had what seemed like an irrational hatred and even jealousy of Falun Gong. But the persecution was also meant to cement his grab for power. Like the violent suppression campaigns the communist regime launched every decade or two—the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the treatment of civilians during the Great Famine—the dictator believed that, with the force of the state, he could “eliminate” Falun Gong in short order.

Shen Yun members young and old have shared with The Epoch Times how they were directly impacted by the persecution. Some experienced torture and forced labor themselves at the hands of the CCP for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. Some risked their lives to escape China. Some have had their families torn apart, with parents or grandparents abducted by the CCP for their faith.

Today, Falun Gong is practiced in more than 100 countries worldwide, and in 2005, a CCP defector and former spy testified about just how much this keeps top-ranking CCP officials up at night.

Chen Yonglin was stationed at the Chinese Consulate in Australia beginning in 2001, where he was tasked to spy on Falun Gong practitioners, whose compassion eventually inspired Chen to expose these transnational repression efforts.

Falun Gong is a top threat to the CCP, Chen said, but they would describe their efforts to eliminate Falun Gong as a losing battle because peaceful demonstrations continue and practitioners refuse to renounce their beliefs.

A journalist conscripted to the CCP’s efforts to defame Falun Gong globally previously told The Epoch Times that CCP officials involved felt they had “exhausted all means” short of murder, and after more than 10 years of failing to stop Shen Yun, the campaign has instead become a massive blow to their confidence.

From Diplomatic Pressure to Bomb Threats

The mission to revive a once-lost civilization is bold enough on its own, but what happens when that civilization is one a well-resourced authoritarian regime has tried for the better part of a century to erase?

The CCP’s inability to “eliminate” Falun Gong is something insiders have told The Epoch Times plagues Xi Jinping, the current party leader. CCP officials overseas work hard to try to prevent Xi from witnessing any demonstrations related to Falun Gong or advertisements related to Shen Yun, but Shen Yun’s popularity and the freedom to demonstrate in democratic societies make this a challenge.

In 2022, whistleblowers told The Epoch Times that Xi gathered key agencies and ordered them to increase their suppression of Falun Gong overseas, focusing efforts on Falun Gong-founded Shen Yun for its global visibility.

Leading the latest effort is Chen Yixin of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its spy agency, but The Epoch Times has documented the involvement of at least 14 state departments. They include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture, United Front Work Department under the MSS, Cyberspace Administration, and the Gestapo-like 610 office that Jiang initiated to spearhead the persecution in 1999.

Shen Yun members have told the newspaper that it has been a target for harassment since its inception, sharing wide-ranging evidence from slashed tires to death threats.

There are physical cases, such as multiple instances of vehicle tampering. In one case, a mechanic assessing the tour bus tires said punctures were made to evade detection but calculated to cause a blowout at high speeds on a highway that might flip the bus carrying dozens of performers.

Chinese officials have also long used diplomatic pressure to try to persuade theaters, or in the case of Europe, governments, which often run national theaters, to cancel Shen Yun performances. These efforts have been well-documented by local media as scandals, with European officials expressing offense that a foreign regime had been attempting to dictate to them what constitutes art. In many cases, local officials have shared with media correspondence from Chinese Embassies asking that they cancel or boycott Shen Yun.

But there have also been cases in which the Chinese regime succeeded.

In 2019, the Royal Theater in Madrid caved in to Chinese diplomatic pressure, an investigation found, canceling Shen Yun performances without notice to ticket holders. A nonprofit had called the Chinese Embassy in Madrid undercover and recorded Chinese Ambassador to Spain Lu Fan saying he persuaded the theater to cancel the show by telling the general manager it could not afford to lose the Chinese market.

Similar events took place in South Korea, where local Shen Yun presenters have faced routine cancellations or refusals from theaters over the years. In 2023, the Chinese Embassy in Seoul made a rare public admission that it informs Korean entities such as national broadcaster KBS to not allow Shen Yun to perform at its theater.

Since 2016, the Chinese regime has added cultural performances and theaters as a subagenda of its global economic development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative. It created the International League of Theaters of the Silk Road, now an alliance of 130 theaters and cultural institutions worldwide incentivized with predictions of 24 million audience members annually.

The Chinese regime also engages in misinformation and disinformation campaigns. For example, it has targeted the dance community with claims that Chinese state-run Beijing Dance Academy invented classical Chinese dance, whereas it’s actually a very ancient art form. It has backed social media bot rings that amplify negative propaganda narratives about Shen Yun.

The latest attempts to interfere with Shen Yun involve what seems to be a version of swatting. In February, the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington was evacuated the morning Shen Yun was set to begin a 12-show run. A false bomb threat was made to the theater, matching a pattern in the past year of inflammatory threats targeting Shen Yun shows around the world. In several cases, Shen Yun shared that law enforcement had confirmed that the messages originated from China.

What’s Behind the Shen Yun Success Story

The Epoch Times has been covering audience reactions to Shen Yun performances since 2006, and those responses have been broadly positive, even profound. They applaud the artistry and, oftentimes, the devotion they see the artists have toward preserving a culture once almost lost.

Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company, and its two-hour performance includes about 15 vignettes such as story-based dances, ethnic and folk dances, and original songs sung in the traditional bel canto style in the Chinese language. Many features of its production are unique: a patented digital backdrop that allows characters to move seamlessly between screen and stage, a live orchestra combining ancient Chinese instruments with a Western symphony, and more surprises to be discovered. Based in New York, its mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, which it has recently billed as “China before communism.”

“These are magnificent, colorful, joyful, festive scenes that tell a story and deserve to be seen by as many people as possible,” Frédéric Étienne, a company director, said after seeing a performance in Paris last season.

Preity Upala, an actress and former Miss India International, said that seeing Shen Yun last season amazed her even more than when she first saw it 10 years ago.

“When you come to a show like this, it reminds us, I think, who we are, why we came here, that we’re all connected, interconnected. ... It’s not just that they’re coming to have a beautiful experience. They’re actually leaving feeling fulfilled, feeling positive, feeling full of hope,” she said.

Former Argentine Vice President Carlos Ruckauf, a towering figure in the nation’s political history, said he found Shen Yun “truly remarkable.”

“The performance is spectacular, and its resistance to communism is equally commendable,” he said.

It is also not uncommon for audience members to say they never knew China once had all the culture and customs shown in the performance—even audience members who spent the majority of their lives in China.

Chinese are in the minority of Shen Yun audiences, with some even telling The Epoch Times they came out of curiosity for the show that is so strictly banned in China. Their responses are broadly positive, too.

A young man surnamed Chen traveled from China to Taiwan to see a performance and said it felt like a rope thrown to him, pulling him out of the chaos in which he was mired. He shared how he thought Chinese people, more broadly, would react to seeing Shen Yun:

“It would have everyone reexamine the history we were once taught under the reign of the Chinese Communist Party: the untruthful version of the history. As people face the real Chinese history and rediscover the virtues in the traditions, they will reflect on their past behaviors and attempt to change accordingly. This will bring the nation to a new era,” he said.

In the grand scheme of things, the CCP is a minuscule part of the story. Last year, audience members around the world  shared that they found the CCP’s attempts to dissuade people from seeing the show absurd and felt that even more so after they'd seen a performance themselves.

“I felt like I was witnessing the distillation of 5,000 years of Chinese culture,” Rick Fisher, a think tank senior fellow, author, and China expert, said after seeing Shen Yun at the Kennedy Center a few days after the false bomb threat. “It’s a very positive message, a positive message of a China that can live in peace with the world rather than the Chinese Communist Party, which is at war with the world.”

“In contrast to the Chinese Communist Party, the Shen Yun production represents a positive vision for Chinese culture in the world, a vision in which China is kind and is godly and is looking to create good,“ he said. “The Chinese Communist Party cannot live with that vision.”

Tickets to the upcoming 2025–2026 season are on sale now at ShenYun.com

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