Their posters are everywhere, but behind Shen Yun lies a darker story

The group promises to take audiences into 5000 years of Chinese history, but it is the result of a spiritual movement established in 1992.

ByAnthony SegaertFebruary 25, 2025

Shen Yun in Sydney.

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Even if you don’t know Shen Yun’s name, you’ll know its ads: on a laminated A3 poster, a brightly dressed Chinese dancer leaps through the air, the words “CHINA BEFORE COMMUNISM” plastered above.

Ostensibly, Shen Yun promises a two-hour musical, dance and cultural performance that takes audiences through 5000 years of Chinese history, reviving traditional Chinese culture after what it highlights as a cultural purge by the country’s communist leadership.

But those who have witnessed the performance in its more than decade-long annual seasons in Sydney have found something very different: the performance, and the company, serve as propaganda for the modern spiritual movement Falun Gong.

As the show opens its 2025 season in Sydney on Wednesday, a Herald investigation has uncovered how Falun Gong’s Sydney outpost is spending millions hosting and advertising the international dance company, which has spent the past year denying media reports of the alleged abuse of its performers overseas.

In the Capitol Theatre last March, Shen Yun opened its show with a dance and orchestral piece called The Time of Salvation Begins. It tells the story of “the Creator” coming to earth, telling angelic-like dancers to “Follow me to save all life!”

On a huge video screen behind the stage, low-definition graphics show the Creator and beings flying through outer space on horses before the scene cuts to an ancient Chinese temple.

“Our journey begins with the ancient legend that people were once divine. We followed the Creator down to the earth to fulfil our sacred vow,” announced emcee Jared Madsen. “Today we invite you to discover a culture inspired by the heavens.”

But Shen Yun’s roots are far more modern, spawning directly from Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) and its leader, Li Hongzhi.

Falun Gong practitioners are known for their exercises done in public.

Li established Falun Gong in China in the early 1990s. Seizing on the cultural rise of qigong – a practice of slow movement, meditation and breathing – he combined elements of Buddhist and Taoist traditions to teach that despite humans being made “divine”, they are forced to suffer because of karma.

Adherents are expected to grow in virtue (by exercising truthfulness, compassion and tolerance) and do exercises to bring qi, a common Chinese concept of energy, into the body.

“[The purpose] is to bring in fresh qi from the universe,” he said in the first of nine seminal two-hour lectures on the faith.

Li has repeatedly claimed he can heal his followers of major sicknesses (only if they have cultivated their mind and body enough), which detractors say has resulted in the deaths of followers who refused medical treatment.

In a visit to Sydney in 1996, he condemned a mixed-race society as an “extraordinarily serious problem” and later told Time that aliens had “begun to invade the human mind” and “introduced modern machinery like computers and airplanes”.

A performance titled Crimes at the End of Days tells the story of a Chinese woman discovering the beauty of Falun Gong in a park. Her brother, a policeman for the Chinese communist government, reports her to authorities before a video shows her organs being harvested by the government – which practitioners report experiencing in China as part of sustained persecution by the government.

Friends in high places

Li boasts to his followers that Shen Yun “is a production created by me that targets the upper classes”. For that reason, Shen Yun’s opening nights have been filled with business leaders and politicians.

In the past several years, prominent names at shows have included Hunters Hill mayor Zac Miles and Hills Shire Council mayor Michelle Byrne; NSW parliamentarians Mark Latham, Damien Tudehope, Robyn Preston and Tim James; and federal MPs Paul Fletcher, David Shoebridge and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.

But their free night at the theatre is not free.

As they leave the concert hall, politicians are swept aside to a well-lit media wall and asked for an on-the-spot review of the evening. The Hunters Hill mayor described Shen Yun as “part of the fabric of this city but also our country”, while outgoing federal shadow arts minister Paul Fletcher lauded it as “a very important educational tool as well as, of course, being richly entertaining”.

The comments, which are then shared in dozens of custom news articles in Falun Gong-aligned media, are part of a well-honed strategy of Li to target the “upper classes”.

Miles did not respond to requests for comment, while a staff member for Fletcher said he was writing a letter of support for the group but declined to comment further.

A moneymaking machine

Shen Yun’s operating model is as unorthodox as its performance.

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Shen Yun, established by Li in New York in 2006, has held shows in Australia since at least 2008, regularly visiting cities and smaller town centres including Bendigo and Toowoomba. But costs of promotion, ticket sales, accommodation and travel are all borne by local Falun Gong associations.

In Australia, that group is the Falun Dafa Association of Australia, which despite being a tax-exempt charity has had its public charity register removed. (A spokesperson for the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission declined to comment specifically but said there were limited circumstances where information could be withheld.)

The Herald has obtained the group’s most recent financial report, which shows the group spent more than $1.17 million on advertising and promotional material in the 2022-23 financial year.

The group spent close to half a million dollars hiring venues and a further $188,333 on travel and accommodation for performers.

That money mostly came from ticket sales ($2.33 million), but over the 2022 and 2023 financial years, records show Falun Gong supporters contributed $1.79 million in unsecured interest-free loans.

Local unpaid Falun Gong practitioners operated merchandise stalls at the Capitol Theatre last year.

But Shen Yun productions abroad are facing more scrutiny. A 2024 New York Times investigation uncovered a pattern of abusive behaviour from Shen Yun’s leaders overseas that pushed the group’s reportedly poorly paid dancers and musicians to their limits with repeated reminders that their performances would save audiences from an incoming apocalypse.

The group is facing a US investigation into its practices.

Zhuan Falun, the group’s main text, on offer in the Capitol Theatre in 2024.

Representatives of the Falun Dafa Association of Australia (which was not referred to in the Times investigation) declined an interview.

Graeme Kearns, chief executive of the company operating the Capitol Theatre, said the theatre’s observations of Shen Yun were excellent: “[They] have always taken great care of their dancers, musicians, and crew.”