What on Earth is Shen Yun?
Entering a truly bizarre world
Holiday season is almost here which, in the US, traditionally concludes with New Years Day. This also means that Americans may start to notice advertisements pop up for a plucky little known Chinese performance called Shen Yun. Shen Yun (神韻) which loosely translates as “divine sound” (or “the beauty of divine beings dancing in the heavens”) began in 2006 and tours major cities in the US every New Year.
Despite having limited exposure to Chinese culture, most Americans are aware of the significance of Chinese New Year, so showing Shen Yun around the American New Year makes sense for selling Chinese culture to Americans (even if the Chinese New Year is about one month later).
However there is a lot wrong with Shen Yun being a representation of Chinese culture, considering it is ran by a radical doomsday cult and serves the soft power geopolitical interests of the US oligarchy. The views and propaganda espoused in the Shen Yun performance do not represent anything close to the views opinions of the majority of Chinese people.
Falun Gong
It’s impossible to talk about Shen Yun without first discussing who funds it, which on paper is the Southern USA Falun Dafa Association which represents the Chinese cult Falun Dafa (or more commonly Falun Gong). Falun Gong currently has as many as many as 20 million adherents (or up to 1.4% of the Chinese population). Founded in 1992 by Li Hongzhi (李洪志) Falun Gong is a synthesis of Daoism, Bhuddism, and various other folk religions. Li has also made a variety of bizarre claims that aliens from other dimensions walk the earth, and that interracial babies may not go to heaven.
Falun Gong also adheres to many other conservative beliefs like opposition to evolution, homosexuality, feminism and communism. The latter of which caused friction between the Falun Gong and the CPC (Communist Party of China). The CPC began to crack down on them once they began to urge their members to refuse modern medicine, a practice they still insist on. In 1999 Falun Gong held a protest against the Chinese government in Beijing where several protesters were arrested, cementing the antagonism between the CPC and Falun Gong. Furthermore, there was an incident in 2001 where five Falun Gong adherents self-immolated in Tiananmen Square, the events of which Falun Gong adherents still promote conspiracy theories for.
This began their mission to defame and destroy the CPC. 2001 is the same year that Falun Gong adherents from the Epoch Media Group founded the New Tang Dynasty Television network (NTD) in New York City. The Epoch Media Group is also behind the Epoch Times founded one year earlier on the millennial epoch. The Epoch Media Group used these US-based media arms to then disseminate anti-CPC propaganda. They ran numerous stories on these platforms that asserted, without evidence, that the Falun Gong self-immolation incident was fake and that other Falun Gong adherents were being enslaved and getting their organs harvested by “the CCP”. Every story published by their platforms refer to the Chinese government as the derogatory “CCP” as opposed to its proper name: “CPC”. The frequently refer to covid-19 as ”the CCP virus”.
The Epoch Times has bizarrely denied association with Falun Gong, despite its tax records saying otherwise. This NBC article also reveals that the Epoch Time’s subscription revenue skyrocketed to $76 million in 2021 from a meager $7 million in 2019 after a massive 2020 ad blitz where 280,000 free copies of its newspaper were given away. Its total revenue soared by 685% in just two years. I myself found one in my mailbox in 2020. Such a dramatic increase is remarkable and hard to explain by the small donations found in it’s tax filings.
From the above, it’s clear the Falun Gong cult is well funded and very determined on spreading anti-Chinese government attitudes in the US.
What is Shen Yun though?
Shen Yun is ostensibly a dance performance meant to portray an “authentic” China or “China before Communism” as featured in many of their ads.
Full disclosure: I have not seen Shen Yun myself, but it seems to be a divisive production garnering 43% 5-star and 39% 1-star reviews on Trustpilot for an average of 3 stars even.
Browsing through the reviews one will notice a middling rating of the dancing. Almost all of the 1-star reviews take issue with the propaganda and other overt political content, and even some of the positive reviews mention it as well:
The contents of the show change with each yearly production, but have included content that casts the CPC as the villain as well as content promoting other conservative themes such as opposition to evolution, atheism and homosexuality. The 2019 production supposedly explicitly referenced Mao Zedong and Karl Marx explicitly.
US Soft Power
The propaganda spread by Shen Yun and the Falun Gong news outlets serves US geopolitical interests by spreading anti-CPC propaganda at home and abroad. The US is currently busy surrounding China with military bases to “contain” China. The US has upwards of 750 military bases located in foreign countries (a conservative estimate) while China has one.
Having dramatically escalated under the Trump administration and covid-19, anti-CPC rhetoric has become commonplace among US politicians of both major parties who frequently attack each other for “being too soft on China”. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is an NGO that nonetheless receives hundreds of millions per year from the federal budget to spread pro-US propaganda abroad. Many NED members have been involved in regime change “color revolution” operations in other countries. Much CIA dark money also flows into various dissident groups abroad like the Nicaraguan Contras, ETIM, TLPF and Ukrainian Fascists which is all well documented. While there is currently no proof, I would not be surprised if given the meteoric rise of The Epoch Times, their inexplicable funding and their convenient support of US geopolitical interests, that they as well as the rest of the Falun Gong propaganda machine are receiving large amounts of dark money from the CIA.
Concluding Thoughts
The tl;dr is that Shen Yun is a mediocre dance performance rife with anti-CPC propaganda and could very well be supported by some kind of dark money. This year I will continue my tradition of not attending, but if traditional Chinese dance intrigues you, by all means go see it. Just know where that box office revenue is going.
Agreed on Falun Gong, though I have no particular liking for the regime in Beijing.
I think that poor ol' Xi, and indeed the whole gang of them, are trying to figger out a way out of the Marxism box, and we should tolerate them from afar as they struggle with their problem.
Thanks for the "like" on comparative advantage, by the way. There's a saying, I think by Galbraith, perhaps by one of the more recent nobelists, that all of economics is obvious except for comparative advantage. I don't think that's quite true: I think that economics is riddled with erroneous assumptions around the notion of normal distributions, a total fantasy, but they're right that comparative advantage is subtle, useful, and generally misunderstood.
Plain ol' advantage, by contrast, is usually obvious.
Cheers,
-dlj,.
Hey, having just glanced at them, the "Shen Yun" results on Youtube are interesting. You'll meet allies there.