The Dark Entertainment Industry (Part I): The Trainee
Yu told me that, as far as he knows, the entire entertainment industry is tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist regime. Every entertainment company, regardless of which one, is directly managed by the CCP's hidden hand. Behind the glamour lies a bottomless darkness.
With the tacit approval of the CCP government, large numbers of children go missing across China. Ironically, every corner of the country — cities and rural areas alike — is blanketed with surveillance cameras at the government's mandate, yet the police cannot trace a single missing child.
These children are held in scattered, obscure locations that no one would think to look — places like caves in the mountains.
Workers administer an injection, and the children stop crying. They become dull and unresponsive, after which their blood is drawn.
Once this preparatory process is complete, the children are sorted and taken away. Those with strong physiques, for example, are sent to Shaolin Temple or martial arts training schools (such as Qiufeng). Those who are good-looking are sent to entertainment companies (such as Yu himself, and Qiao Renliang).
Yu's secondary soul only has knowledge of what happens within the entertainment companies, so for the time being he cannot provide information about where the other children end up.
The children sent to entertainment companies are gathered in one place for the next round of examination and selection. The ones chosen are all extremely beautiful — fair-skinned, with large bright eyes, rosy lips, straight white teeth, well-proportioned limbs, and no large scars on their faces or bodies.
Yu said these beautiful children, roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen, had blank expressions. They simply sat huddled together in silence. Some had clusters of tiny needle marks on their arms or the backs of their hands — whether from injections of drugs or from blood draws, it was unclear. They looked completely listless, like empty shells, their eyes hollow, as if their souls had been extracted from their bodies.
Soon, trainers from the talent agencies would inspect and sort these children into groups — singing, music, dance, acting, and so on. Once the groups were set, the trainers would take the children away to separate rooms.
The training phase was nothing short of a living hell: mental torment, psychological abuse, and physical harm. The children suffered endlessly, training from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day.
Some of these children had attended school before; others had not. But before entering the entertainment industry, they were required to have basic general knowledge and education in order to debut. So the entertainment companies arranged an overwhelming number of courses for these trainees, force-feeding information into their minds. After studying, they had to take exams — and poor results meant beatings.
Some trainees couldn't hold up. These children had been confined in one place since early childhood and were physically weak to begin with. The high-intensity training pushed them to the brink, both mentally and physically. But the trainers had no intention of slowing down for them.
They fed these struggling trainees a type of stimulant drug, regardless of whether their bodies could handle it or whether they had any allergic reactions.
Some children collapsed from allergic reactions after taking the medication. According to staff, some children simply turned cyanotic and died. The company didn't treat them as human beings — if one died, the money spent on them was written off as a loss, and the company would simply go recruit new trainees.
These trainees were purchased from human traffickers by the entertainment companies. They were valuable commodities. In the eyes of the company and its staff, they were merchandise — not human beings with rights.
Among the courses offered was martial arts. However, the martial arts instructors only taught the students theoretical concepts and flashy, superficial moves — never real combat techniques or sparring.
There were two reasons for this. First, these beautiful children were the company's valuable property; if they were injured, the cost would be too great. Second, if the children were actually taught real martial arts, given how they had been mistreated, wouldn't they band together, revolt, and escape?
After studying and training from dawn to night, the children returned to their dormitories exhausted. The dorms housed twelve to a room in bunk beds. The conditions and facilities were poor — the bed frames creaked whenever someone lay down or turned over. The upper bunks had no guardrails to prevent falls, and children frequently fell and were injured while sleeping.
Behind the classroom was a hidden room connected to the classroom itself, separated by a mirror — a two-way mirror. From inside the classroom, you couldn't see into the hidden room, but from the hidden room, you could see the classroom clearly.
During regular training sessions, the entertainment company would arrange for high-ranking officials, powerful elites, or businessmen seeking to offer bribes to watch from this hidden room. The purpose was not to observe the children's progress, but to select bed companions. They jokingly called it "choosing a consort" — and those so-called "consorts" included not only girls, but boys as well.
Once selected, the children would be pulled out of class, washed, groomed, and dressed up, then brought to a lavish banquet hall. There, they sat beside the officials or businessmen who had chosen them, pouring drinks and serving them. After the feast, each child was taken to a hotel room, where terrible things were done to them. Some children lost their lives as a result.
If a child refused to comply — in other words, a child who was still somewhat clear-headed — they would be beaten by the company's accompanying bodyguards and then thrown into the hotel room anyway. There was no mercy.
The next day, the trainees would return bearing wounds and bruises. These abusers were both cruel and brutal. And some children never came back at all.
The entertainment companies treated these innocent children like disposable tools, sending them off to bribe or entertain important figures. When a child died or was left broken, the company simply went back to the traffickers and bought more.
The trainees' only hope was to debut and quickly make a name for themselves. With a fanbase to protect them, perhaps the entertainment company wouldn't dare treat them that way anymore. That was exactly what Yu was thinking at the time.
But they were wrong. For the rest of their lives, they would never escape the entertainment company's grip.
Yu said that the entertainment companies also had other trainees, kept far apart from these suffering children.
These other trainees were the children of high-ranking officials or came from privileged and powerful families. They received proper, healthy training and education. These trainees had no idea that somewhere within the same company, a large group of wretched children were being held captive.
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