Over the last few weeks, Shen Yun has been threatened with bombs, mass shootings, and rape, while we have also had our bus tires slashed and faced a range of sabotage attempts from Beijing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This marks a definite escalation. I\u2019ve been with Shen Yun since day one 18 years ago, and have been documenting all the interference attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to stop the show\u2014the evidence chart<\/a> on my blog has over 100 such cases from around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most typical are Chinese embassies pressuring theaters and elected officials to try to cancel our shows, threatening advertisers and media partners to pull our ads or otherwise lose business in China, and harassing performers\u2019 family members back in the PRC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is Beijing so intent on stopping a performance of traditional Chinese culture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, if you\u2019ve seen our billboards, and I think it\u2019s hard not to these days, you know our tagline is \u201cChina before communism.\u201d This isn\u2019t just a slogan\u2014Shen Yun\u2019s mission <\/a>is to revive five thousand years of Chinese civilization\u2014the very heritage the CCP has spent more than seventy-five years trying to destroy. Shen Yun brings this traditional culture back to life through dance and music depicting the stories, and, more importantly, virtues of ancient China, which include deeply spiritual themes. The CCP sees all this as a threat to its monopoly on culture and its narrative on modern China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Secondly, Shen Yun was established by practitioners of Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, in New York. This is a group that has been brutally persecuted by the CCP for over two decades and a number of Shen Yun artists experienced this persecution firsthand. As part of every performance, we also tell the story of the persecution in China and the courageous, peaceful resistance to it. On stage night after night, I can see that this is one of the stories that moves the audience the most, especially given its message of faith and hope. This is a persecution the CCP claims does not exist, and yet here we are depicting it on prestigious stages around the world. To the CCP, this is terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, over the years, not only has the CCP tried, and mostly failed, to pressure theaters to cancel our shows, it has also placed well-disguised paid articles in major papers such as the Washington Post and London Telegraph vilifying Shen Yun, sent the 50-cent army of online commentators to dominate review boards and chat rooms, hacked our website multiple times, and repeatedly attempted to sabotage our tour buses and trucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n