Transcript: Inside Shen Yun and the Epoch Times, with NYT's Nicole Hong and Michael Rothfeld

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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I think most of us who live in or near a city of any size in the West have seen the massive billboards, the leaflets and the flyers, the mailed brochures — I got one the other day — the posters in the windows of Chinese restaurants, usually on a purple background featuring a leaping dancer dressed in traditional Chinese garb, advertising for a performance called Shen Yun. “Shen Yun” literally means “mystical” or “divine rhyme.” I’ve seen it translated as “divine rhythm,” too, I suppose that works. Anyway, I am certain that 99% of regular listeners to this show know that the Shen Yun troop is an arm of the Falun Gong, the new religious movement — some prefer the word “cult,” but we’re going to use NRM, “new religious movement,” here — that grew rapidly in the ’90s all across China, staged a massive sit-in protest at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, which I was there for by the way, and was thereafter a target of a full-scale crackdown by the PRC government. Its leader, a guy named Li Hongzhi, regarded as a living deity by adherence, had been out of China since about ’95, and he set up shop ultimately in the rural hamlet of Cuddebackville in Orange County in upstate New York, just about an hour or so northwest of the city. Falun Gong operates a number of media outlets, ranging from YouTube channels like China in Focus and China Uncensored to television outlets like New Tang Dynasty TV, a name that rankles with me, especially given my involvement with a certain Chinese rock band, and largest and most impactful of all, the newspaper Epoch Times. I should note that Falun Gong denies its direct involvement in these various media, but they’re really not fooling anyone.

How, though, is this whole multi-headed operation financed, and what on earth does something so seemingly innocent as traditional Chinese music and dance have to do with the Falun Gong’s brand of spiritualism and vehement anti-communist ideology? Well, to unpack all of this, and more, I am delighted to have joining me on Sinica today Nicole Hong and Michael Rothfeld. Both are investigative reporters for the New York Times, and at the end of the year, they published in The Times a couple of excellent investigative pieces about Shen Yun and other pieces of the Falun Gong puzzle. If you haven’t already read those, I suggest you hit pause now and read them. They were published on December 29th and December 30th, and should be really easy to find. I think you’ll get more out of the conversation having first perused the pieces in question. If you’ve got time, I would also suggest reading their reporting that goes back to August of last year, of ’24, and from November, also talking about Shen Yun and Falun Gong. I’ll have links to all those pieces in the show notes. Either way, Nicole and Michael, welcome to Sinica, and thank you so much for taking time to join me. Happy New Year to both of you.

Michael Rothfeld: Happy New Year.

Nicole Hong: Thank you, Kaiser. Great to be here.

Kaiser: So, what occasion by reaching out to you on this were the pieces that were published at the end of the year on December 29th and 30th, respectively, but you’ve actually written quite a number of stories about Shen Yun, the Epoch Times, and the organization that ties them together, which, of course, is the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa. Can you go over quickly the whole FLG collection that The Times has done, which you both participated in and were principal writers of?

Nicole: Yeah, sure. I can run through just a summary of all the pieces that we’ve done this year. So, the first major one we did was looking at the actual working conditions inside Shen Yun. Many of their dancers and musicians are young people. Some have been as young as 13, 14 years old, and that first piece was just looking at the environment that they came up in, right?

Kaiser: Right.

Nicole: So, after we published that piece and started asking questions about it, the New York State Labor Department opened an inquiry into their labor practices. So, once we finished that piece, we wanted to look at how they finance themselves and also to look at their relationship with the Epoch Times. So, the pieces in December were focusing on just how they have stockpiled wealth at the pace that they have. And the Epoch Times piece was focused on how this newspaper has been this incredible publicity machine for this dance group, and how the paper’s ties to Falun Gong are much deeper than have been previously disclosed.