Two former dancers for Shen Yun Performing Arts, the traditional Chinese dance company, filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing the group of amassing a financial fortune and worldwide renown by subjecting an “army of child laborers” to brutal working conditions and psychological coercion.
The lawsuit by the former dancers, Sun Zan and Cheng Qingling, is at least the second civil action targeting the group and its leaders since The New York Times last year detailed the treatment of performers and financial practices at the arts company, an arm of the Falun Gong religious movement.
Advertising a glimpse into “China Before Communism,” Shen Yun performs hundreds of shows a year featuring acrobatic routines by performers in billowy outfits. The group also serves as a messaging platform for Falun Gong, promoting the teachings of its founder, Li Hongzhi, and portraying the Chinese government, which has banned and persecuted his followers, as evil.
Shen Yun accumulated $266 million in assets by 2023, the lawsuit says, while performers worked up to 15 hours a day in training and on a “crushing” tour schedule for little pay.
“The child laborers were paid generally no more than $500 a month — less than the price of a pair of orchestra seats at this year’s Lincoln Center performance,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Representatives for Shen Yun and Falun Gong said in a statement that the allegations “are false and present a distorted picture of our organization, our mission, and our faith.”
“We operate with integrity and are committed to upholding the highest artistic and ethical standards,” said the representatives, Ying Chen for Shen Yun and Levi Browde for Falun Gong. They said Shen Yun uses both professional, salaried performers and students following a state-approved curriculum. And they said that a few former performers were spreading a false narrative pushed by the Chinese government while many more performers and their families have defended Shen Yun.
Mr. Sun and Ms. Cheng, who married after leaving Shen Yun and now live in New Zealand, were featured in The Times’s coverage. Each had parents who were adherents of Mr. Li, who teaches that people can attain enlightenment in part by following his regimen of meditation and exercises and has implied that he created the universe.
Mr. Li started Shen Yun in 2006 and expanded it rapidly at Dragon Springs, his movement’s 400-acre headquarters located northwest of New York City.
The suit describes Mr. Li as “the mastermind of the entire forced labor scheme,” naming him as a defendant along with his wife, Li Rui, and two schools that Mr. Sun and Ms. Cheng say were used to create the “pretext” of educating performers. Ms. Chen and Mr. Browde said the schools provide a quality education and their students excel.
The lawsuit accuses Shen Yun of forced labor, human trafficking and other violations of the Federal Trafficking Victims Protections Act, seeking damages for physical and psychological injuries. One of the former dancers’ lawyers, Carol Merchasin, has specialized in cases involving abuse in religious and spiritual communities.
Mr. Sun was sent by his parents across the world to Dragon Springs at 15; Ms. Cheng arrived at 13. Their suit described the high-fenced compound as akin to “a penal colony,” with performers confined there through psychological and physical control and their passports locked in a safe. Representatives for the groups said holding passports for safekeeping is normal at boarding schools, and they are returned upon request.
Performers had a “dreadful existence” of six-day work weeks full of training and religious practice, the suit says, and just two or three hours of classroom time per day. Instructors allowed Mr. Sun to cheat on exams and sleep in class because of the priority given to training, the suit says.
Humiliation and violence were commonplace, the suit says: “A late-arriving child laborer could expect to have an instructor’s shoe strike their head moments after walking in.” They were told such treatment “was an indication of talent, and so they should be thankful for being beaten.”
Leaders instilled fear by shaming rule-breakers at schoolwide assemblies. Around 2011, a school principal berated Ms. Cheng’s roommate for looking at pornography when she had actually been reading Japanese comic books known as manga, the lawsuit says.
Like other performers, Mr. Sun and Ms. Cheng said they performed through injury and without medical treatment. Mr. Li teaches that only faith can purge the body of illnesses.
Mr. Sun suffered internal bleeding when an instructor told other students to force him into a side split; he had to hold that position for 10 minutes a day for three months and has scarring on his legs, the suit says.
After Ms. Cheng suffered a training injury that made her left arm go numb, Mr. Li ordered a school principal to meditate with her rather than arranging treatment; she has permanent damage to her shoulder, the suit says.
Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities.
(0:03) So, let me introduce myself first. (0:07) I began practicing Falun Gong since I was 22 years old, 1993. (0:13) And I built my basic moral compass in practicing Falun Gong.(0:23) And about, let me think, about six years in Falun Gong to 1999, (0:35) the Chinese Communist Party began stamping down Falun Gong. (0:40) And I found myself in the front line of resisting their very violent cramping down. (0:49) So, I helped Western journalists to interview people persecuted by the CCP.(0:57) And I found an encryption communication tool, an encrypted communication tool, (1:04) an encryption communication tool to establish the communication channel between journalists and us (1:14) and between the fellow practitioners inside China and abroad China. (1:21) So, I was on the top of the most wanted list in China since 2000 to 2002. (1:30) And finally, I was caught with my wife, my ex-wife in 2002, August.(1:38) And I spent nearly 10 years in China’s prison. (1:44) And I went to the States in 2013 until now. (1:50) And after I went abroad, I found that the practice of Falun Gong is really bad.(1:59) They are full of controlling and threatening and such kind of thing and manipulation in the whole practice. (2:12) And since 2017, I heard of the darkness inside Shen Yun. (2:18) And in January of 2021, two Shen Yun dancers, former dancers, Sun Zai, Cheng Qinglin, Jeff Sun, and Ashley Cheng, (2:35) came to me and told their stories to me.(2:40) And I decided to expose all of those things until now. (2:45) We met together. That is my story.And how about you? (2:51) Yeah, thanks for having me. (2:54) First of all, I would like to say that it’s incredible that you spent 10 years in Chinese prison. (3:01) The US prison system is obviously no fun, to say the least.(3:07) But I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in China and imprisoned, what kind of situation that is. (3:13) And also, I think it’s very interesting that you were previously on the Chinese Most Wanted and now you’re in the FLG Most Wanted. (3:23) So you’re always on the Most Wanted, which is really interesting.(3:28) So me, I was not born into the practice. (3:34) I’m in my mid-20s now, but my mom picked up the practice. (3:40) Only my mom, not my dad.(3:42) She picked it up in about 2003. (3:45) So I was about a couple of years old at that point. (3:50) How she heard of it.(3:51) So the reason why I’m talking about her and not myself is because she still plays a very important role in my relationship with FLG today. (4:00) And to be honest with Shen Yun, I’ll call it SY. (4:05) You’ll call what? (4:06) I’ll call it SY.(4:08) Shen Yun, I’ll call it SY. (4:09) XY, right? (4:11) No, SSY. (4:14) SY, okay.(4:16) I just generally, I tend to call it the short version. (4:20) It’s a little easier to say. (4:23) But my mom has had a very big impact, obviously.(4:27) So she was brought into the practice by, I think, a local practitioner who she met. (4:32) She used to do this thing called WMA. (4:35) Do you know what that is? (4:37) Excuse me? (4:37) It’s WMA.(4:39) It’s kind of a pyramid scheme in a way. (4:43) It has a really bad reputation. (4:45) But it’s basically like you sell a, I don’t know if you call it a program, but you sell to other people and they sell to other people.(4:52) So it’s a big pyramid scheme. (4:58) It’s a big pyramid scheme, right. (4:59) But my mom, she was affiliated with that before.(5:02) So you can imagine what kind of person she is. (5:04) But she met somebody through that who introduced her to the practice. (5:11) And at the time, her dad was sick.(5:14) So it wasn’t even for her own benefit. (5:15) It was for my grandfather to somehow receive a blessing, a miracle from the practice and get better. (5:23) But he didn’t get better.(5:23) He had passed away. (5:25) And she began practicing it over here in the US. (5:30) My grandfather lives in China.(5:31) So your mother began practicing Falun Gong in the United States. (5:36) Yeah, I should say that. (5:37) Our family has been in the US for 30 something years.(5:40) We came here as, or my dad came here as a graduate student. (5:45) Can you speak a little more slowly because I cannot catch your words. (5:50) Okay.(5:51) Yeah. (5:51) Okay. (5:51) Sorry.(5:52) Yeah. (5:52) We’ve been in the US for more than three decades. (5:58) And we came as kind of, not as refugee, came as a graduate student family.(6:05) And so it’s been a long process for us after she started practicing. (6:13) It’s been about 20 years since then. (6:15) She’s changed a lot.(6:17) A couple of big things have happened. (6:20) So when I was in my early teenage years, I was already playing the violin, but it became more serious. (6:33) And we had this goal.(6:35) I say we because my mom claims that I had the goal myself. (6:39) But we were practicing and taking violin lessons to go to the mount. (6:46) So that was the end goal.(6:49) We wanted to participate with tours and things like that. (6:53) And so we did that audition. (6:55) I made it.(6:56) And then I was there for five years. (6:58) After five years, I decided I had enough. (7:03) A lot of people around me were also leaving and were skeptical of the entire company and their motives.(7:11) So for me, it was always about the money. (7:16) Money issue is huge for me because we’re students. (7:20) We don’t get paid, which is understandable.(7:23) Students don’t have to get paid. (7:24) But it seems strange that it was 95% students and we worked so many hours, so many shows. (7:32) I remember sitting on the bus for sometimes 15 to 17 hours a day.(7:37) Some others have talked about that. (7:40) For me, I never got physically damaged from that. (7:46) But it was definitely a psychological challenge.(7:49) It was torture, basically, because we couldn’t do anything except sleep, read. (7:56) It was not fun. (7:59) Did you hold your own passport or ID by yourself? (8:05) Yeah, I toured only twice.(8:10) Actually, I should say, no, I don’t think I held my own passport. (8:15) I didn’t have an ID. (8:16) Don’t think what? (8:17) I didn’t have my own passport on me.(8:21) It was handed over to the authorities, to the orchestra manager. (8:29) Can you freely in and out the compound? (8:35) No, you can’t. (8:38) A couple of things.(8:39) Some people, they get so used to that environment. (8:43) They don’t have the desire to leave. (8:45) Others are completely fine with just leaving that place once a week.(8:51) That place being the mountain. (8:52) Once a week to go to the local Walmart or things like that. (8:58) It’s a lot like prison.(9:02) You’re stuck there. (9:04) When you do leave, there’s a time limit. (9:09) Then you have no freedom.(9:13) I remember me and my friends, we would have our own devices secretly. (9:19) We would access Wi-Fi freely when we left the mountain for our weekly trip. (9:29) As far as after I left, what happened, I decided to try out Middletown.(9:40) The reason is because my family had moved to an area where the school district was very competitive. (9:47) We wanted to make sure that I graduated on time. (9:51) That was a big thing for me.(9:52) I wanted to graduate on time. (9:53) Obviously, the implication for graduating on time is that having a high school experience meant I was very behind academically. (10:09) As you can imagine.(10:10) Specifically with the curriculum. (10:13) They did the bare minimum. (10:14) They had a lot of what I deemed unnecessary classes like Chinese, Chinese history, complete waste of time, very little math, very little science.(10:28) I was very far behind. (10:30) Then I went to Middletown to try to graduate on time, which was successful. (10:33) Then I went to college and then I did graduate school.(10:37) Now I am in the middle of the storm. (10:42) That’s my story. (10:43) What storm? (10:45) The storm of the SY PR campaign against New York Times and New York Times and people speaking out against SY.(10:57) Just this whole thing. (11:04) They called you a student when you were in Shenyuan, right? (11:09) Yeah, I was a student. (11:11) Tell me, as a student, did you attend any commercial show with Shenyuan? (11:20) What is your time in everyday time? (11:25) Yeah.(11:26) Did you attend any commercial show? (11:30) Did I do a tour and play shows? (11:34) Yes. (11:34) Yes, I did. (11:35) I did two tours.(11:37) Compared to a lot of my peers, I did very little because I ended up leaving. (11:41) For the first three years I was there, I didn’t tour. (11:43) I was in what they call the preparatory music class.(11:48) That was more of a normal high school education where we specialized in our instruments in the music class, but we also took normal classes year-round because we weren’t touring. (12:00) The last two years, when I did tour, I played something like 90 shows and 110. (12:05) About 200 shows, how much did I get paid? (12:10) Probably a grand total of $2,000.(12:18) $2,000 for how many shows? 200 shows? (12:22) 200 shows. (12:23) 200 shows, you get $2,000. (12:26) The thing is, I was a student, so what they say is, okay, the first year you’re just a rookie.(12:35) They don’t feel the need to pay you for that. (12:38) Second year, as an allowance, as a stipend, I got $300. (12:44) As far as did I actually receive that money and if I can access those records, I don’t have access to that bank account anymore, so I honestly couldn’t tell you.(12:51) Even if you just consider the fact that I played 200 shows, saved however many sentient beings I saved. (13:00) 200 shows, how many hours on tour? (13:04) If you consider those hours as work hours, we took long bus rides, we had rehearsals, we had all kinds of sound checks. (13:14) Don’t forget, before a show, we have to set the stage and stuff.(13:22) After, we have to strike, as they say in industry terms. (13:28) I was talking to somebody about this the other day. (13:30) An average day for an orchestral male who has to do the striking and all that stuff is something like 17, 18 hours, something like that.(13:41) 18 hours per day. (13:43) Yeah, 18 hours per day. (13:45) Ridiculous.(13:47) I don’t think 18 hours working per day, we can call you a student. (13:54) I think we can call you a worker, maybe. (13:56) Yeah, sure.And it’s unheard of to work that many hours, right? (14:01) But let’s talk about how that will be justified on their side. (14:04) They’ll say, okay, you’re a student, and they might say that this is voluntary. (14:12) You can choose to do this, no one is forcing you.(14:15) But if you think about it, is that really the case? (14:17) Do you really get the choice to not participate in strike or wake up early to make sure all the cables are in line and all the things are plugged in? (14:28) Do you have a choice? No, you don’t. (14:31) If you want to leave, like when I left, there was already the talk of, okay, you’re going to have to pay for your tuition while you were here. (14:42) Well, I was there for five years.(14:44) Do you mean to say that I need to pay $150,000? (14:47) What school does that? (14:48) Have you heard of any schools in the entire world that make you pay your tuition after? (14:55) Yes, yes. (14:56) After you attended, you received a scholarship. (15:00) And so that money is, yeah, it’s yours, essentially.(15:08) When you’re setting up the stage, so-called Zhuangtai, is there any security method to protect you from being hurt? (15:20) Well, to be fair, I don’t think we were doing anything that was that dangerous, per se. (15:27) But I do wonder, so to answer your question, no, there was no security. (15:32) They kind of taught you on the go, so you learn kind of quickly.(15:39) And I wonder what the local labor union thought, what their theater people thought with these little kids doing all this work. (15:47) No idea what they thought, but it must have looked kind of funny to them. (15:50) That most companies, performing arts companies, come in with their huge productions and lots of people, and all older, right? (15:58) Us, average age, not even 20, probably.(16:02) How old were you when you were Zhuangtai? (16:06) I was, I turned 16 my first tour, so I was 15. (16:11) I started off when I was 15, and I left when I was 17. (16:15) So honestly, compared to a lot of other people who have their own stories to tell, I don’t have a lot to say.(16:21) But I do think that I understand the operation pretty well. (16:24) I even would say that I can justify their perspective. (16:31) But in justifying their perspective, you have to make a decision, right? (16:36) There comes a point where you have to think, either this is all true, and all these kids are being used for a righteous, sacred purpose, or this is all false, and it’s very highly illegal.(16:50) Yes. (16:51) So there’s no other thing. (16:53) And to continue on that idea, either Li is the creator, or he is a terrible, terrible criminal, and thousands of people in China are being persecuted like you, and are dying for him.(17:04) That’s the situation. (17:06) So it’s no joke. (17:08) Yes, you are right.(17:10) And tell me, when you were Zhuangtai, were there any younger boys or girls doing this job? (17:19) I mean, I was 15. (17:21) There were probably 14-year-olds, maybe even 13-year-olds. (17:26) 13 years.(17:28) The youngest person I know who has toured was maybe 12. (17:34) 12 years old. (17:39) Could you please tell me? (17:41) Yes, please go on.(17:42) But later on, they stopped having these super young kids, and they even stopped admitting super young children to the school, I guess because they couldn’t really do anything. (17:53) It was maybe a little early for them to tour. (17:57) And they had a lot of living, like lifestyle issues.(18:03) Are they a U.S. citizen or other country’s citizen? (18:10) What is their visa status? (18:14) They’re probably on student visas. (18:16) I’m assuming they’re on F1 student visas. (18:20) F1 student visas to the United States.(18:23) Yes. (18:24) They attend the tour on Europe, maybe? (18:28) Yes, absolutely. (18:30) So they have an F1 visa, but they attended the tour to Europe.(18:38) At the same time, the tour is a commercial tour, right? (18:41) Right, exactly. (18:42) So I wonder if the SY office has meticulously arranged people in orchestras or in companies based on what their visa status is. (18:54) I don’t know if that’s the case, but I can speak from personal experience.(18:59) When I did tour and we went overseas, plenty of people in my group were from Taiwan. (19:05) Not a lot of people from China or Hong Kong, but a lot of people from Taiwan. (19:10) And I’m assuming they’re all on student visas.(19:12) They toured commercially. (19:15) How about other countries? (19:17) For example, Germany, Europe, UK, and New Zealand and Australia? (19:24) Yeah, I had a couple of very close acquaintances from Australia. (19:31) They also toured with us.(19:33) In fact, one of the people mentioned in the article was my good buddy who is Australian. (19:40) Do you know Zhang Ruyi? (19:42) Zhang Ruyi, a female violinist. (19:45) Yes, yes.(19:46) Isn’t her name Catherine? (19:48) Tell me again, please. (19:51) Catherine, yes, exactly. (19:52) Catherine Zhang, yes.(19:54) I think I know her. (19:56) We may have overlapped during my time there, but I don’t remember if I’ve actually talked to her and if she knows who I am. (20:03) Catherine Zhang, Zhang Ruyi.(20:04) What about her? (20:08) Her mother is the first person coming to me to tell the story of Inside Shenyue. (20:18) But after she noticed that I exposed all of these kinds of things, and she turned to be on the other side and scolding me to destroy the law. (20:33) Interesting.(20:35) If you think about it, destroying the law shouldn’t be a concept because you can’t destroy the law. (20:42) So if the law is foolproof, if it’s perfect, if it’s already complete, as they say, then all these accusations we’re making are just false. (20:54) It’s a mockery of the law, and it can’t do anything.(20:59) But if they are scared, then they’re probably very scared. (21:04) So again, there’s no in-between here. (21:07) I’m wondering, what kind of stuff did her mom tell you? (21:14) Her daughter, Zhang Ruyi, Catherine Zhang.(21:17) Yeah, but when you were talking to the mom about what kind of stuff was exposed, I guess from the daughter, yeah. (21:23) She has been bullied very severely. (21:25) Oh, wow.(21:26) Just back in prison. (21:28) They use baojia. (21:31) Do you know what is baojia? (21:33) I can imagine, yeah.(21:34) A couple of people. (21:37) Two fellow students put her daughter under surveillance all the time. (21:43) Her daughter cannot behave independently.(21:48) She must be under surveillance, being escorted to anywhere. (21:54) It’s very funny. (21:55) Being humiliated so many times in public.(22:00) Right, right. (22:01) And being searched for body, searched for body publicly. (22:06) And her personal properties will be disclosed publicly and being thrown away all around.(22:14) Right, but that’s all part of cultivation, right? (22:18) It’s all a Xing Xing test, right? (22:21) I would say, go fuck themselves. (22:26) I don’t think, I don’t call it cultivation. (22:32) See, but that’s the thing.(22:33) You and I don’t see it as cultivation because we understand that they’re using the idea of cultivation. (22:39) And your moral ethics, the moral ethics that you originally signed up for, they’re using it against you. (22:44) And you can’t say anything.(22:46) If you say anything, it’s your fault. (22:48) You’re the issue. (22:49) And practitioners who think that what people who are exposing SY are doing, they seem to think that that’s something not to do.(23:03) I find it a little bit silly. (23:07) I talked with a couple of people. (23:13) I guess you could say they weren’t from the media.(23:19) But personally, I don’t have a lot of things I could offer that seem highly illegal. (23:24) I do have my personal experience of performing tour while being a student and having to do so many hours on the road during show days. (23:36) When you describe Catherine’s bullying, that never happened on my side.(23:43) The only thing that happened to me where it felt kind of like weirdly Chinese, weirdly communist, was I had talked to my fellow orchestra guys. (23:57) And I was kind of telling them, hey, everything feels really weird about this place, about tour. (24:02) And then someone told on me.(24:05) And then that was how they understood me to be a dangerous figure. (24:11) But the person who told on me isn’t even at the mountain anymore. (24:14) He’s long gone.(24:16) I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know if he’s still a practitioner. (24:18) But yeah, I guess part of today is I’m really curious what you think of everything.(24:25) So you mentioned that they should go fuck themselves and what they’re doing is illegal. (24:31) That seems to be clear. (24:32) But when it comes to the moral ethics of the practice, do you still agree with the moral ethics? (24:43) Till now, I still identify myself as a fundamental practitioner.(24:47) And the exact reason why I expose all of those things, because those things are directly against what I believe, truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. (24:59) To my knowledge, I think what I’ve heard are the textbook version of human trafficking and children abuse and children in slavery. (25:12) I mean, so I think it is my duty as a citizen or my duty of a practitioner to expose all of this kind of thing and reach out to the law enforcement to inform them of these kind of things.(25:28) I see. Yes. (25:31) It’s funny, you know, do you know the phrase if I wish? (25:35) Yes, that’s kind of the situation here.(25:37) And so why do you think law enforcement and people, you know, people who can actually do something about everything, but the company, why haven’t they done anything? (25:50) The mountain is very careful of everything they’re doing and they’re trying to have an anti or a PR campaign against what’s been brought to light about them. (26:04) Why? After so many years of tour, so many, you know, children being trafficked, you could say, we’ve had to play these shows and basically been free laborers. (26:14) How come, you know, whether it’s the government, whether it’s the nobody, nobody’s noticed.(26:21) How come? Do you understand my question? (26:45) No, I don’t think so. (26:50) Yeah. So my question to you is why, how come if what they’re doing is so problematic, how come no one realized before you and I guess a couple of other people? (27:03) You know, I think there are two sides.(27:07) One side is that the inner story, inner stories never being disclosed outside. (27:15) That is one story. The other story is that Falun Gong launched a very powerful campaign on the political field domain and on the whole public awareness domain.(27:31) So they just manipulate the public opinion on them. (27:38) So I think these two part is the main reason why the outside world do not notice that the crime in Falun Gong practice. (27:50) And in March 11th, March 11th, 2024, when Shen Yun Chu coming back from maybe Europe, I don’t know, coming from abroad and entering United States, (28:08) there was a Customs and Border Protection officer of Department of Homeland Security asking question to Theresa Du, who is a dancer of Shen Yun.(28:24) I know her personal. Yeah, it’s funny. (28:25) And two days later, two days later, Falun Gong motivate their relations on the federal congressman to question Department of Homeland Security saying that that officer is under the influence of Chinese Communist Party propaganda.(28:47) That is the reason why he asked maybe excessive questions to Theresa Du. (28:54) And you know, they have a lot of relationships in the political side. (29:00) So no one disclosed this kind of thing.(29:03) That is the reason why it is very necessary for us to disclose this kind of thing. (29:09) Because there are more than 600 people are now in the compound of Dragon Spring. (29:19) Yes.Well, here’s the thing. (29:21) They’re all young. So unlike a lot of other cults with compounds, these are all young people, all children or young adults who became young adults from becoming from youth.(29:35) And it’s psychological tormenting because, you know, they claim you’re free to leave. (29:43) But like I said, you’re not free to leave. (29:45) Yes.(29:46) It’s not just your physical body. (29:48) You can only leave the campus when you’re on break day or you have permission. (29:55) But it’s also if you leave, they say all sorts of things like you’re not going to be protected.(29:59) You’re not going to all these bad things will happen to you. (30:02) Yes. Yes.(30:04) That’s emotional. That’s manipulation. Right.(30:06) How is that? Okay. (30:08) And threats. I would call threats.(30:11) Right. (30:11) Psychological threats. Right.(30:13) It’s very complicated, too, because the practice is being persecuted. (30:19) That is not a speculation. That’s a fact.(30:23) So it’s so easy for them to say to blame others for wanting to investigate them, for wanting to understand them better. (30:33) It’s always about what are other people doing to us? (30:36) What is the Communist Party doing to us? (30:37) Never are we doing anything that arouses suspicion, because clearly we both agree that there’s a lot of stuff going on that shouldn’t be going on. (30:51) Can you please tell me something about your living condition? (30:53) How many people live in a dorm, a room? (30:58) How many people? And do you have the valid fire prevention apparatus in the house? (31:08) I don’t know if there’s like fire stuff.I don’t know. (31:12) I just know that there’s no way what the living situation was legal. (31:19) At one point, we lived in kind of like an army bunker.(31:23) So I should say that the mountain is not a equal society. (31:29) So if you’re a 07 dancer, for example, you might live in a pretty decent dorm, a relatively newer dorm. (31:36) But if you were a musician and you weren’t on tour, they basically put you in the worst living condition.(31:42) So at one point, I was living with about 20 other guys. (31:46) And we were all lined up in a really long hallway. (31:48) So it wasn’t really a bedroom because there was no door.(31:53) There was one big door and then there was a long, long hallway with bunk beds on each side. (31:57) Yeah, about 20 people lived in that area. (32:01) 20 people? (32:02) 20 people.(32:03) Yeah. (32:05) So it seemed like the army to me, seemed like the military to me. (32:12) Do you have your own bed or you have to share beds with someone else? (32:18) Yeah, we had to share beds.(32:19) And if you wanted to create your own personal private space, that was kind of frowned upon. (32:25) So if I wanted to put up curtains to block what people could see, they would sometimes ask you to take that down. (32:31) Not always, but they would sometimes ask you to remove that and they would do checks.(32:36) They would do bed inspections, which is another very militaristic thing. (32:42) How old are you? How old were you there? (32:45) I was 13, 14. (32:48) 13, 14? (32:49) So this is before I toured, yeah.(32:51) Yeah. (32:54) As a U.S. citizen, you do not have your own ID certificate. (33:02) Your ID certificate has to hand over to the authority.(33:07) Well, actually, that’s a very interesting thing. (33:09) So I’m a big fan of sports. (33:12) And if you watch a lot of videos of athletes when they arrive at a camp for training, (33:19) you’ll see them hand over their documents, probably because someone has to manage them.(33:24) Is it not the same situation? (33:26) They’re handing over their documents to be managed, to be safeguarded. (33:30) Is that not what’s happening? (33:35) I don’t know. I just want to know the exact situation you experienced.(33:41) Right. Well, yeah. (33:43) We handed over our stuff pretty much whenever we got back.(33:48) We handed our stuff. (33:50) And then when we were allowed to go on our two-week break, which is funny because every year we get two weeks. (33:56) Which reminds you of what? (33:58) Of a worker, an employee of a company who gets two weeks off a year.(34:03) Or students. (34:04) Yes. (34:05) So it’s funny.We’re sometimes students, sometimes employees of a company. (34:12) Sometimes billionaire. (34:14) Exactly.Exactly. (34:15) I’m glad we’re on the same page here. (34:21) There was one point where we were living in a two-person bedroom.(34:25) I lived in New York and my room was tiny, but this room was unimaginably small for two people. (34:33) The door couldn’t even open all the way. That’s how small the room was.(34:37) And there are many of these rooms all lined up. (34:43) And I don’t know how we survived that and how people didn’t find that to be extremely problematic. (34:52) Who owned that building? (34:56) I don’t know.I imagine it’s not Li himself. It’s probably a person, a random practitioner. (35:04) Because Li wants to stay out of direct responsibility.(35:13) So can you give me the address of that building? Do you remember? (35:20) No, I don’t have an address. It’s all part of 140 Galley Hill Road. (35:25) Everything is part of 140 Galley Hill Road.I’m sure you know that. (35:30) The address of Shenyuan, right? (35:32) Yeah, the address. It’s all part of the same place.(35:36) In the compound, right? (35:38) Yes, in the compound. (35:42) The mountain has had a lot of issues with the local residents. I’m sure you know that.(35:46) They might say that’s the local residents being infiltrated by the CCP. (35:51) But I say, we have thousands of Chinese people flocking to one area. (35:56) They block themselves off and they say they’re being persecuted.(35:59) But again, if you look at cults, a lot of cults have this. (36:05) They have their own compound and it’s not free access to it. (36:08) If you ask AI, if you ask ChatGPT what they think, they’re going to say it’s a problem.(36:16) They’re going to say that it’s human trafficking. (36:18) Believe me, I’ve done all my asking of AI. (36:21) Is AI infiltrated by CCP too? Who knows? (36:27) Everybody or thing against them or question them are influenced by CCP, obviously.(36:34) It sounds like just a communist party. (36:36) It sounds like a communist party if you don’t say the subject. (36:40) They do the same thing.(36:43) My dad always says the people who are doing this, all they know is that. (36:48) Because they came from that environment. (36:49) Have you heard of any suspicious death cases? (36:55) Guests? Like people visiting? (36:56) Death.Have you heard of any suspicious death cases? (37:02) I’ve heard people falling to their deaths from construction. (37:07) I heard before my time, there was a boy who left. (37:13) I don’t know.I didn’t know him personally. (37:16) I heard he left and he committed suicide. (37:19) Then that was said, like Lee said in the big meeting, which reminds me of North Korea.(37:27) In the big meeting, he said that if you leave, you may have the same fate as that boy. (37:32) Isn’t that extremely… (37:36) I cannot believe these kids listen to that and actually take him seriously. (37:41) That’s unbelievable.(37:45) That boy’s name is Edward Jung. (37:48) Edward Jung, he committed suicide in 2012. (37:53) His death was used against these children.(37:58) Unbelievable. (37:59) But I did hear of a case of a woman. (38:05) I knew her personally.We toured together. (38:07) She was married to a fellow musician. (38:10) She got sick.She had, I think, MS. (38:13) She had the back issue. Her spinal cord was, I guess, compromised. (38:19) She got sick during lockdown.(38:22) She had no access to care because she thought she could just… (38:27) She died. (38:30) Really? What is her name? (38:33) Stephanie. (38:34) Stephanie what? (38:36) Stephanie Chen.(38:40) Is she a US citizen? (38:43) No. (38:44) As far as I know, she was from China. (38:48) She came here.She got married to her old cello teacher. (38:54) So they have quite an age gap. (38:56) But they are both from China.(38:58) I don’t know if the man, the husband, who also passed away. (39:02) I don’t know if he has status. (39:04) The entire family passed away.(39:06) The older brother of the husband was also a very important figure in the orchestra. (39:13) Last name Deng. (39:14) Fair.(39:20) Have you heard any case of arranged marriage, forced marriage? (39:29) It’s the same thing as when they say you’re free to leave. (39:34) Are you really free to leave? (39:35) So they might suggest you marry someone. (39:37) You can say, I don’t want to.(39:38) But everyone will be like, oh, I need to be a good practitioner. (39:42) I need to not care about my own, whether it’s my attachment or my own wishes. (39:48) I’m just going to marry, especially the girls.(39:51) That’s what happens to a lot of them, I suspect. (39:54) But the person who does a lot of that matchmaking is Li’s wife. (40:00) So that’s what I’ve heard.(40:02) Again, these are not personal anecdotes. (40:04) So whatever I say, you can just take it with a grain of salt, so to speak. (40:07) You don’t have to take it seriously.(40:08) But yeah, if you have been at the mountain, you have heard of these things. (40:14) There are cases of weird deaths. (40:16) There are cases of arranged or strongly encouraged marriages.(40:22) There are lots of people on student visas who are doing this kind of commercial touring. (40:29) And oh, I don’t know. (40:31) It’s all very strange.(40:33) I left that environment many years ago, but I still find it such a fascinating thing. (40:38) I saw the videos on Twitter, on X, of the cafeteria of Li, all the weird architecture. (40:48) It’s incredible that more people don’t know about this.(40:53) Yes. (40:54) To all the people who are campaigning against the New York Times, (40:58) campaigning against what you are doing, what Xiaoming, what you guys are doing, (41:03) it’s as simple as if you are practitioners and there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, (41:08) then you can just… (41:09) I don’t understand. Tell me again in Chinese.(41:12) If you are a Falun Gong practitioner, (41:16) if there is nothing suspicious or illegal about what you are doing, (41:23) then why are you so… (41:26) You say, the CCP, the CCP, the CCP. (41:28) Well, it doesn’t matter. (41:29) If what you are doing is fine, then it makes everybody look silly.(41:33) But if you are nervous, (41:34) if you are nervous, (41:35) then it’s even more suspicious. (41:39) Yes. (41:41) So we’ll see.(41:43) You seem to think that everything will be decided soon. (41:48) I actually have a question for you. (41:50) I heard that Bill Nguyen, the former Epoch Times CFO, (41:54) I heard he was released.(41:55) Do you know about his situation right now? (41:57) No, he is not released. (41:59) We cannot bail out. (42:02) He was released on bail.(42:06) He was released on bail. (42:09) Once he is released on bail, can he still be charged? (42:13) Yes. (42:14) He is still facing those charges from SDNY, (42:19) South District New York Court.(42:24) Right. (42:24) I should say it’s SDNY-CCP. (42:28) SDNY-CCP.(42:29) You have to add CCP to everything. (42:31) What do you mean? (42:32) I don’t understand. (42:33) SDNY-CCP, what does it mean? (42:34) That means CCP also infiltrated the New York Court.(42:38) Infiltrated everything. (42:42) Maybe. (42:43) You can tell this story to Damien Williams.(42:46) Do you know Damien Williams? (42:48) It sounds familiar. (42:50) Is he the guy that appears at the Fog Conference? (42:53) Damien Williams is the prosecutor of the SDNY office. (42:58) I see.(42:59) That’s funny. (43:00) He charged Guo Wengui, Miles Guo. (43:05) And I think Li Hongzhi will be the next one.(43:08) You know. (43:10) Our Chinese doesn’t do something good in the United States. (43:15) Right.(43:24) How about your mom’s opinion on me? (43:27) We haven’t talked about it at all. (43:29) So. (43:31) My mom.(43:33) She’s very similar to Ashley Chung’s mom. (43:38) Yeah. (43:40) I listened to Ashley’s audio clip of her mom.(43:47) Persuading her to not speak with you. (43:51) Persuading her to just stay out of it. (43:55) My mom goes a little bit further.(43:56) Her personality is very stubborn and superstitious. (44:03) So she really believes. (44:04) If I don’t stand on the right side, something bad will happen.(44:08) She strongly believes that. (44:10) For her, me leaving was already a huge thing. (44:15) But she was able to justify that.(44:17) Justify, justify. (44:18) She convinced herself that it was all Li’s plan for me. (44:23) Even though I. (44:25) For a long time, I told her I didn’t want to be there.(44:28) And yet, you know, she’ll apply the psychological pressure on me. (44:31) And she’ll make me so frustrated. (44:33) And I just want her to shut up, so to speak.(44:36) Right. Obviously, I don’t want to say that to her. (44:39) But that’s the effect.(44:40) I want her to not talk about stuff. (44:42) And so I will say, like, you know, I’m still a practitioner. (44:46) I’m not.I’m not a practitioner. (44:48) But in order to appease her and get her to not speak about this. (44:51) I’ll tell her that I am just to maintain the peace.(44:54) And so she’ll use these words against me. (44:57) She’ll say, look, you said you were a practitioner or you said you want to go back. (45:01) Really, like, did I did I actually say that? (45:05) She doesn’t.(45:07) Do you know how silence her? (45:10) How to silence your mother? (45:14) Restraining. (45:15) Restraining order. (45:16) Yes.How to restrain your mother’s manipulation on you. (45:20) Do you consider some method to do so? (45:24) The thing is, you know, I can block her contact method. (45:27) I don’t live at home.I can block her contact method. (45:30) But this isn’t something that, you know, I haven’t heard anyone talk about is what is the effect of FLG on families? (45:38) So, you know, from personal experience, like, unfortunately, you you’ve had to divorce. (45:43) Right.And that’s all because of you can say that you left the practice. (45:49) Right. And so for my my family, my dad’s not a practitioner.(45:53) He completely understands me. He’s actually very open minded. (45:57) He says, you know, if you want to go back to the mountain, as long as you you can make a living like that’s that’s all I care about.(46:03) And I’m very grateful that he is able to be reasonable with my mom. (46:08) But, you know, if I completely cut my mom off, what is going to happen to him? (46:12) How is he going to be able to deal with that psychological pressure? (46:15) All of it will be placed on him and she will blame him for all these things. (46:21) And you cannot imagine what that is like.(46:24) Maybe you can learn, you can actually tell what is one recorder for you and one recorder for your father. (46:32) Record everything your mother said and put it online. (46:36) Right.She will be silent. (46:39) And that’s the thing is like. (46:42) That’s what I want to do.(46:45) And even by speaking to you, I want I want the message to be clear to her that I don’t want anything to do with her lifestyle and how she views the world. (46:54) Because my mom’s not a practitioner because she believes in the moral ethics. (47:00) She’s a practitioner because she thinks that her life was saved because I wanted to practice.(47:06) I wanted to practice, but how old was I when when she started back three? (47:09) So she’s saying that I brought her into Falun Gong, did I? (47:14) I was three years old. (47:17) I don’t think your mother is a practitioner. (47:21) I think myself as a practitioner, I think your mother is a manipulator to her own little son, to eat her own son.(47:33) Yeah, to not to nourish her own very, very father. (47:41) So, you know, he is a children eater. (47:44) I call your mother a children eater.(47:46) What she needs is a recorder. (47:50) What you need is a recorder to record everything she said and put it online. (47:55) It’s unbelievable.Yeah. (47:55) Before that, please check your local local law. (48:00) Right.It’s complicated. Yeah, yeah. (48:03) But I mean, just have you heard of any practitioners say that if you leave, I’ll leave, too? (48:09) Have you heard that? No.Right. (48:12) Heard what? (48:13) So currently the situation for me is like my mom, she says, if you decide to leave the practice, I’m going to decide to leave the practice, too. (48:23) So she’s I don’t understand her approach to cultivation at all.(48:30) I don’t know how she’s benefiting from cultivation. (48:33) But what I do know is that she believes that her responsibility is to make sure I’m a cultivator. (48:38) I’m a practitioner.(48:40) Unfortunately, I’m a God fearing man. (48:42) I just don’t believe in Lee. (48:43) I don’t believe Lee is the creator.(48:45) I do believe there is a creator. (48:47) I don’t believe it’s Lee. (48:50) You need to think about it.(48:55) Your mom is not that hard to deal with. (48:59) No, it’s not that she’s hard to deal with. (49:02) If I deal with her, what about my family? (49:05) What do I do? (49:06) What about my dad? Right? (49:08) I’ve heard it all.(49:10) The reason you still have this idea is because you’re still putting your mom under her current control of you. (49:18) If your dad has a recorder, you have a recorder, too. (49:21) Whatever he says, whenever he says, whenever he plays, he’ll be silent.(49:23) But what good does it do to my dad? (49:27) He’s not being used like this for the past 20 years. (49:33) But what if he’s forced to divorce and has to give up half of his assets? (49:42) Then maybe you need to blame your mom for sending you to the Human Trafficking Group when you were young. (49:50) But that’s the thing.(49:52) As someone who’s gone through everything, I don’t want… (49:57) I don’t implicate my mother. (49:58) I don’t think she did something to harm me, but the effect is harmful. (50:03) Does that make sense? (50:09) I don’t know if I say those things to you is appropriate.(50:16) You still have feelings for your son’s mother. (50:22) But what she did to you for 20 years or more proves that she didn’t do that to you. (50:31) But in fact, you know, a lot of parents, especially mothers, (50:40) if they have a son or a daughter, it’s the same thing.(50:49) I’m not asking if there are other people like that. (50:51) I’m just saying that what she did to you wasn’t love. (50:54) Of course, of course.(51:10) I just know that she’s a very extreme woman. (51:13) And you pair that up with a very extreme ideology. (51:17) It’s a very explosive personality.(51:21) So it’s tough. (51:32) When did you know me? (51:39) I’m also friends with people who knew you, who also were mentioned in the article. (51:46) What article? (51:48) New York Times article, sorry.(51:51) In that piece. (51:54) I know everybody in the piece because I grew up with them, especially the musicians. (52:00) I grew up with them.(52:03) And I heard from them about you. (52:05) I still do. (52:07) I listen to your podcast a lot right before I go to bed.(52:11) Some people think it’s very… (52:13) Very exciting. (52:15) But I feel very comfortable listening to it. (52:17) It’s relaxing, you know? (52:43) They claim to be non-violent.(52:48) They claim to do junchai. (52:51) Obviously, with last time when they doxed you and they had Lana Han, when they kind of figured out your location and things like that. (52:59) It’s very scary.(53:00) They don’t play fair. (53:03) They’re very dark. (53:06) Best of luck to you too.(53:08) I just really hope that justice is served. (53:18) Can you consider one day I can put our conversation on my channel? (53:25) You can put it today. (53:27) You can do it today.(53:29) Really? (53:30) Yeah, I don’t mind. (53:31) What I do mind is for the sake of my mom, for the sake of being a son still, you know? (53:40) Just keeping my complete identity hidden. (53:45) Obviously, if people know me, they know it’s me.(53:49) I don’t know if you want to do this. (53:50) I kind of think of my situation a bit like Ashley. (53:56) I have a little bit more stakes personally.(53:59) Not because of myself, obviously, but because of my family. (54:04) So it’s complicated. (54:04) But to be honest, I went to college and I went to music school.(54:13) I would always avoid telling people about my past because it’s not a very proud thing that happened to me. (54:24) It’s glorious. (54:26) I’m back in time.(54:29) Yes. (54:30) Have you considered the reason why I am not afraid of mentioning my past? (54:37) My past is more related to Falun Gong than you do, right? (54:41) Right. (54:43) Why am I not afraid of that? (54:48) That’s a good question.(54:49) I think for you, not to say this in a demeaning way, but you have lost time. (55:00) You’ve lost resources, right? (55:04) So they say you don’t have as much to lose. (55:07) I’m not saying that I have more to lose than you.(55:10) But somehow you are in a position where this is the logical conclusion to speak out to get to the bottom of everything. (55:21) For me, I still want to live a normal life, which is why I’m not the face of the New York Times article. (55:28) I’m just one person that they interviewed, right? (55:32) Let me tell you my answer.(55:35) It is not, as you said, I have nothing to lose. (55:38) Everyone has something to lose. (55:41) Maybe you think my life is very simple or very limited on the material side, but I still have a lot of things to lose from my perspective.(55:53) I think the reason why I am not afraid of exposing my past is that I have disclosed precious gifts from my past, and I share those gifts freely to my audience. (56:10) You have a similar gift too, but you didn’t dig into that gift to open it. (56:17) You are afraid of that.(56:18) You turn your face against that. (56:20) You think that is a liability. (56:24) That is not an asset, but I’m telling you that is a kind of asset.(56:28) You can open the gift. (56:30) It is a very precious gift because not so many people experience the same thing. (56:35) There is a very precious gift in that experience.(56:42) Dig into that experience. (56:43) Find the gift and share this gift freely to others. (56:47) I understand what you’re saying, but it’s a bit shameful.(56:53) If you can imagine the psychology, the psyche of someone who was previously in a cult, they exit the cult. (57:01) Sometimes they share their story, and they often become very well-known. (57:07) If they are interviewed and their story is told online, lots of people flock to it.(57:14) I don’t have that desire to be recognized, to be associated with the practice. (57:20) I just want to be honest. (57:25) I want to see everything come to an end so that I can have peace at home.(57:31) I don’t want to push you to do anything. (57:34) I just want to share my thoughts with you. (57:38) You said you just want to lead a normal life.(57:41) No, it is not possible. (57:44) Your current life is not a normal life. (57:47) It does not depend on you.(57:48) It depends on your experience, but you cannot change your experience. (57:52) When you say shame, you just think about me. (57:59) Why don’t I feel any shame? (58:03) The very important reason is that you can find very precious things from your past experience.(58:14) Those things are very important to you. (58:16) You said you want everything to come to an end. (58:19) But I see everything as a very precious beginning.(58:26) To you, it is a very precious beginning. (58:28) It is not an end. It is a beginning.(58:30) It is the beginning of the true journey. (58:34) Journey inside to see what happened before. (58:39) What really happened in the past? (58:41) What did you really get? (58:42) The reason why you feel ashamed is that you evaluate everything on 得与失.(58:49) What you get, what you lose. (58:51) You evaluate everything on this level. (58:55) No, I don’t evaluate things on this level.(58:57) I evaluate things on how does my life blossom or nourish. (59:05) How does my life grow? (59:06) I think you are also growing. (59:08) When you really grow, when you really share this growth, you won’t feel ashamed.(59:14) And people will thank you, not look down at you. (59:17) People will thank you, just like people thank me. (59:21) It’s a bit, you know, some of my friends don’t understand.(59:26) I think from our conversation, you can tell. (59:29) I make a lot of jokes about the practice and about SY. (59:33) To me, it’s just a drinking story.(59:36) If I have close friends, I won’t tell them, hey, this happened to me in the past. (59:42) And this is why when I say I went to boarding school in New York, that’s what I meant. (59:47) No, I don’t really care to explain to them who I am because of my past.(59:53) But I do think it’s a little bit funny and interesting that this happened to me. (59:57) That’s all. (59:59) That’s why I’m not in a position like you where I’m speaking out against it.(1:00:02) Because I am not interested in, perhaps maybe this is too early for me to say. (1:00:09) And I’m still, like you say, I’m still growing and maturing. (1:00:13) But to me, it is very simple.(1:00:17) Like, let’s just imagine for a second what Lee did. (1:00:23) So Lee was, you know, uneducated. (1:00:27) Some people say that he was involved with the government in a very local setting.(1:00:32) Do you know about this? (1:00:33) He was like a local, like a… (1:00:38) I saw some pictures of him wearing a uniform. (1:00:43) So he has some involvement with the government. (1:00:45) But he was not a very successful person by any means.(1:00:49) And all of a sudden, he comes out and he becomes a figure, a public figure, (1:00:53) preaching about morality and preaching about how to basically become a god of your own. (1:01:01) So that’s his psychology. (1:01:04) And I don’t know what Lee is thinking when the persecution started.(1:01:10) Like, coincidentally, he left China, right, two years before the persecution started. (1:01:14) Don’t know if that was planned. (1:01:15) Don’t know if that was accident.(1:01:16) He’s here. (1:01:17) Persecution is happening. (1:01:18) It’s been happening for 25 years.(1:01:21) And so many people have basically contributed their entire lives, their families to this thing. (1:01:27) He created several companies, you know, grossing, what, hundreds of millions in revenue. (1:01:34) And that’s Lee.(1:01:35) And we know who he is now. (1:01:37) I mean, when I went to the mountain, that’s when I really had to understand who Lee was. (1:01:41) Not someone to fear.(1:01:43) I went on tour with Lee. (1:01:44) One time I was outside during Fajionian. (1:01:48) Because I hate Fajionian.(1:01:49) So boring. (1:01:51) But we were Fajionian. (1:01:52) And I would escape, basically, the fear.(1:01:57) And one time I ran into Lee outside. (1:01:59) And Lee was like, (1:02:02) Something like that. (1:02:03) And I just kind of laughed, you know.(1:02:05) At that point, I had no, I did not see him as a divine, you know, creator figure. (1:02:11) He was just a normal man. (1:02:12) And I cannot imagine how absolutely normal my life would be without him.(1:02:20) You know? (1:02:21) Like, sure, you say it’s very treasurable, very special, what’s happened to me. (1:02:28) To me, again, that’s not my personality. (1:02:32) Does that make sense? (1:02:33) Yes.(1:02:34) I understand. (1:02:35) So some of my friends, you know, they want to create a story. (1:02:40) A piece of literature based on their experience.(1:02:42) I don’t. (1:02:43) I just want to get married, have a family, you know. (1:02:48) Some of my friends from the mountain are my lifelong friends.(1:02:51) Because we went through the same thing. (1:02:53) And I want to see everyone do well. (1:02:55) And I want to see my mom, (1:03:00) I want to see that happen.(1:03:01) And, you know, has my mom understood how to be a better person? (1:03:09) Yes. (1:03:09) Has she become a better person? (1:03:11) No. (1:03:11) Does that make sense? (1:03:13) She understands, you know.(1:03:14) Last sentence. (1:03:15) I don’t understand the last sentence. (1:03:18) She has understood how to become a better person.(1:03:21) How to be a better person. (1:03:23) But she really hasn’t become a better person. (1:03:39) I want to ask you.(1:03:41) I want to ask you. (1:03:42) You came from Mainland China. (1:03:51) How come you weren’t like them? (1:03:53) You came here.(1:03:53) How come you didn’t become more devout, more fervent? (1:04:11) Like you’re saying, the gains and losses, right? (1:04:15) The assets and liabilities. (1:04:17) I don’t know. (1:04:18) I don’t understand their English.(1:04:19) You’re saying it’s the same thing as for my situation. (1:04:23) I think of it as something to gain, something to lose. (1:04:26) And you’re saying these other practitioners are the same way.(1:04:31) Yes. (1:04:32) I think most of them are also afraid. (1:04:35) They’re afraid that if they leave this thing, (1:04:39) what will happen next? (1:04:40) But it’s all just to scare you.(1:04:42) Believe me. (1:04:43) Like when I was at the mountain too. (1:04:45) Do you know about the contract? (1:04:47) That was… (1:04:48) I still talk about the contract because I was there for the contract.(1:04:56) It was ridiculous. (1:04:59) It’s unbelievable. (1:05:00) And we promised to never access these ordinary things.(1:05:07) I don’t play games. (1:05:12) But all these things. (1:05:15) We thought if we fell into this trap one time, it was over.(1:05:23) Isn’t that hilarious? (1:05:26) It’s like… (1:05:27) Very scary. (1:05:29) Dangerous. (1:05:30) Yes, really.(1:05:31) When I think about it, it’s really incredible. (1:05:35) It was really scary at the time. (1:05:37) How do I put it? (1:05:46) It’s just about their lives.(1:05:50) Their lives. (1:05:51) Their life-and-death choices. (1:06:02) Yes.(1:06:10) So, is there anything you want to tell me? (1:06:27) Yes. (1:06:31) 26 years old. (1:06:37) He has his own life now.(1:06:37) What is his stance? (1:06:40) He walked along the whole journey with me. (1:06:43) He gave me a lot of comfort and support. (1:06:48) And I exchanged my thoughts with him.(1:06:52) He is now landing a job in Dallas, Texas. (1:06:56) In a very good company. (1:06:59) and he lived his own life and he told me that he will announce he’s leaving from (1:07:08) Falun Gong maybe in next week to his mother.Do we have any, oh I see, but he (1:07:14) has the same, he’s in the same situation as me, right? To his mother’s (1:07:18) knowledge, he’s still involved, correct? Yes. That’s the same situation as me and (1:07:23) why hasn’t he told her he’s leaving yet? Why hasn’t he told what? Told his mom. (1:07:30) Because he is not financially independent.I see, but soon he will be. (1:07:36) He is now, he is now. Right, so that’s why he’s telling her now.Yes. Well for me, I (1:07:42) waited until I was moved out as well, also financially independent, to then tell (1:07:47) my mom, but guess what? My mom doesn’t believe me. (1:07:49) She believes that, right? You know, so it’s a little bit tricky.Can I ask, does (1:08:00) he respect like his mom? What does he think of his, her still being affiliated, (1:08:07) what does he think? On the Falun Gong issue, he doesn’t share any thought (1:08:17) with his mom. Does she make him, yes, does she make him Xue Fa? She tried to persuade him to (1:08:29) regularly Xue Fa, but finally he is determined to, determined to tell his (1:08:39) mother, I’m out, I’m quit. Right, okay, and that’s the thing.I would say the vast (1:08:45) majority of young children, either they are ingenuine or they are completely (1:08:51) disassociated. Yes. There’s, there’s actually quite a, you know, only a select (1:08:57) number of people who are still in that middle, where they’re both still (1:09:01) believing, but also not acting out.So that’s, that’s the situation, right? And I (1:09:07) think there is, there is a third way, is to fight back, you know, fight back. They (1:09:14) are doing the wrong thing. They hurt a lot of people, especially they hurt their (1:09:19) own children.Sure. In the whole scenario, those parents, those parents in Falun Gong (1:09:26) is the major role to hurt their own children. Yeah, exactly.So we need to fight (1:09:32) back. We are not just leave them alone, no, we fight back. Right.I agree that (1:09:42) there is value in doing that. It’s a very ironic, their, their claim is they’re (1:09:51) saving people, but they themselves need to be saved. Yes.It’s very, it’s kind of (1:09:58) like something out of a movie, the plot of a movie. Someone should make a movie, (1:10:03) it’d be a blockbuster, a story of children who believe they are saving the (1:10:09) world, but they’re actually being abused. Yes.It’s unbelievable. In fact, there is (1:10:17) a documentary filmmaker is filming a movie. Do you want to talk with him? (1:10:24) Sure.I think I, I’ve heard of him, but I need his contact information. (1:10:30) Yes. I will give you the contact information.Yeah. Okay. That sounds good to me.(1:10:38) Okay. So let’s, let’s call it a conversation. Yes.I hope I can contact in the future, (1:10:53) we can exchange our thoughts, right? I am definitely open for that dialogue. (1:11:03) I think that for now, I want to keep, you know, this, this picture, this name, whatever, (1:11:09) I can be somewhat anonymous. If that’s okay with you, if you find that there’s (1:11:15) no use publicizing this recording, if I’m not public, then it’s up to you.But (1:11:26) maybe you can say like, like a musician, former musician, I don’t know, it’s up to you. (1:11:31) I just want for the sake of my, actually my family, it’s always been my family, not myself. (1:11:37) I don’t really care if that’s okay with you.Thank you. And I will, I will stop recording (1:11:48) and I will ask some other questions. Sure.Okay. Sure. Sure.
The dance group has accumulated enormous wealth, in large part by getting followers of the Falun Gong religious movement to work for free and pay its bills.
The reporters examined thousands of pages of records, including internal communications, and interviewed dozens of people about the finances of the dance group Shen Yun and the Falun Gong religious movement.
Dec. 29, 2024, 3:00 a.m. ET
Over the past decade, the dance group Shen Yun Performing Arts has made money at a staggering rate.
The group had $60 million in 2015.
It had $144 million by 2019.
And by the end of last year, tax records show, it had more than a quarter of a billion dollars, stockpiling wealth at a pace that would be extraordinary for any company, let alone a nonprofit dance group from Orange County, N.Y.
Operated by Falun Gong, the persecuted Chinese religious movement, Shen Yun’s success flows in part from its ability to pack venues worldwide — while exploiting young, low-paid performers with little regard for their health or well-being.
But it also is a token of the power that Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, has wielded over his followers. In the name of fighting communism, and obeying Mr. Li’s mystical teachings, they have created a global network to glorify him and enrich his movement.
Under Mr. Li’s direct leadership, Shen Yun has become a repository of vast wealth for Falun Gong, often accumulating money at the expense of its loyal adherents, a New York Times investigation has found.
It has raked in funds through ticket sales — nearly $39 million in 2023 alone — but also by using religious fealty to command the free labor of its followers. It has received tens of millions of dollars more in ways that may have crossed legal or ethical lines, The Times found.
In one case, Shen Yun and a school that trains its dancers received $16 million from The Epoch Times, a newspaper run by Falun Gong followers, during a period when federal prosecutors said the publication’s accounts were inflated in a money-laundering conspiracy.
Shen Yun and a network of satellite organizations added more wealth by skirting rules to tap tens of millions of dollars in pandemic-era relief money.
And three former Shen Yun performers told The Times that they were used to ferry large amounts of cash into the United States, a possible attempt to circumvent laws about reporting U.S. currency transactions.
Shen Yun has kept its own costs down by wringing countless volunteer hours, and sometimes personal savings, from followers of Mr. Li, who has suggested he created the universe and instructed believers that Shen Yun performances can save people from a coming apocalypse by exposing them to his teachings.
Eager to heed Mr. Li, the followers have borne most of the financial burden for staging hundreds of Shen Yun shows around the world, including paying out of their own pockets to book venues, print fliers, buy advertising and sell tickets — even going into debt to cover upfront costs.
“They all think — including me before — we all think it is an important part of the path to godhood,” said Simone Gao, a former practitioner and Falun Gong media personality. “If you devote time, energy and money to this cause, the reward is incomparable to what you get in this world.”
It was not clear why Shen Yun has amassed so much money, or why nearly all of its assets — $249 million in 2023 — were kept in cash and other liquid instruments. Experts said it was unusual for a nonprofit not to invest such sums unless they were needed for significant short-term expenses, which Shen Yun has not seemed to have incurred.
Shen Yun’s representatives declined to answer questions about its finances. In the past, Mr. Li has said large sums of money were needed to battle the Chinese Communist Party, which has banned the movement and repressed its followers since the 1990s.
“For over 25 years, Falun Gong practitioners have struggled to peacefully resist persecution from the largest totalitarian regime on earth, and Shen Yun is a key part of that effort,” a Shen Yun spokeswoman, Ying Chen, said in a statement to The Times. “Your attempts to brand Shen Yun as a grand moneymaking scheme are shocking and deeply offensive.”
Ms. Chen accused The Times of making “gross distortions or blatant factual errors,” but she declined to elaborate.
As Shen Yun has amassed wealth, its supporters have purchased real estate for Mr. Li’s movement, including Falun Gong’s 400-acre headquarters, known as Dragon Springs, which is about 60 miles northwest of New York City.
They have also subsidized the lifestyle of Mr. Li, now in his early 70s, and his wife, Li Rui, a top manager in Shen Yun.
One follower gave the movement her life savings before dying of cancer, virtually penniless.
In recent years, Mr. Li and his aides have found yet another way to make money through Shen Yun. They have created companies that market products directly to Falun Gong followers, like a Tang Elegance necklace with a spessartite garnet for $3,850, Heavenly Phoenix earrings for $925, a $35 ornament of the Shen Yun tour bus and Shen Yun-branded athleisure clothing.
Practitioners have been told they should purchase the most up-to-date Falun Gong clothing for public events, including a reversible blue-and-yellow jacket for $120.
Business records show that Mr. Li personally started an online video platform that charges $199.99 a year for a subscription to watch Shen Yun performances. His associates also created another video platform, Gan Jing World, which was accused by YouTube in a lawsuit this month of stealing content. The platform has not filed a response to the suit.
Practitioners were urged to subscribe to help “Master” — as Mr. Li is known — save more souls, emails show. Many did just that, former followers said.
“People gave up their life’s savings, and this happened so often,” said Rob Gray, a former practitioner in London who spent 15 years working on Falun Gong projects. “There’s a constant theme now to fleece practitioners, to take money. Where is this profit going to?”
A Winning Strategy
From the start, Shen Yun has pursued a winning strategy for reaping huge profits: It has gotten other people to shoulder the costs of putting on its shows.
Although the group has a stated mission of reviving traditional Chinese culture while “providing audiences everywhere with an experience of beauty,” it does not routinely pay for the billboards, television ads or fliers depicting Shen Yun’s dancers leaping through the air that are ubiquitous in cities around the world. Nor does it generally cover the costs of venues, ticket sales or hotels and meals for performers.
That burden has fallen on a network of smaller satellite organizations that Mr. Li and his aides have encouraged followers to form around the world.
Known as presenters, the organizations were incorporated as nonprofits in the United States, operating in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities.
The nonprofits are staffed by practitioners who work as unpaid volunteers and have agreed to “bear the responsibility for all costs incurred” and be liable for losses, claims “and expenses of every kind and description” related to staging Shen Yun shows in their areas, according to a contract reviewed by The Times.
Every year, the groups collectively spend millions of dollars and keep only enough in ticket sales to cover their expenses, sending every penny of profit back to Shen Yun.
In 2018, a satellite organization in Georgia, the Falun Dafa Association of Atlanta, spent $1,621,011 on advertising, hotel rooms, food, transportation, venue fees and other expenses, tax records show. The group earned $2,077,507, mostly from seven Shen Yun performances in Atlanta. The Atlanta nonprofit kept $1,621,011 and sent the remaining money — $456,496 — to Shen Yun.
If a satellite organization should spend more money than it earns, it still sends money to Shen Yun — and it falls on the people who run the groups to make up the difference.
At the Indiana Falun Dafa Association, local followers made loans to the satellite organization for a decade. In 2018, eight of them lent a combined $375,000 without any loan agreements and at zero percent interest, tax filings show. One of the lenders, the group’s president, handed over $130,000 on his own.
The satellite organization paid Shen Yun $169,233.39 to put on three shows that February, records show, but did not make enough to repay the loans. They appear to have been settled only years later, using government grants.
Inside the local organizations, practitioners can feel immense pressure to deliver for Mr. Li, who has taught that success in selling Shen Yun tickets is an indicator of how devoted they are to his teachings.
He has also urged followers to advertise only in “well-to-do” areas and to set high prices for Falun Gong dance shows.
“Getting things for nothing,” Mr. Li said, “wouldn’t conform to this dimension’s principles.”
Ahead of shows in the San Francisco area, followers would gather on Saturday nights to study Mr. Li’s writings and share how many Shen Yun tickets they had sold, according to a former practitioner who asked to be identified only by her last name, Wang.
Selling as many tickets as possible was seen as a way to accumulate more virtue, she said.
And in London in March 2023, a note of panic crept into an “urgent” email sent by a practitioner named Sharon Xu to other followers in the area. She was seeking their help with leafleting, she wrote, because the show was approaching and thousands of tickets were still unsold.
“We are at a crucial stage in Shen Yun promotion,” she wrote. “Thousands of predestined people whom Master wants to save have yet to connect with us, and there are only literally days remaining this year.”
‘All Her Money Is Gone’
For all the time and money that the operators of the satellite organizations provided, some gave much more to the movement — and to Mr. Li himself.
In 2006, one of Shen Yun’s first performers began traveling from his home in Maryland to Falun Gong’s headquarters along with his sister, also a performer, and their mother, a devoted practitioner. Soon, they all moved to Dragon Springs, known among followers as the mountain, to focus on dancing.
The man, whom The Times is identifying by his first name, Liang, and his sister eventually left Shen Yun and moved away. But their mother remained on the mountain, working unpaid for years as a top aide to Mr. and Ms. Li and as a bookkeeper for the dance group.
She left the area only rarely, such as for Liang’s wedding in 2014, he would later write in an email to friends. That same year, she and her husband sold the house they had owned in Maryland since the 1980s for $485,000, records show.
Soon after, she began spending money for Shen Yun, her family would later learn. After Mr. Li remarked that Shen Yun’s orchestra should use only the best pianos, Liang’s mother arranged for the purchase of $260,000 in premium models, according to another email her son sent and other records reviewed by The Times.
Other gifts and donations followed, including thousands of dollars in payments for Wi-Fi hot spots and domain names and monthly payments for Mr. and Ms. Li’s cellphone bills to Verizon, according to the records, Liang’s emails and people familiar with the events.
Mr. Li teaches that diligently practicing his meditation exercises and reading his texts keeps the body healthy by purging the bad karma that causes illness. So Liang’s mother did not see a doctor when she began losing weight and becoming increasingly haggard around 2018.
By the fall of 2019, she was 66 years old and down to 70 pounds. Shocked at her appearance during a video call, her family finally persuaded her to get medical care.
The diagnosis was dire: kidney cancer that had spread through her body, leaving her with small odds of survival and tens of thousands of dollars in expected medical costs. She told Liang and his sister that she would not be able to pay for any of it.
“My mom revealed that all her money is gone, donated to the mountain,” Liang emailed his friends on Oct. 15, 2019. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
As their mother was slipping away, Liang and his sister got another shock. An employee in the Shen Yun office accidentally mailed them a statement for their mother’s credit card, which showed charges from Saks Fifth Avenue and other shops. They reviewed more statements and discovered that her accounts had been used to buy tens of thousands of dollars in luxury items, apparently for Mr. Li and his wife.
The statements showed a $13,029.70 charge from the Watch Gallery in London and $10,000 for virgin wool suits and other clothing from Hugo Boss. They showed $2,045.31 in purchases at the luxury retailer Hermès in Austria and another $1,091.99 at the jewelry house Van Cleef & Arpels in Switzerland.
They showed thousands more spent on seafood and custom billiard cues — Mr. Li is an avid pool player — and assorted charges from high-end brands including Ferragamo and Tiffany & Company. Ms. Li appeared to have personally used his mother’s credit card, Liang wrote to his friends in an email.
Many of the charges were made in 2018 and 2019, as Liang’s mother’s health was failing, records show.
Within weeks of seeing a doctor, Liang’s mother was dead.
Afterward, a portion of the money was repaid to her family, people familiar with the events said, though the source of the repayment was not clear.
Shen Yun’s spokeswoman, Ms. Chen, said The Times’s account of these events was “inaccurate and misleading in numerous respects.” She said the details were subject to a confidentiality agreement, which she called “a carefully negotiated resolution of a misunderstanding.”
The experience left Liang convinced that the movement was preying on people like his mother, who gave willingly in hopes of receiving a heavenly reward.
“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing things as how they truly are,” he wrote in one of his emails. “I’m not going to let this happen to anyone that I care about ever again.”
Envelopes of Cash
To track the flow of money into Shen Yun, The Times reviewed more than 15 years’ worth of tax filings for the main nonprofit and dozens of its satellite organizations.
Reporters also examined hundreds of pagesof internal Shen Yun-related records and communications and interviewed people with knowledge of the organization’s financial dealings, including some who were directly involved in organizing shows.
The dance group and a school that trains its performers received about $16 million from The Epoch Times, the right-leaning news organization founded by followers of Mr. Li, during a period when federal prosecutors said the news outlet’s accounts were inflated by the proceeds of a money-laundering scheme.
Prosecutors charged The Epoch Times’s chief financial officer, Bill Guan, and an employee in Vietnam with conspiracy to launder at least $67 million using cryptocurrency in a scheme that involved identity theft and prepaid bank cards. Mr. Guan has pleaded not guilty.
The Epoch Times has said in public statements that it would cooperate with the investigation and that Mr. Guan had been suspended. It has also said that the accusations against Mr. Guan run counter to the publisher’s standards and to the principles of Falun Gong.
Shen Yun’s supporters found another source of income when the pandemic swept the world in 2020, causing venues to close and putting a strain on the performing arts industry.
They did it in part by exploiting a loophole in a federal pandemic relief program launched to keep struggling arts programs afloat. The program was designed to award no more than $10 million in grant funding either to any one group or up to five “affiliated” organizations, with rules that were meant to ensure no single entity got a disproportionate share of the aid.
Shen Yun’s satellite nonprofits were all run by ardent followers of Mr. Li, many of whom had staged Shen Yun shows in their cities and sent money back to the dance group for years. But on paper, none of the groups shared board members or were formally related to Shen Yun or to one another, and so they were allowed to tap the federal well without limitation, The Times found.
In all, at least 25 of the satellite groups applied to the so-called Shuttered Venue Operations Grant program and received a combined $48 million, records show. Shen Yun, despite not performing for most of 2020 and 2021, reported a surge in assets in those years of $50 million.
Meredith Lynsey Schade, a theatrical producer who worked with other applicants that sometimes struggled to get aid, called Shen Yun’s approach unethical.
“There are so many organizations that went under because they couldn’t pass the threshold,” she said. “Instead, one organization is hoarding all of this money.”
And then there were the practitioners who sneaked wads of cash into the United States at the dance group’s direction.
Three former Shen Yun performers told The Times that they ferried money through customs without disclosing it. Their accounts bore some similarities to a 2009 incident in which a practitioner was charged by federal prosecutors with smuggling more than $100,000 in cash, some wrapped in tinfoil, through customs at Kennedy International Airport. (A lawyer for Falun Gong later convinced prosecutors to drop the case.)
In 2015, the night before flying back to New York from Barcelona, the performers were each handed a white envelope stuffed with $100 bills.
They were instructed to keep it in their carry-on bags but to separate it. One performer, then a teenager, recalled getting $10,000 — the maximum a person can carry in without reporting it under laws meant to combat money laundering and other crimes. The performer put some of the money in a diary and recalled feeling like a character in a spy movie.
“They said it was very important money,” said the performer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A manager instructed: “Don’t let other people know that you have this.”
Sun Zan, another performer who carried cash, said he had to surrender his envelope to Shen Yun staff on the bus after the flight. One performer was chastised for leaving the money in a bag that could not be reached right away, he said.
Mr. Sun did not think much of the episode because he had often been paid in cash for dancing, he said, though there was one key difference.
The envelope he brought home from Barcelona held about half of what he earned from Shen Yun in an entire year.
Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Peiyue Wu contributed reporting.
Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about Michael Rothfeld
陳旭@perth 