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

Shen Yun in Sydney. Even if you don’t know Shen Yun’s name, you’ll know its ads.

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 cult 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!”

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

Li established Falun Gong in China in the early 1990s. Seizing on the cultural rise of qigong. 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”.

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.

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 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”.

A moneymaking machine

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

Shen Yun has been forced to issue a statement that their dancers are based in the USA.

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 cult 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.

Source Link: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/their-posters-are-everywhere-but-behind-shen-yun-lies-a-darker-story-20250220-p5ldry.html?s=09