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

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.Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

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.

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.