How Shen Yun Tapped Religious Fervor to Make $266 Million

Over the past decade, the dance group Shen Yun Performing Arts has made money at a staggering rate.

The group had $60 million in 2015.

It had $144 million by 2019.

And by the end of last year, tax records show, it had more than a quarter of a billion dollars, stockpiling wealth at a pace that would be extraordinary for any company, let alone a nonprofit dance group from Orange County, N.Y.

Operated by Falun Gong, the persecuted Chinese religious movement, Shen Yun’s success flows in part from its ability to pack venues worldwide — while exploiting young, low-paid performers with little regard for their health or well-being.

But it also is a token of the power that Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, has wielded over his followers. In the name of fighting communism, and obeying Mr. Li’s mystical teachings, they have created a global network to glorify him and enrich his movement.

Under Mr. Li’s direct leadership, Shen Yun has become a repository of vast wealth for Falun Gong, often accumulating money at the expense of its loyal adherents, a New York Times investigation has found.

It has raked in funds through ticket sales — nearly $39 million in 2023 alone — but also by using religious fealty to command the free labor of its followers. It has received tens of millions of dollars more in ways that may have crossed legal or ethical lines, The Times found.

In one case, Shen Yun and a school that trains its dancers received $16 million from The Epoch Times, a newspaper run by Falun Gong followers, during a period when federal prosecutors said the publication’s accounts were inflated in a money-laundering conspiracy.

Shen Yun and a network of satellite organizations added more wealth by skirting rules to tap tens of millions of dollars in pandemic-era relief money.

And three former Shen Yun performers told The Times that they were used to ferry large amounts of cash into the United States, a possible attempt to circumvent laws about reporting U.S. currency transactions.

Shen Yun has kept its own costs down by wringing countless volunteer hours, and sometimes personal savings, from followers of Mr. Li, who has suggested he created the universe and instructed believers that Shen Yun performances can save people from a coming apocalypse by exposing them to his teachings.

Eager to heed Mr. Li, the followers have borne most of the financial burden for staging hundreds of Shen Yun shows around the world, including paying out of their own pockets to book venues, print fliers, buy advertising and sell tickets — even going into debt to cover upfront costs.

“They all think — including me before — we all think it is an important part of the path to godhood,” said Simone Gao, a former practitioner and Falun Gong media personality. “If you devote time, energy and money to this cause, the reward is incomparable to what you get in this world.”

It was not clear why Shen Yun has amassed so much money, or why nearly all of its assets — $249 million in 2023 — were kept in cash and other liquid instruments. Experts said it was unusual for a nonprofit not to invest such sums unless they were needed for significant short-term expenses, which Shen Yun has not seemed to have incurred.

Shen Yun’s representatives declined to answer questions about its finances. In the past, Mr. Li has said large sums of money were needed to battle the Chinese Communist Party, which has banned the movement and repressed its followers since the 1990s.

“For over 25 years, Falun Gong practitioners have struggled to peacefully resist persecution from the largest totalitarian regime on earth, and Shen Yun is a key part of that effort,” a Shen Yun spokeswoman, Ying Chen, said in a statement to The Times. “Your attempts to brand Shen Yun as a grand moneymaking scheme are shocking and deeply offensive.”

Ms. Chen accused The Times of making “gross distortions or blatant factual errors,” but she declined to elaborate.

As Shen Yun has amassed wealth, its supporters have purchased real estate for Mr. Li’s movement, including Falun Gong’s 400-acre headquarters, known as Dragon Springs, which is about 60 miles northwest of New York City.

They have also subsidized the lifestyle of Mr. Li, now in his early 70s, and his wife, Li Rui, a top manager in Shen Yun.

One follower gave the movement her life savings before dying of cancer, virtually penniless.

In recent years, Mr. Li and his aides have found yet another way to make money through Shen Yun. They have created companies that market products directly to Falun Gong followers, like a Tang Elegance necklace with a spessartite garnet for $3,850, Heavenly Phoenix earrings for $925, a $35 ornament of the Shen Yun tour bus and Shen Yun-branded athleisure clothing.

Practitioners have been told they should purchase the most up-to-date Falun Gong clothing for public events, including a reversible blue-and-yellow jacket for $120.

Business records show that Mr. Li personally started an online video platform that charges $199.99 a year for a subs**tion to watch Shen Yun performances. His associates also created another video platform, Gan Jing World, which was accused by YouTube in a lawsuit this month of stealing content. The platform has not filed a response to the suit.

Practitioners were urged to subscribe to help “Master” — as Mr. Li is known — save more souls, emails show. Many did just that, former followers said.

“People gave up their life’s savings, and this happened so often,” said Rob Gray, a former practitioner in London who spent 15 years working on Falun Gong projects. “There’s a constant theme now to fleece practitioners, to take money. Where is this profit going to?”

From the start, Shen Yun has pursued a winning strategy for reaping huge profits: It has gotten other people to shoulder the costs of putting on its shows.

Although the group has a stated mission of reviving traditional Chinese culture while “providing audiences everywhere with an experience of beauty,” it does not routinely pay for the billboards, television ads or fliers depicting Shen Yun’s dancers leaping through the air that are ubiquitous in cities around the world. Nor does it generally cover the costs of venues, ticket sales or hotels and meals for performers.

That burden has fallen on a network of smaller satellite organizations that Mr. Li and his aides have encouraged followers to form around the world.

Known as presenters, the organizations were incorporated as nonprofits in the United States, operating in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities.

The nonprofits are staffed by practitioners who work as unpaid volunteers and have agreed to “bear the responsibility for all costs incurred” and be liable for losses, claims “and expenses of every kind and des**tion” related to staging Shen Yun shows in their areas, according to a contract reviewed by The Times.

Every year, the groups collectively spend millions of dollars and keep only enough in ticket sales to cover their expenses, sending every penny of profit back to Shen Yun.

In 2018, a satellite organization in Georgia, the Falun Dafa Association of Atlanta, spent $1,621,011 on advertising, hotel rooms, food, transportation, venue fees and other expenses, tax records show. The group earned $2,077,507, mostly from seven Shen Yun performances in Atlanta. The Atlanta nonprofit kept $1,621,011 and sent the remaining money — $456,496 — to Shen Yun.

If a satellite organization should spend more money than it earns, it still sends money to Shen Yun — and it falls on the people who run the groups to make up the difference.

At the Indiana Falun Dafa Association, local followers made loans to the satellite organization for a decade. In 2018, eight of them lent a combined $375,000 without any loan agreements and at zero percent interest, tax filings show. One of the lenders, the group’s president, handed over $130,000 on his own.

The satellite organization paid Shen Yun $169,233.39 to put on three shows that February, records show, but did not make enough to repay the loans. They appear to have been settled only years later, using government grants.

Inside the local organizations, practitioners can feel immense pressure to deliver for Mr. Li, who has taught that success in selling Shen Yun tickets is an indicator of how devoted they are to his teachings.

He has also urged followers to advertise only in “well-to-do” areas and to set high prices for Falun Gong dance shows.

“Getting things for nothing,” Mr. Li said, “wouldn’t conform to this dimension’s principles.”

Ahead of shows in the San Francisco area, followers would gather on Saturday nights to study Mr. Li’s writings and share how many Shen Yun tickets they had sold, according to a former practitioner who asked to be identified only by her last name, Wang.

Selling as many tickets as possible was seen as a way to accumulate more virtue, she said.

And in London in March 2023, a note of panic crept into an “urgent” email sent by a practitioner named Sharon Xu to other followers in the area. She was seeking their help with leafleting, she wrote, because the show was approaching and thousands of tickets were still unsold.

“We are at a crucial stage in Shen Yun promotion,” she wrote. “Thousands of predestined people whom Master wants to save have yet to connect with us, and there are only literally days remaining this year.”

For all the time and money that the operators of the satellite organizations provided, some gave much more to the movement — and to Mr. Li himself.

In 2006, one of Shen Yun’s first performers began traveling from his home in Maryland to Falun Gong’s headquarters along with his sister, also a performer, and their mother, a devoted practitioner. Soon, they all moved to Dragon Springs, known among followers as the mountain, to focus on dancing.

The man, whom The Times is identifying by his first name, Liang, and his sister eventually left Shen Yun and moved away. But their mother remained on the mountain, working unpaid for years as a top aide to Mr. and Ms. Li and as a bookkeeper for the dance group.

She left the area only rarely, such as for Liang’s wedding in 2014, he would later write in an email to friends. That same year, she and her husband sold the house they had owned in Maryland since the 1980s for $485,000, records show.

Soon after, she began spending money for Shen Yun, her family would later learn. After Mr. Li remarked that Shen Yun’s orchestra should use only the best pianos, Liang’s mother arranged for the purchase of $260,000 in premium models, according to another email her son sent and other records reviewed by The Times.

Other gifts and donations followed, including thousands of dollars in payments for Wi-Fi hot spots and domain names and monthly payments for Mr. and Ms. Li’s cellphone bills to Verizon, according to the records, Liang’s emails and people familiar with the events.

Mr. Li teaches that diligently practicing his meditation exercises and reading his texts keeps the body healthy by purging the bad karma that causes illness. So Liang’s mother did not see a doctor when she began losing weight and becoming increasingly haggard around 2018.

By the fall of 2019, she was 66 years old and down to 70 pounds. Shocked at her appearance during a video call, her family finally persuaded her to get medical care.

The diagnosis was dire: kidney cancer that had spread through her body, leaving her with small odds of survival and tens of thousands of dollars in expected medical costs. She told Liang and his sister that she would not be able to pay for any of it.

“My mom revealed that all her money is gone, donated to the mountain,” Liang emailed his friends on Oct. 15, 2019. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

As their mother was slipping away, Liang and his sister got another shock. An employee in the Shen Yun office accidentally mailed them a statement for their mother’s credit card, which showed charges from Saks Fifth Avenue and other shops. They reviewed more statements and discovered that her accounts had been used to buy tens of thousands of dollars in luxury items, apparently for Mr. Li and his wife.

The statements showed a $13,029.70 charge from the Watch Gallery in London and $10,000 for virgin wool suits and other clothing from Hugo Boss. They showed $2,045.31 in purchases at the luxury retailer Hermès in Austria and another $1,091.99 at the jewelry house Van Cleef & Arpels in Switzerland.

They showed thousands more spent on seafood and custom billiard cues — Mr. Li is an avid pool player — and assorted charges from high-end brands including Ferragamo and Tiffany & Company. Ms. Li appeared to have personally used his mother’s credit card, Liang wrote to his friends in an email.

Many of the charges were made in 2018 and 2019, as Liang’s mother’s health was failing, records show.

Within weeks of seeing a doctor, Liang’s mother was dead.

Afterward, a portion of the money was repaid to her family, people familiar with the events said, though the source of the repayment was not clear.

Shen Yun’s spokeswoman, Ms. Chen, said The Times’s account of these events was “inaccurate and misleading in numerous respects.” She said the details were subject to a confidentiality agreement, which she called “a carefully negotiated resolution of a misunderstanding.”

The experience left Liang convinced that the movement was preying on people like his mother, who gave willingly in hopes of receiving a heavenly reward.

“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing things as how they truly are,” he wrote in one of his emails. “I’m not going to let this happen to anyone that I care about ever again.”

To track the flow of money into Shen Yun, The Times reviewed more than 15 years’ worth of tax filings for the main nonprofit and dozens of its satellite organizations.

Reporters also examined hundreds of pages of internal Shen Yun-related records and communications and interviewed people with knowledge of the organization’s financial dealings, including some who were directly involved in organizing shows.

The dance group and a school that trains its performers received about $16 million from The Epoch Times, the right-leaning news organization founded by followers of Mr. Li, during a period when federal prosecutors said the news outlet’s accounts were inflated by the proceeds of a money-laundering scheme.

Prosecutors charged The Epoch Times’s chief financial officer, Bill Guan, and an employee in Vietnam with conspiracy to launder at least $67 million using cryptocurrency in a scheme that involved identity theft and prepaid bank cards. Mr. Guan has pleaded not guilty.

The Epoch Times has said in public statements that it would cooperate with the investigation and that Mr. Guan had been suspended. It has also said that the accusations against Mr. Guan run counter to the publisher’s standards and to the principles of Falun Gong.

Shen Yun’s supporters found another source of income when the pandemic swept the world in 2020, causing venues to close and putting a strain on the performing arts industry.

They did it in part by exploiting a loophole in a federal pandemic relief program launched to keep struggling arts programs afloat. The program was designed to award no more than $10 million in grant funding either to any one group or up to five “affiliated” organizations, with rules that were meant to ensure no single entity got a disproportionate share of the aid.

Shen Yun’s satellite nonprofits were all run by ardent followers of Mr. Li, many of whom had staged Shen Yun shows in their cities and sent money back to the dance group for years. But on paper, none of the groups shared board members or were formally related to Shen Yun or to one another, and so they were allowed to tap the federal well without limitation, The Times found.

In all, at least 25 of the satellite groups applied to the so-called Shuttered Venue Operations Grant program and received a combined $48 million, records show. Shen Yun, despite not performing for most of 2020 and 2021, reported a surge in assets in those years of $50 million.

Meredith Lynsey Schade, a theatrical producer who worked with other applicants that sometimes struggled to get aid, called Shen Yun’s approach unethical.

“There are so many organizations that went under because they couldn’t pass the threshold,” she said. “Instead, one organization is hoarding all of this money.”

And then there were the practitioners who sneaked wads of cash into the United States at the dance group’s direction.

Three former Shen Yun performers told The Times that they ferried money through customs without disclosing it. Their accounts bore some similarities to a 2009 incident in which a practitioner was charged by federal prosecutors with smuggling more than $100,000 in cash, some wrapped in tinfoil, through customs at Kennedy International Airport. (A lawyer for Falun Gong later convinced prosecutors to drop the case.)

In 2015, the night before flying back to New York from Barcelona, the performers were each handed a white envelope stuffed with $100 bills.

They were instructed to keep it in their carry-on bags but to separate it. One performer, then a teenager, recalled getting $10,000 — the maximum a person can carry in without reporting it under laws meant to combat money laundering and other crimes. The performer put some of the money in a diary and recalled feeling like a character in a spy movie.

“They said it was very important money,” said the performer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A manager instructed: “Don’t let other people know that you have this.”

Sun Zan, another performer who carried cash, said he had to surrender his envelope to Shen Yun staff on the bus after the flight. One performer was chastised for leaving the money in a bag that could not be reached right away, he said.

Mr. Sun did not think much of the episode because he had often been paid in cash for dancing, he said, though there was one key difference.

The envelope he brought home from Barcelona held about half of what he earned from Shen Yun in an entire year.

Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Peiyue Wu contributed reporting.