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One of the most difficult things about moving from the Northeast of the US to the Bay Area was getting accustomed to the different seasons. In Boston, for instance, the seasons were winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, etc.
In the Bay Area, the seasons are similar but just different enough to be off-putting:
Winter
Fools spring
2nd winter
Spring of deception
3rd winter
Road construction
Actual spring
Summer
Fire
False fall
2nd summer
And finally, the season we are currently hurtling towards: Shen Yun season.
If you don’t know what Shen Yun is, congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided one of the most annoying marketing campaigns on the planet, something I had done for several decades before moving to the Bay Area. By the time my first October rolled around, I was surrounded, inundated, with billboards, posters, and mailers imploring me to buy $300 tickets to see the “#1 show in the WORLD” where a live orchestra plays along with beautiful dancers who demonstrate the rich history of China before communism.”
The sheer amount of advertising immediately tipped me off that this was a nefarious organization but at the time I had no idea how bad it actually was. It didn’t take me long to learn that the project was run by Falun Gong.
Falun Gong is, to put it bluntly, a cult. It was started in China in the 1990s by Li Hongzhi, who claims to have magical powers like levitation and psychic foresight, and likes to hint that he may be an alien. He says that people can achieve similar supernatural results by going through certain gentle exercises/stretches and meditation upon their various principles. The cult rejects much of modern medicine and insists that their exercises can cure incurable diseases.
If you live in a major city, you’ve probably seen Falun Gong adherents hanging out in public parks doing their stretches. They do that on purpose: unlike most cults, Falun Gong insists that adherents engage with the secular world as much as possible in order to attract new adherents. By hanging out in the park doing gentle stretches, they appear to be a placid, friendly group getting fresh air instead of a bunch of raving bigots who want you to do jazz hands as you die of a burst appendix.
Another way that Falun Gong maintains contact with the secular world and spreads propaganda is through the Epoch Times, which has become famous in recent years for being one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. It’s funny how closely Falun Gong mimics the Church of Christ, Scientist, another cult that convinces adherents to avoid medical care and started a newspaper to spread propaganda. But while the Christian Science Monitor has now won several Pulitzer Prizes, the Epoch Times is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories in order to hasten the end times in which communists will be sent to hell.
I’ll pause this to point out that you may have also seen Falun Gong members handing out anti-Chinese materials that claim China has oppressed them. This is absolutely true! Chinese authorities almost immediately identified the organization as a threat to them, and so by 1999 they had banned the practice of the religion, and they beat, harassed, tortured, and imprisoned Falun Gong adherents. That is obviously not the best way to go about stopping a dangerous cult. If you think of China’s authoritarian government as the enemy, you shouldn’t fall for the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” slogan. It’s not true. In this case, the enemy of my enemy still fucking sucks.
Because of China’s crackdown, Li Hongzhi left the country and was welcomed with open arms into the US, where he eventually settled in Western New York state. That’s where adherents set up the headquarters for Shen Yun with the specific goal of spreading propaganda about how great everything was in China before communism, and also how horrible things like atheism, feminism, and homosexuality are.
And that’s more or less as much as I knew about Shen Yun: propaganda for a dangerous cult. But imagine my surprise when I recently learned it gets even worse.
The New York Times recently published a massive exposé and while it DOES make the picture clearer (and much worse), none of the revelations are what you’d call “extraordinary” if you know how cults work, in general. Because yeah, it turns out that the performers for Shen Yun are brainwashed, groomed, and abused in every way you can imagine.
NY Times reporters managed to find dozens of ex-performers willing to talk, nine of whom went on to ignore threats from Falun Gong and go on the record to talk about their experiences. The most horrific finding was that many performers said they were sent to the Western New York compound very young, some before they were even 12 years old.
Once at the compound, these children are put on strict diets and put into training. To encourage these kids to spend 15 hours a day training despite serious injuries that should have but did not receive medical care, Falun Gong leaders told them that the show was going to literally save the audience members from the impending apocalypse. Like, you’d better turn in an A+ performance or that audience is going to suffer for all of eternity with the communists. Neat.
The performers weren’t JUST worried about the safety of audience members, but about their own as well. They were convinced that if they left the show, they would no longer receive Li’s mystical protection against physical harm, and they themselves might go to hell.
I can’t believe I played the trumpet in so many concerts without the threat of endless agony hanging over my head. That’s probably why I never made first chair.
In addition to spiritual abuse, Falun Gong adherents also trap the performers through financial abuse. They consider the years of training to be “schooling,” and so they pay the students little or nothing until they are older, like in their 20s, and even then it’s a pittance. If anyone wants to leave, they’re told that if they do they will be forced to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in “tuition.”
And that brings me to a question that’s been in the back of my head since I moved to the Bay Area and was first buried under daily mailers from Shen Yun: how on earth do they afford all this marketing? I’m serious, there were days when I received multiple identical flyers from Shen Yun, while passing billboards that seemed to be about 50% Shen Yun ads, or taking subway cars that were completely papered in Shen Yun posters. Where’s all this money coming from? I assumed that as a cult, they wrung a lot of money out of their adherents, but surely there must be more to it.
Well, there is one factor: free child labor.
Another major factor? Money laundering! In 2020, the Epoch Times saw a huge and very suspicious jump in revenue, from $15.5 million in 2019 to $121.5 million in 2021, and their tax records were described by experts as everything from “fishy” to “a hot mess.” Earlier this year, the Epoch Times’ chief financial officer was arrested under suspicion of “laundering at least $67 million in illegally obtained funds.”
The final factor? This cult is considered a legitimate religion here in the United States, and that comes with the major benefit of them not paying taxes. That’s right! No taxes. The Epoch Times, aka “the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign itself”? Tax exempt. That 400-acre compound in Western New York where children are brainwashed and forced to dance? That’s a church. That means they don’t have to pay property tax on it, and they don’t have to pay income tax on any profits, and they can get away with more in terms of tax free benefits to their employees, like housing for their leaders.
In my opinion, it’s disgusting that any church in the United States is given tax free status, but in this case it’s especially egregious. We, the taxpaying masses, should not be paying for these fanatics to abuse children. Revoking their tax exempt status probably won’t shut the cult down, but at the very least it will stop the cult from burying us under annoying mailers, and that’s a good first step.
