Shen Yun Hosts Government, Community Leaders to Expose CCP Transnational Repression

When the first bomb threat came, Justina Wang was shocked. But then came the second, the third, the twentieth. “There’s so many bomb threats, every single year,” she said.

Attacks on her dance troupe have been “a little bit overwhelming,” the principal dancer said.

Like a dozen others The Epoch Times interviewed for this story, Wang has been touring the world for years with Shen Yun Performing Arts, a premier classical Chinese dance and music company.

The performance they put on, under the tagline “China Before Communism,” has drawn the ire of the communist regime in Beijing—not just for its portrayal of traditional Chinese culture untainted by communist influence, but also for raising awareness about some of the harshest human rights atrocities perpetrated by the regime.

The artists have seen nearly every conceivable attempt to stop them: Their relatives getting arrested in China, Chinese diplomats pressuring theaters and government officials to cancel their shows, death threats and false bomb threats sent to theaters, sabotaged tour buses, lawsuits, attacks in the media, and armies of fake accounts amplifying those attacks online.

“It is almost to be expected because we are facing opposition from a totalitarian regime that very much hates what we’re doing,” said Hubert Qu, a Shen Yun dancer.

Due to their busy schedule, the artists don’t get many opportunities to hear face-to-face encouragement from their supporters. They did get one, though, on Oct. 16 when the company training grounds hosted a screening of “Unbroken,” an award-winning documentary that delves deeply into Shen Yun’s backstory and the communist regime’s campaign against it.

The event gave some two dozen Shen Yun dancers and musicians a chance to talk with about 100 guests, many of them government officials or business and community leaders.

To see people deeply affected by the film provided great encouragement, the artists said.

“Hearing their perspective is really refreshing for me,” Lucas Browde, a Shen Yun dancer featured in the film, said. “It reminds me how impactful, how meaningful the show is.”

Yet the impact of the documentary is quite different from watching a Shen Yun performance itself, he said.

“From watching the show, you get what we’re trying to portray and why we put the show on. But from watching the documentary you get to understand what we go through.”

First Impressions

Shen Yun’s home is at a 400-acre campus in upstate New York, just south of the Catskill Mountains. The campus also houses a religious boarding school and a college, both of which train many of the artists who perform with the company. Classrooms and rehearsal spaces lie right next to Tang dynasty-style temple grounds and a lake surrounded by oak and maple woods, draped in breathtaking foliage this time of the year.

“I walked through the gates and immediately the vibe changes. It comes up from the ground,” Frank Dellapolla, former principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, said.

Richard Guertin, a former Orange County Court judge, described the campus as “one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been to on earth.”

“I feel like I was a part of the beauty that’s within everything that’s been done here,” said Martha Flores-Vazquez, New York state Assembly district leader for Flushing, New York.

While the campus often welcomes visitors and hosts events, such as graduation ceremonies or guided tours, those usually pertain to the schools or the temples. This was the first time the campus hosted an event focused on the extraordinary attacks faced by the Shen Yun company.

“It saddens me that there’s such a concerted effort by the communist Chinese to try to undermine and really hurt something that is very, very good,” Guertin said after watching the film.

“Shen Yun is really teaching through its performances what makes America great, which is that sense of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the ability to practice one’s faith.”

The story of Shen Yun urgently needs a “much broader, wider audience,” said Richard Swett, former congressman and U.S. Ambassador to Denmark.

“All of us … need to chip in and help make that happen,” he said.

Vaughn Spencer, senior attorney with Dhillon Law Group and former federal prosecutor, was “very happy” to hear that the documentary will be shown in more venues.

“A lot of people need to see this, get the message out, understand what the CCP is currently doing,” he said.

Dellapolla was taken aback by the “scope of what the company is going through,” especially because it “seems to have the same principles that a real American would certainly appreciate, treasure, and want to fight for.”

He was impressed with the demeanor of the performers, whom he described as “uniformly to be of a really, really high character and a caliber of intellect as well.”

“Even if they were not artists, just to be the way they are as people is extremely, extremely refreshing,” he said.

Rod Martin, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Martin Capital, praised the artists for their resilience in the face of the repression. 

“It tells you how brittle the [Chinese] Communist Party really is that they have to worry themselves about a dance troupe. I mean, how pathetic is that?” he said, adding, “Praise God for the courage of these young people.”

Escalating Attacks

In recent years, attacks on Shen Yun have become more serious, Jared Ren, a Shen Yun principal dancer, said.

“It just felt like things came popping up one after another.”

Starting in 2024, The New York Times published almost a dozen articles attacking Shen Yun and its operations.

“When I first heard about the media attacks, to be honest, I laughed,” said Daniel Zhang, a Shen Yun dancer.

“I’m like, ‘That’s absolutely absurd. Who would believe this stuff?’ And then I got a little bit angry because I’m like, ‘Wait, some people are actually being affected by this, and it’s starting to affect us.’”

To Ren, the attacks felt personal.

“I felt extremely, extremely insulted because this was something I cared so much about, something I dedicated so much of my life to,” he said. “I actually just view everything they say as slander.”

Around the same time, the same three former dancers who supplied allegations to The New York Times filed lawsuits against Shen Yun. 

All the artists interviewed for this story said that their experience with the company drastically differed from the portrayal by the former performers.

“I was pretty surprised to hear of some of the things they were saying,” said Catrina O’Neill, who performs with Shen Yun as part of her studies at one of the affiliated schools, Fei Tian Academy of the Arts.

“I just don’t know what went wrong there.”

Meanwhile, a flurry of bomb threats and death threats, some traced back to China, were sent to theaters hosting the show, apparently in an attempt to disrupt it.

“All of a sudden, bomb-sniffing dogs are part of our daily lives,” Ren said.

The seriousness of the attacks struck home for Shen Yun dancer Sunni Zhou last season when a performance in Toronto was canceled at the last minute following a bomb threat. That’s where she grew up. That’s where she used to watch the show as a child, dreaming of becoming a part of it.

“How could this be possible?” she asked. “It’s where it all started for me and now, they’re canceling the show.”

Initially, the attacks seemed random, Ren said. But as the documentary laid out, they all appear to stem from a single campaign coordinated and approved at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“It really shows how this whole thing is so systematically organized,” Andrew Fung, a Shen Yun principal dancer, said.

“It made me realize this kind of system isn’t really developed just overnight. It’s not just developed for Shen Yun. It’s been tried and practiced through years of targeted attacks on different groups.”

Falun Gong

One group that has borne the brunt of the CCP’s attacks for decades is Falun Gong, a spiritual practice based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance that became popular in China in the 1990s. When regime surveys indicated the number of adherents to total between 70 million and 100 million, the CCP targeted it for elimination, launching a nationwide campaign of mass detention and propaganda in 1999.

When followers refused to give up their faith, the CCP resorted to torture and killings at a scale that remains difficult to estimate. Independent investigations assessed the number of deaths in at least the tens of thousands, many as a result of the barbaric practice of forced organ harvesting.

It was the Falun Gong diaspora in the United States that gave birth to Shen Yun in 2006, starting with a single dance troupe and orchestra, few resources, and a lot of dedication, several Shen Yun artists who were with the company since the beginning previously told The Epoch Times.

As the documentary explained, the CCP views Shen Yun as a serious threat to its rule because the show provides an alternative cultural vision for China, one that doesn’t need the CCP at its helm. Since the beginning, Shen Yun has been a target of transnational repression—an expansion of the persecution from China overseas. The most recent wave of attacks fits the pattern, according to Qu.

“It’s basically just an extension of the tactics they’ve been using over the past 20 years of persecuting our faith,” he said.

“Except in this case, they’re taking it a step further. They’re trying to exploit the freedom of speech in America, exploit the press, exploit lawfare in America.”

This form of repression has been dangerously overlooked, he said.

“Few people in society realize this: that for Shen Yun to be able to be attacked in the free world is a fundamental attack on what it means to be free.”

In any case, the artists firmly described themselves as unbroken by the pressure.

“I see how serious it is … how hard these guys are trying to stop us,” said Sam Pu, a Shen Yun dancer and online influencer.

“But because they’re trying so hard, it makes me realize how hard we need to try to keep it going.”

Zhang echoed the sentiment.

“They tried everything to stop us, but they won’t be able to,” he said.