The New York-based performing arts group showcases China as it existed before communism.
NEW YORK CITY—Beds in Chinese prisons are not just for sleep, as Shen Yun conductor Chen Ying can attest.
In the hands of prison guards, a bed roughly 1.5 feet from the floor became a torturing device. Guards tied up Chen’s brother, then-29-years-old, taped his mouth to prevent him from crying out, then shoved him underneath it, folding his body in half. One tormentor then stepped on the bed to increase the pressure on his back.
The potentially spine-breaking torture marked only one of myriad abuses Chinese authorities contrived in targeting people like them: practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, which espouses the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance along with meditation exercises.
The number of practitioners in 1999 comprised anywhere from 70 million to 100 million Chinese by some estimates. The atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), deeming Falun Gong’s popularity a threat, launched a campaign that year to purge the faith. Those refusing to give up their belief faced agonizing cruelty, including, but not limited to, slave labor, psychological drug injection, and forced harvesting of their organs for sale.
“It’s just unspeakable—the kind of crimes that they did,” Chen told The Epoch Times. Her soft spoken brother was dragged out of their Beijing home in the middle of the night and put in a labor camp for 18 months. Chen said he was lucky to have survived—another Falun Gong practitioner he knew became permanently paralyzed under the same torment.
As Chen’s brother struggled near the verge of death, his hair turning gray, a distraught Chen, who lives in the United States, was calling local media outlets to bring attention to his plight. It pained her to know such torture was only too common in China.
“This is very real to us,” said Chen.
Stories such as these don’t make it into the headlines in the communist-controlled media landscape. Unless it happens to a close friend, Chen said, people—whether they are inside China or abroad—have no idea it’s happening.
After her brother fled China in 2003, Chen, the daughter of two elite musicians who both had three decades of experience at China’s national orchestra, felt that she couldn’t just stand by and watch similar abuses continue.
In New York in 2006, Chen and her parents joined a group of like-minded artists who aspired to elevate artistic expression in a way that was impossible in communist-ruled China—and Shen Yun Performing Arts was born.
By Eva Fu
