Prime ministers being whisked away, theaters closing their doors, threats of violence, and vandalized property—this is the recurring scene when a particular Chinese dance troupe arrives in town, according to the performers themselves.
“Wherever we perform, these issues seem to follow us,” explained Ying Chen, vice-president of Shen Yun, in an interview with The Post. “We’re exposing the CCP’s secrets to the world.”
Shen Yun Performing Arts, a nonprofit troupe founded in 2006 by practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, is based in New York and is widely recognized for its extensive advertising in subways and on local television. However, a new documentary titled “Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun,” which premieres this Tuesday, suggests that Beijing has long harbored animosity towards the dance ensemble. Last year, the Chinese consulate in New York described Shen Yun as “cult propaganda.”
Representatives of Shen Yun, which maintains eight touring companies globally, assert that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its supporters are behind the ongoing threats against them and those who facilitate their performances.
In a recent incident in February, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was forced to evacuate his official residence following email threats of a bombing if Shen Yun did not cancel an upcoming show in Australia.
One of the threatening emails, which was written in Chinese and directed at Shen Yun officials, ominously warned: “If you proceed with the performance, the Prime Minister’s Lodge will be reduced to ruins, and there will be bloodshed.”
That same month, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, was evacuated due to similar threats ahead of a Shen Yun performance. On March 15, a Shen Yun show in Mississauga, Ontario, proceeded despite another bomb threat aimed at that performance.
Chen said the Canada troupe’s tour bus then had its tires slashed.
Multiple bomb threats targeting a Shen Yun performance in Taiwan were traced back to Xian, China, according to local reports.
Human rights groups say the history of Beijing’s beef with Falun Gong is far darker than false flags and smear campaigns.
“The CCP has their claws in every government and the world doesn’t understand what’s going on. It’s a complete genocide,” human-rights activist Mitchell Gerber, an American, told The Post from an undisclosed location near the western Chinese border, where he has lived since 2021 to raise awareness of Falun Gong persecution.
The religion, which is based in Buddhism and traces its origins back centuries, members say, spread like wildfire in China after its founding in 1992 by guru Li Hongzhi, now in his 70s.
According to internal Chinese government figures, Falun Gong attracted at least 70 million practitioners in the country — larger than the Communist Party at the time, which had only 61 million members — before then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin outlawed it in 1999, calling it an “evil cult.”
“The Chinese regime has spent who knows how many trillions of dollars trying to root out traditional Chinese culture and shove Marxism on people,” Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, told The Post.
“This was after decades and decades of the communist regime trying to destroy religions, destroy spirituality, destroy the authentic culture so it could turn everybody into good communists,” Browde added. “Falun Gong …was a hearken back to the days before communism.”
Indeed, “China before communism” is the motto used in ads for Shen Yun, which was founded in 2006 and conducts performances depicting ancient legends and historical stories through classical Chinese dance and acrobatics.
Touring dancers, primarily ethnic Chinese in their 20s or 30s, are Falun Gong practitioners and considered world-class professionals in classical Chinese dance. The majority of them train at Shen Yun’s Fei Tian Academy, some 80 miles northwest of Manhattan.
It’s a religious-based school, said Chen, where high school age students — about half are Americans — live on campus.
Today, the number of Falun Gong followers inside China is estimated to be between seven and 20 million.
According to the US State Department and several independent groups, CCP authorities have arrested or detained hundreds of thousands — and possibly over a million — practitioners in prisons and labor camps.
In 2020 the independent China Tribunal claimed that forced organ harvesting from primarily Falun Gong prisoners occurred on a substantial scale. The following year, UN human rights experts expressed alarm over reports of detainees subjected to blood tests and organ examinations consistent with harvesting preparation.
The gruesome accusations appear to be backed up by peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on China’s official organ transplant numbers and citing the often extraordinarily short waiting times for organs in China.
Patient intake forms from China-based organ transplant centers shared with The Post showed clinics advertising vital organs like livers available “within two weeks” after patients signed up — a wait that takes months or years in many countries.
According to a 2025 investigation by The Epoch Times, which was founded by Falun Gong members in 2000, the social media platform X removed thousands of bot accounts suspected of links to the CCP that were amplifying a series of New York Times articles critical of Shen Yun.
The NYT series claimed that “[Shen Yun] performers were prohibited from reading articles from unapproved news outlets” and “managers told them that any mistakes they made onstage could doom their audience to hell.” The paper accused the Epoch Times of being Shen Yun’s main “publicity machine” and reported claims that performers faced “abusive conditions” and “emotional manipulation.”
The Epoch Times responded by reporting that the NYT published 10 anti-Shen Yun hit pieces in 2024, eight of them published only in Chinese.
The NYT did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Following the NYT series, the New York State Department of Labor announced it was actively investigating Shen Yun for alleged violations of state child labor and wage laws, including claims that underage performers endured grueling unpaid or underpaid schedules.
The investigation is ongoing.
Last April, two former Shen Yun dancers, husband and wife Sun Zan and Cheng Qingling, filed a federal lawsuit in New York, accusing the group of exploiting an “army of child laborers” through brutal working conditions and a culture of fear that forced them to perform while injured.
Sun said he was forced to perform extreme side splits that caused internal bleeding and had to dance with a sprained ankle. Cheng alleges she was forced to endure an untreated shoulder injury.
Both joined Shen Yun’s Fei Tian Academy in Cuddebackville, NY, as teenagers — Sun at 15 in 2008; Cheng at 13 in 2010 — and claim they performed in over 1,000 shows before both being dismissed in 2015.
Shen Yun, which runs out of a 400-acre complex called Dragon Springs that includes the affiliated dance academies, stated that medical care was available to the dancers. The troupe also claims the couple boasted about their time at the academy but changed their tune after a trip to Beijing, and that the lawsuit is another CCP smear operation.
“We will have no comment,” a lawyer for the couple told The Post.
The Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, said in a statement that Falun Gong is “an anti-human, anti-science and anti-society cult … The so-called ‘persecution’ and ‘organ harvesting’ are purely malicious and sensational lies.”
Shen Yun has been a major moneymaker for the nonprofit Falun Gong, with tax records showing an annual revenue of $40-50 million. The new documentary, directed by filmmaker Fiona Young, is timed for the 20th season of Shen Yun and will have a red carpet premiere at Manhattan’s AMC Lincoln Center on Tuesday.
