He Did One Thing in 2001. China Has Been Coming After Him Ever Since.

I remember the policeman who beat me, the look in his eyes was, I hate the fact that you're not Chinese and I can't kill you right now. I hate the fact that you have a foreign passport. 27 hours later, we were kicked out of China and told not to come back. We were handed the China Daily, and it said, following practice from around the world, we're sent here by anti-China foreign forces like the CIA. They were treated really well, put up in a hotel, given food, and sent back home. And I'm sitting there, my jaw is dislocated from the beating. I cannot speak. The person next to me has two broken fingers and broken ribs and a broken nose. He was arrested and beat by Chinese police for meditating in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. And nearly two decades later, he's still documenting how far the Chinese Communist Party will go to silence a performing arts company. They were joined by Li Shailesh, the longtime emcee of Shen Yun Performing Arts, who has introduced audiences to classical Chinese dance and music at nearly 2,000 performances worldwide. In this episode, we'll explore what is documented in over 200 cases of attempted sabotage against the company, its testimony before Congress on transnational repression, and what nearly 20 years on this stage has taught him about resilience. This is The Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Li Shailesh, welcome to The Area Innovators. Thank you. Well, great to have you here. So you're kind of known for being the emcee for Shen Yun Performing Arts for the last 20 years. And that's, of course, the world's premier classical Chinese dance company. Now, before that, you did other things. And I want to start with, how did you get your passion for learning Chinese? You grew up between US and Israel, and then you went to school at Pomona College. And all of a sudden, you start speaking Chinese. What's the story behind that? So, yeah. So you gotta go back, actually, to my baseball playing days for this story. I grew up going back and forth between the United States and Israel. I actually spent quite a bit of time here in the Bay Area. I've been a Giants fan since 1987. I was here for the Battle of the Bay. I remember where I was for the earthquake. And you get a lot of resilience being a Giants fan over the years, and it pays off eventually. But I fell in love with baseball here because of the Giants. And when we went back to Israel, I started playing baseball very seriously and became the starting pitcher for the Israeli national baseball team, which sounds like a lot, but we were not very good. But we would have these competitions in Europe every year, these international championships. And my last one, my senior year of high school, I was tournament MVP, and I was being scouted by the Braves. And I really wanted to be a professional baseball player. And at the time, this is mid-90s. It's always something new to learn about. But yeah, go ahead. Well, it was a big part of my life, about 10 years. And I think it's a very common dream for a lot of boys. But it was weird in Israel to be the guy who's walking in baseball uniform and carrying a bat. Nobody knew what it was. And at the time, there wasn't a whole lot about the mental side of baseball. You had a lot of physical training, and I was following Nolan Ryan's pitcher's Bible and all these things and working out. But when you hear the top performers in any sport, Michael Jordan's Tiger Woods, the Greg Maddox's of the world, they talk about the mental side being so important. Yogi Berra famously said, the baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical. But there was no training. There were a few books, just a couple of books about it. Now, every sports team, even at the collegiate level, has a mental performance coach, and everybody knows about visualization and guided imagery and meditation. But it was very new at the time. And that took me into the world of Eastern philosophy and spirituality. And first, I started with a Zen teacher in Israel who was training some of the Olympic athletes and practicing meditation. And I would actually go before a game, before a baseball game, and I would meditate on the side of the field. And I would visualize what would happen in the game, and I would create these images. And I remember one time we were playing against Poland in Italy, and before the game, I visualized, okay, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, full count, what pitch I'm gonna throw. And I got to the ninth inning, I was still pitching, and that situation came up, was bases loaded, I had a full count, and I, at that moment, recalled how I'd imagined this before and what pitch I was gonna throw and how he was gonna strike out. And it was like, if you're watching a movie, an action movie that maybe you've seen before and you're watching it a second time, in the moment, you have this adrenaline rush and the excitement and the thrill of the expectation of what's gonna happen, but you have this inner peace because you know the outcome. That was the feeling I had on the mound. It was like, it was the moment and all of the win or lose is hanging in the balance, but I knew what the outcome was, because I'd seen it and I'd prepared it before. And I threw that pitch and he struck out and we won the game and the whole thing. And then, I was 18 and I started thinking, wow, if our mind and our perception of reality can affect baseball to this degree, what about the rest of our life? What about the big questions? What about our health and longevity, immortality? What about the meaning of life? What about world peace? I was thinking these other bigger questions and that took me even further down this path, along with some health issues I was dealing with, back injury, I started doing all kinds of Tai Chi and yoga and eventually, I went to, in Israel, in Tel Aviv, World Tai Chi Day in a park. And they had all these different Tai Chi practices, doing different martial arts and different kinds of Qi Gong and they were very pretty looking and the movements looked really nice and graceful, but I felt like there was something missing. It was just the form. They were almost showing off how beautiful their movements were and I wasn't getting the spiritual substance, which is what I was looking for. And there was a table on the side, introducing this meditation practice from China called Falun Gong or Falun Dafa. And I walked up and I said, hey, what is this? They said, well, it's a mind-body practice. I said, that's perfect, because I've been doing Zen for the mind and Tai Chi for the body. This is one system and it's free. So, I picked up the exercises with them. I later ended up getting a book and learned about the practice and I just kind of dove into it and it actually took me another year after that to really commit myself to this practice and say, this is the practice I'm gonna do, the spiritual practice that I'm gonna do. And this was from China and I didn't know much about China or Chinese history at the time. This is around the year 2000, but they told me it was being persecuted in China. I remember the only thing I thought was, oh, if it's being persecuted by Chinese Communist Party, it must be pretty powerful for them to actually ban it. And then when I started practicing, by now I'd moved to the Bay Area. I'd stopped playing baseball because I was just kind of injured a lot, had arm injuries and back injuries. And then I said, well, this is the practice I wanna do. And so, I found another person who was practicing Falun Gong here, it was actually in Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, and joined the little practice. Which makes you local, definitely, for the Bay Area. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in San Rafael and Rohnert Park in many ways, this is what I consider home for me in the United States. So, it's been nice just to visit here again. And so, I started practicing, then I really learned about the persecution in China and how people who were just meditating in a park like myself were being rounded up and thrown into labor camps and beaten to death. And that episode relates to what I was gonna ask you next, about 2001, you went to Beijing, to Tiananmen Square. Right, so then, this ties into what your question about learning Chinese was, it was all around the same time. So, because I started practicing Falun Gong, I said, well, this practice is from China, most people who practice it here, even in California, are ethnic Chinese, a lot of them don't speak English. Why don't I learn a language? I can study the teachings in their original language, I can communicate with the other Falun Gong practitioners, I can maybe talk to Chinese people and talk to them about the persecution. So then, I started studying at Pomona College in California, in Southern California, in Claremont. And I said, well, I'll learn Chinese. And I learned Chinese and majored in Chinese history with a minor in Chinese and fell in love with the language. It was such a beautiful language. And I remember class was at 8 a.m. And all the students would show up all groggy from the night before, and I was like, let's go, Chinese, let's go. And I would just memorize the cards. This was pre-smartphone, so it was all flashcards, handwritten, I'd write the character on one side and the meaning and the pronunciation on the other side, I'd lay them out on the floor and move them like a battlefield, memorizing all of them. I just loved the language. And then one day, somebody came to the school and talked about study abroad in China. And it was the Avery program. And I knew that as somebody who practiced Falun Gong, I couldn't do that without really risking my life. I went there, I'd be arrested, and I would not be able to survive there very long and probably end up getting kicked out. But I put a thought in my mind of, maybe I should go to China and do something about the persecution, something small, whatever, what could I do? Because at the time, in context, hundreds of thousands, later millions of people, ordinary people just like myself in China were being thrown into labor camps, beaten to death. We're getting daily reports of people tortured to death. And so we did what we could outside. I would get petition signatures. I'd send them to my congressman. Hey, please raise this in Congress. Let's have a resolution about this. We'd go do a sit-in in front of the consulate and meditate there and just show them that we haven't forgotten about what's happening in China. We'd have press conferences and nobody would show up. And we'd do all these things. And I felt, is there more that I could do? And that presentation at my school about study abroad in China put that thought in my mind. And I shared it with another Falun Gong practitioner from the Bay Area named Adam. And he said, it's funny you mentioned this idea because I know a few other people who want to go to China from Sweden and a few others from Germany, and we've been talking. And so we came together and we ended up being 35 people from 12 countries, most of whom I hadn't met before. And we met on Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of China. You set up a time and date. 2 p.m., November 20th, 2001, right in front of the flagpole at the center of Tiananmen Square. Flew there a couple of days early. And it's pretty discreet, right? So you wouldn't get the Chinese police to follow you. So we didn't know if we were blacklisted or not. So I remember when I went to the Chinese consulate to get my visa, I grew a beard and I wore a baseball hat. I tried to disguise myself because I'd been outside the consulate protesting. They wanted to recognize me. So I went in and got my visa. We went as tourists, I went with a friend. And we went to Forbidden City, went to the Great Wall just for tourists. And then 2 p.m., we walked onto Tiananmen Square. And this was the place where Mao Zedong had his big rallies during the Cultural Revolution. It was a place where the massacre on June 4th, 1989 began. Tiananmen and the surrounding streets. And when I walked up there, I remember the sky was just so blue and open. It was like the whole world was watching. It was like, I felt like the universe was watching this moment. Tiananmen is important for Falun Gong practitioners because when the persecution started, they thought it was a big misunderstanding. They didn't know that much about the Communist Party. Some were Communist Party members, some were officials. Falun Gong was so loved in China. Think about, this is a society that went through the Cultural Revolution, had believed in Mao, believed in Communism, and then just saw the brutality of it and lost 80 million people because of the campaigns of the Communist Party. And so their complete disillusion with the regime. And then they go through Tiananmen Square Massacre, and they're just fed up with the regime. And they just wanna be left alone to live their life, to care of their family, make some money, leave me alone with any ideology. And then in 1992, Falun Gong is introduced to the public. This is at the end of an era where there were many people practicing Qigong, like I was, Tai Chi, right? 100 million people would go to the parks in the morning in China and practice slow-moving exercise for health and fitness. But a lot of them, you started seeing phenomena of sham Qigong masters reusing this for money and pretending to have all kinds of abilities and all kinds of phenomena. And at the end of this, in 1992, a man by the name of Li Hongzhi, Master Li, from Northeastern China, he introduces Falun Gong. And he says, this is a practice that's been around for a while. It's been passed down from master to disciple for generations. It wasn't suited for public teaching, but he modified it to make it available to the public, and it's always gonna be free. And it's got five simple exercises, including meditation, and the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. And this was 1992. This is 1992, and in the early 90s, he goes around China, gives about 50 lectures, nine-day seminars all over China. He's invited by the governments. He's invited by Qigong associations. He's invited to go all over China. He's getting awards from the Chinese government. And very quickly, the practice spreads to the point that there's 70 to 100 million people by 1999 practicing Falun Gong. And this is according to Chinese government estimates. And there are features on Chinese state-run television saying how wonderful this is and how people's health is improving, factory workers are working better, families are harmonious. Government officials, military officials are talking about how wonderful this is, giving it awards. They're participating in all these exhibits and parades. And at some point during this time, the late 90s, the head of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin at the time, starts being suspicious and afraid of this massive group of people who have their own beliefs. And he tries to come up with some reason to ban it. And they do kind of an investigation, a secret investigation, and they try to find a reason. They find nothing. And they conclude that the report says it's got no harm and is only beneficial to people. And in spite of the better advice of a lot of the standing members of the Politburo and other Communist Party leaders, he decides to ban Falun Gong. And overnight, July 20th, 1999, 100 million Chinese people and their family are turned into enemies of the state. And they have vans driving across the streets in China with loudspeakers 24-7 on the TV and radio is just how evil Falun Gong is. It needs to be banned according to law. And anybody who practices it is gonna be arrested as an anti-China foreign force. And then in some way, it's similar to the previous movements that the Chinese government. Yes, because people immediately, it brings back to mind the Cultural Revolution, where one day you're targeted, and now you're targeted. If you have foreign connections, if you have an education, you play classical music, you have a religious belief, if you're a Christian, you're a Buddhist, you're targeted. Right, and it changes all the time. And so your people just become very afraid. And the people who saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre, who saw the Cultural Revolution, they just said, just forget this Falun Gong thing, just go hide. But the reality was that tens of millions of people had benefited from the practice. They had better health. They had a sense of purpose in life. They wanted to become better people, become more moral people. And they were thinking, well, truth, compassion, forbearance, that's not wrong. Why are you telling us that we're evil? And this must be some misunderstanding. So they go to the petitions office. This is the way the Chinese government has for people to complain about government policy. They write letters to the petitions office. Guess what, they show up, they're arrested. Then their family come. Hey, you arrested my relative. They're arrested. Sent into these massive stadiums. This is really something we hadn't seen since Nazi Germany. Burning books by the pile. This is an image that really stood out to me. And sending- And this was documented in Western media, at least to some degree. But the Western press had no idea what was going on. They were caught off guard. It was like, Falun Gong, what is this? And all they had was the propaganda from the Chinese government. Because they hadn't paid attention to this. Nobody was reporting on it. And all of a sudden, the Chinese Communist Party says, okay, we're banning Falun Gong. This is an evil organization. They're out to overthrow the government. They say all these things about Master Li, who by now is living in New York. And the Western press just parroted a lot of that stuff. They didn't know what to make of it. And for the first couple of years, Falun Gong practitioners would go to the petition office, and then when that failed, they would go to Tiananmen Square. And they would travel from all over China to hold a banner that says, truth, compassion, forbearance. Or Falun Dafa, Falun Gong is good. Don't persecute us. That's all. On Tiananmen Square. And they'd hide it in their jacket. They'd bring it out. And police would pounce on them and beat them. And the media did cover this. Western media did cover a lot of this. And you see these people just holding a banner and police beating them to the ground, putting them in a van, never to be seen again. And so, back to me in Southern California, I thought, what if I went to Tiananmen Square? And that's what we talked about. So we went and we met 2 p.m., November 20th, 2001. 35 people who never met each other for the most part. And we just posed for a group photo. And then we took off our shoes and we folded our feet the way you would when you meditate. And we had this massive banner that was made right here in the Bay Area that had truth, compassion, forbearance in Chinese and English. That's it. And within 30 seconds, we were surrounded by police vans. They grabbed us, threw us into vans, beat us up, took us to detention, beat us up there again. I remember the policeman who beat me. The look in his eyes was, I hate the fact that you're not Chinese and I can't kill you right now. I hate the fact that you have a foreign passport. And it was just like, there's something about that look. Did he actually say that? No, but that was what he was telling me with his eyes, was I hate that I can't kill you right now. Because you've pissed us off. And he actually had to be separated later because he was beating up people. And so, of course, we were from 12 countries. We had all our embassies were calling, hey, where are our people, release them. This was, we had two people who were there just to film it because we were afraid, my parents were afraid, because I told them that I was going. They were afraid they were gonna plant drugs in our bags and execute us or something like that. And so we wanted to make sure we had documentation. So we had two people who wanted to be part of it. And we said, can you just film it? And they had a camera in their backpack. You can still find this footage now. If you look up Falun Gong practitioners from America or other countries on Tiananmen Square, you can see this. And he's filming us and he turns around because police are coming, comes back and films us some more. So we had video. And this was sent to Western Press. And so they had it and they knew what we were doing. And so 27 hours later, we were kicked out of China and told not to come back. And I remember when I was walked out onto the plane, the policeman went onto the airplane with me and stood there by my seat until the doors were about to close and he left. And we were handed the China Daily, which is the English language propaganda newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. And they had an article there about us. And it said- That fast? Yes, the next morning, right? They said, a day and a half later, they said, Falun Gong practitioners from around the world were sent here by anti-China foreign forces like the CIA. They were treated really well, put up in a hotel, given food and sent back home. And I'm sitting there. My jaw is dislocated from the beating. I cannot speak. The person next to me has two broken fingers and broken ribs and a broken nose. And just go down the line, these other people, beaten up and I thought, wow, it is so easy to lie to everybody when you control the media. And that was my first experience with how propaganda works. I'm sitting here, I don't have shoes, they took my shoes. And oh, we were treated well, put in a hotel and sent back home. And I've been blacklisted in China ever since. So from then on, I continued my Chinese education. Really wanted to be somebody who focuses on human rights and the story, getting the story out, telling people what's happening, because it's still ongoing today. There's another episode along these lines. A few years later, you were in Paris. And I believe you were on your way to Iceland. I wasn't supposed to stay in Paris. We ended up staying there. This is probably one of the trips where you go to Paris without seeing anything. Yes, yeah, that does happen. But what happened was that you were in line to get your boarding pass for Iceland. And then they wouldn't give it to you, right? And then you started a hunger strike on the spot in the terminal. Tell us, first of all, why were you going to Iceland and what happened there? Yeah, I almost never think about this story. This is 2002, June. So Jiang Zemin, who started the persecution, was about to leave power officially. Jiang actually maintained power for many years later, but officially he was stepping down. And so Jiang went on this kind of world tour to maybe establish more relations or whatever. And wherever Jiang and his delegation went, we would go and we would show that we have not forgotten about the human rights atrocities in China. And there were other groups too, free Tibet people, democracy people, but Falun Gong practitioners were by far the largest and the quietest, like who just meditate or just have these banners, the same ones that you would see on Tiananmen Square, stop the persecution. So we went to Houston, we went to St. Petersburg, and one place we wanted to go to was Iceland. And I was a college student. This was the summer, I had time. So I borrowed some money and I flew to Iceland. But we were supposed to transfer in Charles de Gaulle in Paris. And we get to the counter to check in to Iceland Air, which is, at least at the time, was the only airline that would fly to Iceland. So it had a monopoly on who comes and goes to Iceland. Iceland, I believe, is the longest continuous democracy in the world. I think like 600, 700 years. Look this up, of democratic history. Very proud of it. And yet, when Zhang's delegation went there, they gave the Icelandic government a list of people they did not want in Iceland during their visit. And they gave them a blacklist. And Falun Gong practitioners traveling legally to Iceland to enjoy the democracy and the freedom of speech that Iceland provides were blocked all over the world. And there was somebody from the Icelandic embassy there. It might have been the ambassador. I don't know who it was, who came in person to the airport to apologize. He said, we're really sorry, but you cannot go. And I said, well, okay. Well, then we'll protest here. We're going on hunger strike. And we ended up being on hunger strike for three days and three nights. No food, no water. This was early intermittent fasting, I guess. And in the airport. And what happened was in Iceland, the Icelandic people stood up. And they went to the streets and they put duct tape, black duct tape on their mouth. And they took a major ad in the newspaper saying, sorry to the Falun Gong practitioners. And these were members of parliament and the top artists and musicians, celebrities signed off on this. And they represent. So they knew, they found out what was happening. They found out, yeah, it was all over the press. And they said, well, if you're gonna stop these people from protesting, we who knew nothing about this will protest for them. And eventually we were allowed into Iceland just at the very end of the delegation was about to leave. And this was kind of the first experience that I had with transnational repression. What we now call transnational repression. We didn't know what it was called at the time. But that's basically the regime. And not only China, the Communist Party does it, but other regimes do this too. But by far the CCP is the most notorious and uses this the most. Basically exports its oppressive practices into other countries. And is able to manipulate them in order to control the narratives outside of China. That was that story in Iceland, 2002, Reykjavik. Now moving forward a few years, you found out about Shen Yun. Shen Yun, again, the world's leading classical Chinese dance company. And you became the emcee in 2006. Now that's 20 years. So you've been, what, 2,000 shows? Just about 2,000 shows, yeah. Give us a sense of what it's like to go out there every, that's like two per week on the average, or, well, no, I don't know. It's a lot more. It's a lot. We do anywhere from, you know, some weeks we'll only have three, four shows. Other weeks we may have eight or nine. Yeah. But you've been doing it for 20 years. So what is it like to go out there so many times and what does it feel like to talk to the audience, to introduce the show to the audience? The human connection that you get when you're on stage, you hear stand-up comedians talk about this. And you have what feels like a heart-to-heart connection with 2,000 people. And you can say something and make them laugh and feel the whole audience just laugh at that moment. Or it might be something where they go, oh, you have this kind of gasp of understanding something. I mean, there's nothing like it. I mean, we're now in the age of AI and everything. I think we're even more going to appreciate the real human performance of seeing a live human on stage interacting. In that moment, it's not a movie. Anything could happen. There's that tension of, is this person going to forget what they want to say? Are they going to just trip and fall? Like what could possibly, is there going to be a power outage? What's going to happen, right? You have this tension. And every show is different because it's live, it's real. And it's the same with the dancers. So the way the show for Shen Yun is set up is it's about two hours and it's about 20 short pieces that make up the show. And it moves really fast because every piece is three to seven minutes long. And you go from the origin story of Chinese civilization coming down from the heavens and reincarnating on earth to a beautiful classical Chinese dance to water sleeves in the palace and then stories of the monkey king. And it just goes on like this. And of those 20 pieces, we also have a story about the persecution of Falun Gong and what's happening in China today. It's a small part of the show, but it's one that's really memorable for people. And because each of these stories has its own background, its own dynasty, its own region, its own literary reference or heroes from history, you need kind of a tour guide. And that's what I do as an emcee. I come on stage with a lady. She speaks Chinese, I speak English. Sometimes for fun, we'll switch, but mostly it's that way. And we just introduce the piece and we say, hey, there's this classic novel called Journey to the West. And it's got this colorful character called the Monkey King and he's got superpowers. And let's see what happens. You just introduce the piece and sometimes crack a joke. Sometimes you introduce the orchestra and interact with the audience, but mostly we're just there to show, just give a bit of background and get out of the way so that the dancers and the orchestra and the backdrop and the costumes can do the work. And yeah, I've been with Shaven since year one when we were just, mostly the company was started by volunteers. It was people from all over the world who had this shared wish, it's kind of a dual wish, kind of like a dual mission that we had. One was to, this is in the context of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China to raise awareness of that. This is a story, it's not being covered by the Western press. It's being covered up in many ways. Let's take the story and present it on stage all over the world and let people see not just the brutality of the persecution, but the courage and peaceful spirit of the people resisting it in China on a daily basis. And at the same time, there was this world-class performers being honed and trained. Yes, and so that was the other part of the mission was let's bring back traditional Chinese culture because every year the Chinese embassies and consulates would have these New Year performances and they were all red, like literally red, Communist Party blood red, how wonderful things are in China, how great the Communist Party is, how wonderful Mao Zedong was, all this stuff. And my Chinese friends were saying, this is not our culture. This is not Chinese New Year celebration. What is this stuff? This is just propaganda. Let's create our own show. And before Shen Yun was started, we had some early iterations of that that were just Chinese New Year celebrations. A big one that I did was in 2006 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, 7,000 people in the audience. It was just a celebration of Chinese culture and we even had ballet and other things in there too. And then when Shen Yun was established, these artists who really, some of the elite Chinese artists from around the world said, let's do this for real. Let's bring this production together and led by artistic director, DF, let's actually use classical Chinese dance as the main art form and tell people, because people don't know what classical Chinese dance is. You know, is this Chinese ballet? Is this Peking opera? No, no, no. This is a whole other dance system with thousands of years of history that grew in parallel to Chinese martial arts and embodies and preserves so many of the aesthetics and values and ideals of Chinese culture. So through this, you can tell the stories. You can bring any character to any moment from Chinese history to life. And so you have that, then you have an orchestra that combines both classical, Western and Chinese instruments like no other orchestra has done. It's the first one in the world to have done this as permanent members of the orchestra. And we have animated backdrops and authentic costumes. And so people see the show and the curtain comes up and you're instantly transported to another time, another place, the world of classical Chinese civilization. Might be the Tang Dynasty palace from the 7th century. Might be Qing Dynasty forbidden city. It might be the battlefields of the Song Dynasty, heroes and mythical creatures and all these different things. And what we discovered, which I didn't know when I started this, I thought this was gonna be like a cultural exchange. People are gonna learn about China, learn about Chinese history. I certainly learned a lot watching it. But what I realized was the ideals and the values that we're showing in the production, loyalty, integrity, courage, faith, humility, right? These are the ideals of Chinese civilization, but they're ideals of any traditional culture around the world, right? Jewish, right? Italian. It doesn't matter what it is. These are your traditional ideals. And people connect with that. And so the show resonates with people wherever we are, Japan, Paris, Alabama, San Francisco, certainly, in a way that I didn't expect. People leave the show, and the things that audience members say, I found new meaning in life. I found a hope for the future. I was expecting people to say stuff like that. And I think that's because Shen Yu is trying to bring something that's so good and positive and uplifting and full of hope. We take even stories that maybe on the surface you think are tragic, but you actually give people a sense of hope and what's right and faith in higher powers. We talked to some of the performers and how they have to learn the character. They have to study the character before they play it. And I think even for the audience, they are able to learn a little bit about the different characters, the generals, the emperors. How do you feel about that? Did you study them also or through the performance you've seen so many times, do you get different understandings of their characters and performance? So some of the things I remember from my studies of Chinese history and my own amateurish interest in it over the years, but every year we have a new production. So now we are in the summer where we're starting to see the new dances come out. So what I do is I sit down with the choreographer and I have a conversation with them. I say, what are you trying to express here? Tell me more about this. And I get all the information from them and what they're trying to convey, the ideals they're trying to portray, the virtues. And then I do my own research. I do my own reading about it. I learn as much as I can about it. And then I sit in the audience and I watch the rehearsal and I think, with all that I know about this, if I'm an audience member who knows nothing about Chinese culture, what am I gonna get confused about? What do I need to know to understand the piece of what's conveyed? And then you come in to explain it. And then I sit down and I, not just me, but the other MCs as well, we sit down together and we write this from the perspective of, what do audience members need to know to understand and appreciate this dance? And kind of fill in the gaps for them. Because Chinese people, give them a story of, let's say, Mulan, right? They know the poem of Mulan. You tell them a story about U.F.A., they know the story of U.F.A. You don't need to say a whole lot. You can just go, hey, here's a story of U.F.A., enjoy. And you walk off. And if you're not a Chinese person, who is U.F.A.? What are we talking about? Song dynasty, what's a Song dynasty? When was that? Who are the Jurchen? What are we talking about over here? So you gotta give all that. And so that's why you can come to the show and not know anything about Chinese culture and enjoy it. Because we just fill in the gaps. Then you have programs that you can read also. But that's how I approach it. And I learn a lot over the years, having done 20 seasons of this now with the new stories every season. And also you see different performers because we have eight companies that do this. And you see each company, how they, different performers, interpret the characters differently. The show is the same across eight companies, but these are, again, these are not bots. These are humans. And they have their own emotions, their own background, their own experience, life experiences, their own take on things. And so you see a group dance. And if you look from far away, everything is so beautifully synchronized. And they work really hard to do it that way. But if you're sitting up close, you see the smile's a little different. This person's got this kind of smile. That person's got that kind of smile. You really see the personality of the dancers come out. And in our name, Shen Yun, right? The Shen is like divine or spiritual or godly. That's what the Shen. And Yun means the inner feeling. And so together we can translate as the beauty of divine beings dancing as the name Shen Yun. But the Yun itself is a really interesting word in Chinese. There's another term, which is very similar to our company name, called Shen Yun. So it's not Shen Yun, but Shen Yun, which has a very, very slight difference. It's very confusing. But the Yun itself is the feeling that comes out through movement. And every person's Yun, every character's Yun is different. The Yun of a gentleman or of a warrior is gonna be different. The Yun of a palace maiden compared to the Yun of an empress is gonna be different. And every dancer's Yun is different. And how they do a simple movement is gonna be different. It's gonna carry their own personality, their own traits, what they've been through in life, their own view of the world is gonna come out in every little gesture. And that's why classical Chinese dance is so expressive that through these stories and through the legends, you can express so much that you almost don't need the emcees to explain anything because you see in dance and music are universal languages. Tell us a bit, how is Shen Yun innovative in any way? It's obviously bringing the tradition and it's respecting the tradition from before. But the show itself, does it innovate or is there innovation involved in any way? So Shen Yun is innovative in that what we're doing is trying to bring what's the most traditional and beautiful onto the modern stage with the modern technology, with the modern audience and mindset that people have. So classical Chinese dance has been around for thousands of years, but there's no other company in the world that brought classical Chinese dance to the stage and made it a household name. You have a lot of talented dancers who can do classical Chinese dance, but first of all, a lot of them are in China and they are very limited in what they can express. So we have people in our company who left China specifically to join Shen Yun so they can be free to express what they want and the traditions and the stories that they're not allowed to perform in China. But also a lot of the performing arts company in China, they somewhat feared that people in the West will not understand classical Chinese dance, so they mix it with ballet, they mix it with modern dance, and you're watching, you don't really know what you're seeing anymore. Shen Yun says, no, let's clean all that up. This is classical Chinese dance. We also have ethnic Mongolian dance, Tibetan dance, Yi ethnic dances. We have folk dances like the Younger, but those are specific moments like when we say very clearly, this is an ethnic dance now, it's different. But classical Chinese dance, which is the majority, is traditional, but it's an innovation that Shen Yun brought to the stage. The orchestra. Many people have tried and failed to combine classical Western symphonic instruments that we all know, the violin, the trumpet, and so on, with the pipa or the erhu or Chinese percussion instruments because they're so different and the volume is different, the timbre is different, the harmonics, everything about it is different. But the composers of Shen Yun and what DF has guided them as artistic director to do is find a way where the melody is played by the Chinese instruments and the orchestra has the power of the Western orchestra and it's beautiful melodic arrangements and is really able to harmonize that. The perfect harmony of East and West was our tagline for this, that you actually can perform the symphony of Shen Yun on stage. We've done this at Carnegie Hall, just the music alone, until nobody else has been able to achieve this to bring the Chinese sound with the best of the West. And that's really, I think something that Shen Yun has been able to do is combine these forms. The animated backdrops are probably one of our biggest innovations and they're a big part of our show and a big surprise for people. I don't wanna talk about it too much in case some people are watching and are gonna see the show. But when the curtain rises, you're instantly transported to another land and the animated backdrops are a big part of the reason why. But not only that, you can be on the plains of Mongolian grasslands or you can be in the palace in ancient China, you can be in the heavens. But the performers on stage and this animated backdrop interact. The dancers can actually go on and off the screen. We have a patent for this. And you'll see this in the program as described. That's really innovative. And other people have tried to imitate it but they can't quite get it right because it looks like magic and it is very, very magical. But there are other elements too, small ones. I think, for example, when you see other performances, every department, like lighting and sound, they kind of are trying to be a performance within themselves. They're doing all these different lighting effects. In Shen Yun, everything is the most traditional possible and it's in service of the main thing, which is the dancers on stage. As an emcee, I'm not out there to show off my amazing emceeing. I'm there to introduce the dancers so they can perform and you can enjoy it. Orchestra is supporting, the conductor's looking at the dancers trying to get the movement just right and the timing just right. The backdrops, the lighting is very simple and beautiful and bright and clean and allows you to really focus on the main action. So it's very traditional stagecraft in that way in that everybody kind of checks their ego in service of the overall product. So you get one beautiful effect and that allows the sum of the parts to be much more greater than the whole, the whole to be much greater than the sum of the parts. Because it's this, what's innovative about Shen Yun is the return to the traditional way of doing sound engineering, the traditional way of doing lighting, the traditional way of dancing music. That's what's new, is that we're actually bringing in what's classical and timeless and putting it on today's contemporary stage. That's very interesting. Now I know one of the things you enjoy doing is during the break or maybe after the show, you like to go to the lobby and see the audience, maybe chat with them a little bit. Yeah. Tell us a bit about that. What is that like? What does it mean to you when you actually see them and you see them, you're happy? So as an emcee, I actually cannot see the audience from the stage. We have a spotlight in our face and I look out and you might think I'm looking at you and I'm trying my best but what I'm seeing is black and a couple of exit signs. That's it. And so you're talking to people, you're spending two hours engaging with them but you never really get to meet them or hear from them. You hear the applause, you hear their gasp but you're really talking to them. So sometimes we'll have maybe a VIP reception or maybe there's an interview in the lobby. Sometimes we'll have like mayors or congressmen giving awards to Shen Yun presenting a proclamation. We'll go meet them. So I'll take a couple of dancers, we'll go out together to the lobby and as I'm walking to meet these VIPs, I'm constantly being stopped by audience members. Oh, great show. I love it and I love that. Just talking to people, hearing their take because they'll say things I never thought of myself from my own perspective and you have people who are, oh, I'm deeply Christian and this show, I know it's not what you portrayed but it resonated with me. It gave me strength in my own spirituality. Stuff like that, I would not imagine people would have that take. So hearing from them directly and also in an environment where we've been attacked by Chinese Communist Party for years, ever since day one when we started. They've been trying to smear us. They've been trying to do disinformation campaigns and sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they get their narrative into Western press and social media and in that environment where we're being stigmatized and demonized, here in America, as an American company, Shen Yun is based in New York, it's nice to actually talk to people, let them see who we actually are and there's a documentary that's been done about it now. We're doing interviews, letting people see into our lives and it's not something you would think you would need to do as a performer. You let your art speak for yourself but right now, I think it's important for people to have a chance to judge for themselves who these people are and why we do what we do. Yeah, actually speaking of the documentary, just yesterday, we were at the red carpet ceremony and we had the screening of Unbroken in San Francisco. How significant do you think it is to have the screening here in San Francisco where there's a large Chinese community and many of them are very close to the Chinese government and to China? Yeah, so Unbroken, it's a documentary, it's called Unbroken, The Untold Story of Shen Yun. It came out last year. It came out in March, was produced last year and what it does is really takes a close look at how the CCP, through its operatives, through its Chinese embassy and consulates around the world, through its United Front organization, spy networks, disinformation, lawfare, cyber hacking, on and on, all these tactics, including violence, tire slashing and bomb threats is targeting a performing arts company in America and it's significant for many people around the world because this is not a problem that's isolated only to Shen Yun. Anybody that the CCP doesn't like, they can come after with this very same playbook that they've used against us and we've seen them come after other groups. We've seen them silence NBA stars and Hollywood actors and Hollywood films and make them censor themselves, book fairs, other human rights organizations, government officials around the world. They have their honeypot traps and they have their bribery and they have threats and they have, in some cases, violence. In California especially, there's such a long history of the Chinese American community, the Chinese diaspora here. It's so long and in many ways is a big part of the beauty of the diversity of our country and of California and the Bay Area in particular and you really can't separate talking about San Francisco and the Chinese community and at the same time, especially under the CCP, a lot of this started long before the CCP came to power. Under the CCP, when it comes to sensitive topics, you see the tentacles of Beijing reaching here into California and I remember when the persecution of Falun Gong first started, there was going to be a proclamation from Willie Brown from City Hall in San Francisco acknowledging Master Li and his practice of Falun Dafa and under pressure from the Chinese consulate, it was rescinded and Willie Brown would not talk to Falun Gong practitioners after that. I remember going to his office and his secretary said, he will not talk to Falun Gong practitioners. We've had government officials in California who've had spies working for them. We've had, even recently, the story from Southern California of a spy. Arcadia Mayer. Yeah, right, Annie Wong and then she's connected to one of the people in our film, John Chen, who was acting as an agent to try to sabotage Shen Yun and try to bribe an IRS official to revoke her non-profit status. It was caught in a sting operation behind bars and so this network, they target anybody at any time so when Xi Jinping comes to visit in 2023 for APEC, not only are the streets of San Francisco cleaned but also dozens and dozens of people are beaten up by thugs associated with the Chinese consulate associated with the United Front organizations to silence the protesters, to silence these voices, basically like it's China and here we are in San Francisco and keeping Falun Gong out of Chinese New Year parades, trying to cancel shows. This is something they do all the time, writing letters to San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and all the other theaters where we perform. We say, do not allow Shen Yun to perform there. Unfortunately, here in California and really in the United States, people have a spine and they say, no, this is America. You're not gonna tell us what you can and cannot watch but in other places around the world, South Korea, say, or former Soviet bloc countries that are more susceptible to corruption and pressure from China, they do sometimes cave into this pressure. So for San Francisco, we have such a robust spy network of Chinese operatives and you still see CCP flags flying over buildings in Chinatown and you have beatings on the streets of San Francisco of Falun Gong practitioners going back all the way to 2000. There was testimonies about this in Congress. My congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey, from the Marin County led a congressional hearing about this. The late and great Tom Lantos was a big part of speaking up about these issues. Chris Daly from San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. We had a lot of people stand up to this but it's gonna take more than that. We're gonna need more people because it is something that affects everybody's life and if you think about the issue of unrestricted warfare, I don't know if this is something you've talked about in your show but this is the strategy of the PRC, the CCP, to ultimately take over the world. It's laid out very clearly. They pretend to be, oh, you just want a multipolar hegemonic world where we can have superpowers working together for a beautiful future and green peace and all this stuff. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing, they're biding their time while weakening the United States and who they see as their arch rival. We may not think of ourselves as being at war with China, with the CCP but the CCP is at war with us. They've talked about this for decades and they have this book called Unrestricted Warfare where they talk about, well, we can't beat the US in a kinetic war. Not now at least but we can weaken them. We can cause division in society. We can inflame conflict. We can kill military-age men with fentanyl. We can do all these different things. We can make people dumb with TikTok while we have a different algorithm that strengthens people's STEM abilities in China. They do all these different things. There's so many issues and Shen Yun is maybe at the tip of the spear but it's a cultural way that we're trying to show what China was like before communism. It's right there on our billboards. We're not shy about this. China before communism and that allows people to envision a China without communism and also what it does is it shows people the difference between talking about China and Chinese people and the CCP. Our company is mostly made of ethnic Chinese people. They're from all over the world. Many of them are from California but they're ethnic Chinese. It would be ridiculous to say that I'm anti-China. Our performers, including myself, what we dream of is bringing this show back to China someday where we cannot perform now. We get emails from people in China all the time saying, when are you going to perform in China? We have people from China flying to other countries including here in San Francisco to see Shen Yun perform just for that. It's loved by people in China and what you realize is that the people of China and Americans actually have a common enemy and nobody suffered more at the hands of the CCP than the Chinese people. 60 to 80 million people murdered and people, even still today, persecute in many different ways or living in a very small, this little space of freedom that they can carve out for themselves and think that that's happiness. And so this is an issue that affects all of our lives and it's, I think as we're busy with our daily lives and with our own political issues here in our country, not that these are not important, but they're using that to kind of come in under the radar and weaken the country for their long-term objectives which are global dominance. And you can see this, it's all wide out there in the open in Chinese Communist Party documents. So in the Shen Yun performances, how do you balance art, spirituality and truth-telling about historical events without becoming political? Well, the performance itself is just kind of exploration of different aspects of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. So we really start with the origin legend of how Chinese civilization came to be, that it was divinely inspired, that it was different deities bringing down a culture to earth for the betterment of humankind and establishing the civilization. And it travels through different dynasties and different regions and different traditions. And as part of that story, we talk about what's happening in China today. And this kind of tension between the traditions of Chinese civilization, the spirituality of Chinese civilization with the persecution and the human rights issues at the hands of the CCP. Just by telling that alone, we're already being political in the mind of the Communist Party. Because we're taking an issue that they are trying to cover up, that they claim it does not even exist, that everything is perfect. And we put it on stage and we say, look at this, look at what's happening. They're beating up people for meditating in a park and look, they're not even being violent in response, but they have a firm belief and they have hope and look at this sense of courage that they have. And that to them is political. So however they wanna label it, it's fine. Telling this story is a big part of why Xi Jinping came to be because we're looking at millions of people being rounded up and sent to labor camps and prisons and being tortured to death and later being killed for their organs and the world just sitting and watching this. And so we said, well, we're gonna tell this story on stage. We'll do it at Lincoln Center, at Kennedy Center, at San Francisco Opera House. We're gonna do it in theaters all over the world in front of congressmen and VIPs from all walks of life. And so the CCP is very afraid of that. And so that's why they try everything they can to stop us. Now, how do you keep the show, not the show, but your presentation, how do you keep it fresh after so many years? How do you make it so it's exciting and it doesn't get in a mold that you're just gonna be doing it for the sake of doing it? I've seen this show so many times that I can tell you honestly, it doesn't get old. The music, when the gong is struck and the curtain rises at the beginning of the show, there's this energy of the performance of a live performance, the energy of attention from 2,000 people and the beauty of the costumes and the dance and the music. And we're all in it together. We're like a big family. We're all working to this cause together of reviving a culture and talking about these stories. That my attention is really on how do I make this the best experience for the audience possible? How do I open my heart and let my own stuff get out of the way so it doesn't block this flow that comes through me as a small part of the performance to communicate with the audience and help them have a great experience and understand everything? And to me, that never gets old because it's live theater and it's a new production every year. So we actually have a really nice balance to our lives in the sense that we travel from around Christmas till early May, four and a half months or so. We go maybe a hundred shows, maybe 20-something cities per company. Eight companies are doing this. So about a million audience members every year. And we're traveling around the world. So you get to see the world. I get to keep up with friends that I haven't seen in years, sometimes decades. And I see them in Australia. I've met more of my distant family members and their siblings sometimes. And then you come home. And you're home and you're home for, you have a break, you go travel, maybe take a vacation. And then you have six to seven months of preparing the new production. So just when you're at home with your wife and kids and you start wearing out your welcome as a dad, you hit the road. And then just when they start missing you a lot, you come back, right? So it's a really nice cycle. It's a new production every year. You sometimes have changes in personnel from company to company. So you get to work with different people. You get to room with different people, interact with different colleagues. And the audience is different because the, say, San Jose audience is different from the LA audience, which is different from the Birmingham, Alabama one, which is definitely different from the Tokyo one. The way they respond to things is different. How they express joy or laughter even is different. And Japanese people, when they hear a joke, they go, ooh. They like that, they cover their mouth. In the deep South, in the US, they're laughing at everything. It's so loud and a lot of fun. Certainly in Puerto Rico, that's the case. So it's very new that way. And I think also, I think for artists in general, especially for the dancers and musicians, but even as an MC, which is a small part, you feel like the limits to art are boundless. There's no limits to art. You can always find a higher realm. There's always a more pure state of mind you can bring to your performance. There's always a better way to really open your heart. And I think you're always striving, not just on the technical side, but on the mindset of it, which kind of comes full circle to me from how I started this journey, that you're always trying to find ways to improve and be more selfless. And that's really where, for me as a Falun Gong practitioner and for the other performers who are also Falun Gong practitioners, our spiritual practice is kind of combined with our work that way, because our practice is about really aligning yourself with these higher principles of truthfulness, being honest with everybody and yourself, being compassionate, being kind, being really selfless, and being resilient, having forbearance, having tolerance, being able to endure. And these are really simple-sounding principles, but to align your speech and your action, your thoughts with those, and everything you do is difficult. And so it's also a process of letting go of what's getting in the way. We call those attachments, letting go of those. And so as a performer, it's very easy. I'm in the spotlight. I got everybody's attention. I got the microphone. But actually it's about letting go of yourself and being there for other people. And that process is also part of our spiritual journey. And so from that perspective, it's always fresh. There's always more to learn about the universe and about our place in it and about these principles and how to reach a higher realm with them. And it's interesting when it's one person, but when you have a group of people and that's the company culture, when you have a conflict with somebody, it's not about, you might initially be like, why'd you do that? But then everybody actually goes and calms down and we do what we call looking inward, right? Looking inside, finding where we can improve instead of blaming other people. And very naturally, even sometimes without saying anything, the whole thing just dissolves because you thought about it and I thought about it and now we come together and the whole thing is gone because like, oh yeah, I should have done this better. Totally should not have done that. And then you improve that way. And that's the company culture. It's not that we don't have issues. Everybody has issues, but we try to take a spiritual perspective into how to improve ourselves within them. And you know, now in the age of AI, when there's entire symphonies, even ballet performances that are, they're done by AI or it's a mechanical sound. You know, I've seen people, I heard people walking out of concert halls because they don't like it the way, how horrible it is. Having a live performance is always gonna keep it fresh in that sense. Yeah, it's a live orchestra, which, you know, a lot of companies don't do anymore. Especially after COVID, a lot of companies cut back. And we have a live orchestra. The dancers are very much alive and humans. These are not robots. And so yeah, it's live, it's fresh. You feel the energy. There's something about that. I think, I don't know if science can prove yet exactly what the difference is when you're watching an AI made film, let's say, or a human made film. I think at some point they're gonna realize it's not the same. There's something in the energy. It's like if you write something yourself or you have ChatGPT write it. And I use ChatGPT a lot for research and things like that or other AI platforms. I'm not sponsored by ChatGPT here. But you know, there's, when you actually write something and somebody gave me something the other day because I sometimes edit things for our website. I'm like, I think this was ChatGPT written. It's missing soul. It doesn't have the human soul behind it. All the information is there. It's missing something. And I don't think that we quite know what it is right now. I think some people who are in the field, here we are in the Silicon Valley, there are gonna be people who disagree with me. That's okay. But I think as we go further, I think we will realize that there's something about humans doing things that is different. It's fundamentally, at its core, different. And we need that. And I think that's where live theater is not gonna go away like maybe some other industries are afraid. Now, Nilesh, I know you have a plane to catch in a short while. Last question, you've been also involved with the different transnational repression that happens, the threats against Shen Yun. What is your hope in the next few years to accomplish with the company? What is it that is gonna be a successful story for you in the next few years? Yes, I've documented, I think, over 200 cases at this point of transnational repression. I've testified about this in Congress. When we first started documenting it, we didn't know what it was called. We just called it interference by the Chinese Communist Party. Then it turns out there's a term that was actually coined, I think, in 2016 by, I think it was a sociologist. And now we're kind of like the, probably the most documented victim of transnational repression of any other group that I can think of, because we're everywhere with Shen Yun, and the CCP is trying to stop us everywhere. So we have all these cases. I think, single-handedly, you have over 200 cases. Yeah, and that's not the comprehensive. I didn't even, for example, one place gets dozens of bomb threats. I count that as one. And there's more, actually. The Falun Dafa Information Center did a study recently about Falun Gong practitioners in the United States and what they faced in terms of transnational repression, and there's a lot more there beyond what Shen Yun itself has faced. My hope, I think, is twofold, probably. First, I hope that this tide that we face of disinformation coming from Beijing, and you can see how an article in American media can be traced back to propaganda from a Chinese consulate, can be traced back to the Ministry of Information and Ministry of State Security in Beijing and documents that we've had leaked from there, and how, and the movie Unbroken really goes into this really well. I hope that people will get a chance to see both sides of the story and really understand, it's not even see both sides, because one side is propaganda, it's just coming at us with lies and demonization, and that's straight out of something that we've seen in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the same exact tactics. If you just repeat a lie 1,000 times, people will believe it. And on the other hand, you have this group of people who are trying to raise awareness about human rights atrocities, and in some cases, over 90 of our performers had experienced persecution themselves or in their family. Some survived torture. Some lost a parent to torture. And we're trying to tell this story, and the CCP's trying to silence us. That's the story. That's what's happening. So I hope over time, one thing is that people will realize what's actually happening, and not only get to know Shen Yun better in Falun Gong practice, but actually use that as a tool to understand anything they read in the press about China, certainly, maybe other issues as well, because once you see the movie, Unbroken, or you understand the story of what we faced, you cannot look at news the same way after that. You realize how many things are behind it, and who's manipulating it behind the scenes. So that's one thing, because it's been tough to face this onslaught here in our own country. My ultimate dream is to bring Shen Yun back to China, to be on stage in Beijing and elsewhere in China, and really allow, be witness to the moment when Chinese culture and all its beauty returns as homeland, and to see how it's welcomed and embraced by Chinese people, because I know they're thirsting for it. We get their emails. I talk to them. They can't wait. And to see my colleagues who have family members in China they have not been able to see for decades, because they're blacklisted, to be able to reunite with their family and show them their talent on stage, that's my dream. That's what I hope to see. Disha, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to see you next season, being the MC for Shen Yun. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you, and see you next week.