Shen Yun Dance Company and Its Secretive Parent, Falun Gong, Investigated – People’s World

This Friday, March 8, 2019 photo shows the Falun Gong Dragon Springs compound in Otisville, NY. After years of additions, the lakeside site features buildings in the Tang Dynasty style close to modern, boxy buildings that would fit into a modern office park. Dragon Springs said 100 people, mostly students, live there. | Julie Jacobson/AP

WARWICK, NY—A tall Chinese temple towers over the small Hudson Valley town of Warwick, NY The temple is the centerpiece of a sprawling and secretive school/college complex for Falun Gong, which the People’s Republic of China notes is a cult that sponsors the Shen Yun dance company.

Shen Yun troupes tour the world, infusing classical Chinese dance with propaganda skits against the Chinese government and socialism. The dance company is especially active now that we are approaching the big annual holiday season for shows.

Falun Gong is also in legal trouble with both the state of New York and the federal government. But the advertisement for the dance company doesn’t tell you that.

Although the temple is the centerpiece of Falun Gong’s sprawling compound near Warwick, the reality is different. The complex includes the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts for the training and schooling of Shen Yun dancers. But when the dancers go on tour, they often don’t get paid.

“Fei Tian students are not employees and as such cannot be paid a salary,” the dance company told Epoch Times. Like Shen Yun, that paper is a Falun Gong company. So is New Tang Dynasty TV, a cable channel.

Many former Shen Yun dancers told that New York Times they weren’t paid at all in their first year on tour. In their early to mid-20s, most were paid $12,000 a year or less.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour equals $15,080 for a year of 40-hour weeks. But many of the former dancers told the paper’s probers that their workweeks were much longer than that — with no overtime pay.

The New York Labor Department is investigating other abuses at the Warwick complex and at the dance company Times reported. The most important is using minor performers – the teenage dancers – without seeking and receiving a DOL permit for their employment.

Shen Yun finally got one this year, following the newspaper’s revelation. It requires the dance company to report to the state every month about underage performers and get a new permit every month.

But both the dance company and Falun Gong maintain that the dancers are “students” at their academy, not “employees” under labor laws. It is important. Under current rulings by the National Labor Relations Board, college students, such as the Shen Yun dancers, are “employees” with the right to organize and bargain over labor conditions, although a Republican-majority board appointed by President-elect Trump could reverse that.

Complaints about lack of pay finally prompted the New York State Labor Department to open an investigation into the dance troupe earlier this year after a multi-part New York Times expose the blown cover of the secretive Shen Yun and Falun Gong abuses.

Abuse for more than a decade

These abuses have continued for more than a decade Times reported. But according to a state audit nearly a decade ago, the state Department of Labor cannot act on its own, but only respond to complaints it receives. And it didn’t come until Times’s stories hit the pages throughout the country.

But some of the abuses Times disclosed is not legally covered.

The Times and other sources reported that “an atmosphere of fear” and isolation of the students who became dancers is a major abuse. There are also threats that individual dancers would “go to hell” for mistakes they make, and there is a lack of proper medical care for workplace injuries.

Ben Hurley, an Australian who left Falun Gong after a dozen years as a member, reported four years ago that even then—three years after his first blog about it—he was getting reports from once-fearful members.

“The stories express a mixture of excitement and terror,” Hurley wrote Religion and ethics website after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ran his own exhibition of Falun Gong. “Excitement that now they can listen to pop music, or eat sashimi, or have a beer, or have sex, or take up a hobby, or hang out with non-believers — without feeling dirty and unworthy.

“And lingering horror as they turn against their living god and try to banish him from their minds and out of their lives.”

The living god is Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi. “A number of people labored over the decision to contact me before finally working up the courage because they believed Li could read their minds,” Hurley wrote.

It is not the only belief that Li promotes in Falun Gong.

“ABC portrays Falun Gong as a threat to public safety because of its dangerous teachings on medicine and its secretiveness and dishonesty. Foreign correspondent and Background briefing“—the two Australian programs that ran the ABC’s revelations — “both rejected such a characterization of its coverage.”

The two Australian programs said: “They simply gave critics an opportunity to be heard and Falun Gong a fair opportunity to respond. But from my perspective, having been a staunch follower for 12 years, such a characterization would be correct. “

Other Falun Gong beliefs preached by its founder are “homosexual people are disgusting, interracial children have no heaven to go to, and aliens are slowly taking over human bodies—not to mention the less talked about but widespread belief that Donald Trump is an angel from heaven.”

And that could be a problem for the US Justice Department, especially after Trump takes over in January when he re-enters the White House.

Charged in crypto scheme for money laundering

“Just days after Trump was found guilty” in a New York courtroom of multiple counts of violating state campaign finance laws, “the Justice Department arrested and charged the finance director of the far-right newspaper. Epoch Times in a $67 million crypto money laundering scam,” SFist reported.

“The Epoch Times, promotes and of course helps fund the ubiquitously advertised propaganda dance show Shen Yun.”

The dance company’s advertisements are ubiquitous at bus stops, on media and on billboards in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC, promoting its performances.

The dance company, technically a non-profit organization, received a New York state tax credit years ago to build the Warwick complex. But it doesn’t pay for the ads, even if they New York Times revealed that its annual revenue totaled $265 million last year.

Instead, the advertising money comes from Epoch Times plus local branches of Falun Gong scattered around the United States Epoch Times itself doesn’t want to pay full freight for its ads, according to a newspaper ad executive who posted his experience with the newspaper’s ad buyer on Reddit under a pseudonym.

The buyer claimed that Shen Yun, as a non-profit organization, should get a 50% discount. After an increasingly difficult hour-long discussion, the newspaper’s advertising representative walked away from the sale.

Propaganda against the People’s Republic of China infiltrates Shen Yun dance itself, Gia Tolentino reported in a lengthy exposé in The New Yorker. Many audiences seemed to realize that, a survey of posts on Reddit and other social media shows, and discounted it. Nevertheless, it threatens.

“A man came on stage to sing a song in Chinese, which was translated on the screen behind him. ‘We follow Dafa, the Great Way,’ he began, singing about a Creator who saved humanity and created the world anew. The New Yorker story told.

“Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends are destroying what makes us human,” he sang. place with corrupt youth.

“Their corruption was evident because they were wearing black, looking at their cellphones and, in the case of two men, holding hands,” Tolentino wrote.

“Chairman Mao appeared and the sky turned black. The city in the digital backdrop was wiped out by an earthquake and then ended by a communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes and saw a huge, bearded face disappearing into the water.

“‘Was it…?” I said to my brother, wondering if I should go to the hospital.

“‘Karl Marx?’ he said. “Yes, I think it was a tsunami with Karl Marx’s face.”

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