Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners and based in New York, has been targeted by the Chinese regime for almost 20 years. Recently, The New York Times published a number of negative articles on Shen Yun. The arts company calls the articles one-sided and deeply flawed, and says they have helped bolster the communist regime’s attack.
NTD’s Tiffany Meier speaks with Levi Browde of the Falun Dafa Information Center and Ying Chen of Shen Yun to learn more about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) plan to eradicate the spiritual practice and the regime’s influence in the United States.
Below is a transcript of part of the interview. The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tiffany Meier: Levi, the Falun Dafa Information Center has done research in terms of The New York Times’ coverage of Falun Gong and then a little bit about Shen Yun over the years. How do you see, more broadly, the Falun Gong community responding to pieces like this that are attacking?
Levi Browde: I think the first thing is we need to raise awareness and make people aware of the convergence that’s happening in both time and goals achieved. Again, I’m not in the back rooms of The New York Times or other places that might be writing or publishing stuff that seems like an intentional hit piece. So we can’t know what’s happening in those back rooms, but we can look at the patterns, and we know for sure the Chinese regime said they were going to do this. They were going to start this campaign. They were going to start in social media. It was going to bleed into mainstream media. And this is the final nail in the coffin to try and eliminate Falun Gong.
That’s exactly what’s happening. It matches timing, it matches the goals achieved. And I think that’s really something we have to really focus on. It’s very disturbing that the CCP would articulate goals to persecute a group of people here in the United States, and The New York Times is achieving that. Hopefully, The New York Times is doing some serious introspection—there’s an audit, there’s some sort of look at this, how did this come to pass?
I think, more importantly, the DOJ [Department of Justice] should look at this, the FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] that looks at foreign agents that are not disclosing or letting people know. For example, we know very clearly that some of those interview subjects have public and open ties to the Chinese government. The New York Times knows that, they use it in the report, and they publish it, and they don’t let their readers know that.
The DOJ should be looking at The New York Times. It should be looking at these interview subjects. It should be looking at the social media folks that are drawing this all up. This is clearly a coordinated effort, it appears to me, and I think the DOJ needs to look at that, because we can’t have this. Today, it’s Falun Gong and Shen Yun, and tomorrow, what else? An American corporation? A mayor? Who knows. If they could do this to us, who else could they do this to? So I think we need in this country, with a new administration coming in, they need to take a good long look at what’s happening to Shen Yun and Falun Gong, and pick this apart piece by piece.
Watch NTD’s full interview with Levi Browde of the Falun Dafa Information Center and Ying Chen of Shen Yun here.