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The earliest area Shen Yun performances are on Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 2 and 3, when the Chinese dance and music company will take the stage at Dayton’s Schuster Center. Those willing to pay a minimum of $80 will experience the group’s bombastic retelling of China’s history spanning thousands of years. (Submitted photo) Biscuit Tin
On highway billboards and small-town bulletin boards, gas station windows and restaurant foyers, there she is.
A smiling woman bounds across a cerulean-hued backdrop of an ancient temple, beautiful pink silks rippling from her limbs, below the words “Shen Yun.”
Yes, it’s Shen Yun season, and the ads are ubiquitous, even in our little village. All throughout downtown Yellow Springs, in a surprising number of shop windows, are those cerulean posters promoting Shen Yun Performing Arts Company’s upcoming performances in the area.
The earliest is on Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 2 and 3, when the Chinese dance and music company will take the stage at Dayton’s Schuster Center. Those willing to pay a minimum of $80 will experience the group’s bombastic retelling of China’s history spanning thousands of years. It’s a polychromatic ode to the country’s traditional customs and culture, showcased in song, dance, instrumentation and elaborate costuming.
Strange, though, that something that should be as innocuous as “The Nutcracker” is essentially religious-political propaganda.
At its core, Shen Yun is an over-the-top commercial for the cultish Falun Gong, a spiritual group that has ties to far-right organizations and a penchant for profiteering off racist, homophobic and anti-evolutionary views.
Shen Yun, which means “the beauty of divine beings dancing,” was a troupe founded in 2006 by a group of expatriate Chinese Falun Gong practitioners. The stated purpose of the performing arts company was to revive Chinese culture and traditions as they allegedly were before the Chinese Revolution — a goal not unsurprising given that Falun Gong was banned in China in 1999 for a laundry list of reasons.
Following several years of growing notoriety in China during the mid-’90s, the group’s founder, Li Hongzhi, had attracted “tens of millions of adherents,” and had thousands of Falun Gong stations throughout the country, according to political scientist Maria Hsia Chang in “Falun Gong: The End of Days.” Worried by the possibility of practitioners having greater allegiance to their religious sect than the official state party, China’s government cracked down and began enforcing an anti-cult law. Falun Gong was kicked out, moved to upstate New York and held onto certain grudges.
Perhaps the leaping lady on the Shen Yun poster makes people miss the small “China Before Communism” slogan. The message is subtle, but still there.
It wasn’t just Li’s supposed influence that led to the Communist Party banning Falun Gong — Li’s beliefs were patently dangerous. As The New Yorker notes, Li held that evolution is a fraudulent science, that people of different races will be separated in Heaven, and that homosexuality and promiscuity are unnatural. Time magazine also reported that Li believed aliens were attempting to control humans through science — and that a battle for human consciousness between those aliens and the enlightened few will take place after a judgment day. Li also said that American magician David Copperfield can actually levitate.
Since landing in the U.S. and headquartering themselves in the Hudson Valley, Falun Gong has staged thousands of Shen Yun performances all over the world. Their 2024 lineup features over 150 scheduled shows throughout the world — from stages in Dayton and Houston, to Italy, the Czech Republic and beyond. Shen Yun brings in a great deal of money from this impressive globetrotting. In 2022, the nonprofit reported more than $229 million in total assets and over $46 million in revenue. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the majority of the money made from shows goes back to the Hudson Valley Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, which then trains more Shen Yun performers.
It should be said that the group’s expenses are $13.5 million, and I can only assume that much of that goes to the aforementioned advertising blitzkrieg.
That a sizable portion of Shen Yun’s revenues come from the performances themselves, makes this a good time to describe them in some detail. As most reports go, they’re bizarre.
Dance sequences are dubbed “Goodness in the Face of Evil,” “The World Divinely Restored” and the like. At some point in the show, the Falun Dafa (synonymous with Falun Gong) is introduced in a skit that involves a lovely young practitioner being abducted by “organ-harvesting” communists. A vocalist cries out, “Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends destroy what makes us human.” Near the grand finale, Mao Zedong appears on the digital backdrop and obliterates a faux community with an earthquake. Then, a tsunami appears — in the center of the wave, a red hammer and sickle manifests alongside the bearded vestige of Karl Marx.
But what of Shen Yun’s incredible assets? Well, here’s the rub to bring it on home.
In addition to its worldwide dance sensation, Falun Gong has its own media outlet: a newspaper called the Epoch Times, founded in 2000. Again, maybe readers have seen advertisements for this publication online (I sure have) or in print in newsstands in large cities.
Leading up to the dramatic 2020 election — wherein Joe Biden defeated incumbent and ignoble huckster and criminal Donald Trump — the Epoch Times directed millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign. After his loss, innumerable articles were published regurgitating blatant lies about the “stolen election.”
Sure, there’s the occasional article on the “multitude of health benefits” from apple cider vinegar, but the publication’s editorial page and the overt far-right slant of its news stories often feature ludicrous and conspiratorial headlines denying climate change and spreading falsehoods on the origins and effects of COVID-19.
All told, the Epoch Times is a neoconservative rag that daily bangs as many war drums as it can, aiming to incite greater political distrust against supposed U.S. adversaries (mainly China) and stoke resentment against the “woke” left.
So why is all of this relevant to the Yellow Springs reader?
Well, let’s not forget the number of Shen Yun posters that litter the village. And let’s also remember that this is a multi-million-dollar dance troupe with direct ties to a fringe religious cult that also bankrolls conservative conspiracies and hawkish projects bent on worsening U.S.-China relations to frightening ends.
If I can help it, I want no complicity in theaters of war. Lord knows this country doesn’t need my help. Just last month, the U.S. Senate greenlit a $14.5 billion military aid package to Israel to continue its indiscriminate genocide against the Palestinian people. I realize that our tax dollars are largely beyond our control, and that with every purchase of gas or milk, a fragment of our spendings indelibly goes to finance the newest tomahawk missile.
It may be easy to tell ourselves that ethical consumption under capitalism is impossible, but I believe we still have some autonomy; we can still intervene in smaller, more local ideological realms provided enough information.
Shen Yun masquerades as a family-fun, cultural experience for all, but I suggest that is not so. Despite its colorful, cerulean claims, the performances are easily digestible propaganda for the upper crust that props up ahistorical and orientalist views of China, and has direct ties to a group with explicit overtones of racism, homophobia and anti-intellectualism.
As such, I’d recommend Yellow Springs business owners take down their Shen Yun advertisements immediately.
*Tin Can Economy is an occasional column that reflects on object, form and scale. It considers the places and spaces we inhabit, their constituent materials and our relationship to it all. Its author, Reilly Dixon, is a local writer, gardener and amateur winemaker. He works in production and as a writer for the News.
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