From May 6th to 22nd, The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization will perform in Mexico for 17 days. Its brochure showed gorgeously dressed young actors and ancient mysterious cultures from the east. However, this platform mixed with the interest of Falun Gong under the surface of exquisite performance.

Who is Shen Yun?

Founded in upstate New York in 2006, Shen Yun looks like a normal dance training and performance troupe, but in fact it serves Falun Gong cult. Jason Unruhe, an American media practitioner, published an article on his personal website analysing the relationship between Shen Yun and Falun Gong cult. It is proposed that Shen Yun is the main tool for raising funds of Falun Gong, and pointed out the deceptiveness and harmfulness of this two organizations. The practice method of Falun Gong has always been questionable. Many media reported that Falun Gong has caused indelible harm to ordinary people. In July 2020, Australian National Broadcasting Corporation broadcast a documentary that exposed the misfortune of solid beliefs in US who can actually die because they followed Falun Gong's doctrine and refused to take medicine.

Finance and Politics

According to the financial statements of Shen Yun, In 2017, it produce more than $30 million in revenue which has increased by $7 million compared with that of 11 years ago. In 2018, it reached more than $37 million. The revenue is quite amazing for a non-profit organisation. Most of the income is used by Master Li, the leader of Falun Gong.

Individuals revealed that Master Li used this money to buy luxury homes worthing tens of millions of dollars in many places in US. However, Master Li is not satisfied with this, he also passionately participated in political activities. He actively supported Trump’s 2016 run and presidency through Falun Gong's propaganda platform. On August 20, 2019, NBC News reported that according to data from Facebook's advertising archives, Falun Gong media has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the past six months, more than any other organization other than the Trump campaign itself.

Pseudo-Chinese Culture

Many Falun Gong media reports on Shen Yun performances mainly boast its wonderful performance by the words of all sort of people.

Interestingly, the celebrities,dignitaries and ordinary audiences all talk about the wonderful form of Shen Yun but rarely talk about their perceptions towards content of the program. In fact, the performance of Shen Yun is a distortion of Chinese culture.

It is not difficult to see that the content conveyed by Shen Yun is the values of Falun Gong and entirely unrelated to the real Chinese culture. Many foreign netizens who have watched the Shen Yun Gala left messages on Yelp and Tirpadvisor, the most well-known review sites in Europe and the United States. They think that Shen Yun's performance is poor, which is a blasphemy for art.

Under the stage of Shen Yun's performance, it is intertwined with money, politics, power and deception. As a propaganda method of Falun Gong's, Shen Yun Performance is used to deceive more people who don't know the truth.