Behind the scenes of Shen Yun — “A group of child laborers living in constant fear.”
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Deep in the woods of New York State, behind guarded gates, lies a vision of ancient China reborn – a private sanctuary called Dragon Springs, 400 acres where faith and art share the same stage. It is the creative center of Shen Yun, the epic stage production of Chinese history, legends, and politics.
“We are putting on stage the tyranny of the CCP,” said Ying Chen, a vice president and conductor with Shen Yun.
The Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, calls the group behind Shen Yun an evil cult. Known as Falun Gong, it’s a spiritual movement rooted in Buddhism. In 1992, founder Li Hongzhi started teaching Falun Gong’s meditation exercises, which spread quickly throughout China.
And Beijing responded. In 1999, China banned the religious group, referring to it as “public enemy number one” for challenging communist rule.
Ying Chen says practitioners were imprisoned and tortured, including her own family. “My mom and my brother was sent to a labor camp,” she said, “and he endured 18 months of agony, and his survival was a fragile miracle. He was literally tortured every single day.”
Founder Li Hongzhi settled in the U.S., and in 2006 launched Shen Yun. It would ask much of his followers, including Jeff Sun and Ashley Cheng, who both grew up in Falun Gong families. “Li Hongzhi made it quite clear that Shen Yun was the highest form of how practitioners can support the movement,” said Cheng.
Their parents had sent them in the late 2000s to a boarding school at Dragon Springs where young performers train for Shen Yun. We spoke with Sun and Cheng, now married, from their home in New Zealand.
“The entire community I grew up in was very proud of me,” Cheng said. “They thought it was a great honor to live with Li Hongzhi in that compound.
Sun said attending Shen Yun was “as if, like, I made it to Harvard.”
He was 15, she was 13 … nearly 9,000 miles from home. According to Cheng, “Everything was very isolated, and our main job is to dance.”
Regarding contact with the world outside Dragon Springs, Cheng said that, if their parents asked any questions, “we had to tell that we were happy, that Master (which is Li Hongzhi) was taking great care of us.”
The reality, Sun and Cheng claim, was they were part of a group of child laborers living in constant fear.
“I was in survival mode,” said Cheng. “It’s about not exceeding 100 pounds every day. It’s about following the footsteps of the person in front of me so I don’t get yelled out of line.”
Sun said, “There’s no one we can talk to. The adults there who are your educators, [are] also your persecutors. You want to speak how you feel to them but the next day you get told that you’re thinking different to everybody else, that you are the problem.”
That was the weight of the mind. The body, they say, would bear its own. “Two kids kind of pushed my legs open in the side split, and it was the most amount of pain I’d ever experienced, ever,” Sun said. “I had internal bleeding. My entire inside of my leg, both legs, was purple. But every day I still had to do the same thing.”
Cheng said, “My shoulder was stretched for [an] abnormal amount of time once, and I lost all feeling in it. So, I had issues, from showering to going to the bathroom.”
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