There’s little that scares the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more than the growing popularity of traditional culture—embodied in the brilliant sights and sounds of Shen Yun Performing Arts.
It makes sense. New York-based Shen Yun’s mission is to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, an ancient culture centered around harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind—a culture said to be passed down from the divine. This is everything the CCP has been working to destroy since the Party’s inception.
“Absolutely, this is blacklisted. This is the biggest threat to the Chinese Communist Party,” said Jared Madsen, one of Shen Yun’s emcees. “If people believe there’s something beyond the Chinese Communist Party, they believe there’s something higher … that’s a major threat to the Chinese Communist Party.”
As such, the CCP has done everything from slashing Shen Yun’s tour bus tires to hiring hordes of internet trolls to skew perception of the company on social media, to having Chinese consulates write letters to local officials saying that their letting Shen Yun perform in their areas would damage relations with China, to calling up theaters themselves (or through hired proxies) to demand Shen Yun be canceled. The interference goes back over a decade and has been well documented, and actually often backfires.
These measures may sound extreme, because Shen Yun is not even a political show. It’s a performance of classical Chinese dance, of ethnic and folk dances from China’s 50-some minority groups, of bel canto solos, and of an orchestra blending Eastern and Western traditions. And audiences step out of the theater aglow, uplifted by the performance, and happy to have learned the truth about the authentic culture of China, something little known in the West precisely because the Party has tried to erase it.
“Fundamentally, the Chinese Communist Party is an atheist regime. Shen Yun reflects 5,000 years of Chinese culture, and Chinese culture is rooted in divine thought—all different types of divine thought: Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—that goes directly against the atheist principles of communism,” Madsen said.
The CCP is afraid because Shen Yun shows China before communism.
