Chang Chun-Ko, a former dancer for Shen Yun Performing Arts, filed a lawsuit accusing the group of exploiting underage dancers.
Credit...The New York Times

Ex-Dancer Accuses Shen Yun of Forced Labor and Trafficking in Lawsuit

The former performer, who was recruited to join Shen Yun at age 13, said the prominent dance group coerced children into making money for it.

by · NY Times

A former dancer for Shen Yun Performing Arts, the prominent music and dance company of the Falun Gong religious movement, filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing the group and its leaders of trafficking vulnerable children to work for little to no pay.

The 68-page lawsuit, brought by Chang Chun-Ko in Federal District Court in White Plains, N.Y., described Shen Yun as a “forced labor enterprise” that has exploited underage dancers through threats and public shaming to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Shen Yun instills obedience in its dancers through a wide range of tactics, the lawsuit said, including by confiscating their passports, cutting them off from outside media, denouncing them as Chinese government spies if they question the group’s practices and subjecting rule-breakers to public critique sessions.

Ms. Chang said she was recruited from Taiwan to join Shen Yun as a dancer at age 13, in 2009. She performed with the group until she left in 2020, when she was 24.

Ms. Chang sued under a federal law that allows victims of forced labor to sue their traffickers.

The lawsuit comes three months after The New York Times revealed that Shen Yun’s performers had been working under abusive conditions for years. Ms. Chang, now 28, was among the former performers and instructors quoted in the article.

The New York State Department of Labor has opened an inquiry into the company’s labor practices, including its use of child performers, The Times reported last week.

The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in damages.

Ms. Chang is the only named plaintiff, but she is asking a federal judge to certify the lawsuit as a class action to represent a larger group of Shen Yun performers. Her lawyers are looking for other plaintiffs to join the suit.

Shen Yun performed more than 800 times on five continents in its most recent five-month tour. It puts on a two-hour dance and music show intended to spread the message of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that is banned in China and whose followers have been persecuted by the Chinese government.

Representatives of Shen Yun and Falun Gong did not immediately provide a comment on Monday. They have previously denied any wrongdoing and said labor laws did not apply to their underage performers because they are students who tour with Shen Yun as a learning opportunity, not employees. Every student participates in Shen Yun voluntarily, they have said.

“Sure, some people leave because it’s not for them, and that’s perfectly fine,” Shen Yun’s representatives said in a recent statement. “But the vast majority of students will tell you this is their dream come true, and the parents rave about the positive changes in their children.”

In a statement, a Washington-based lawyer for Ms. Chang, Times Wang, said the persecution of Falun Gong “does not justify the Shen Yun defendants’ use of forced child labor.”

In the same statement, Ms. Chang said she is suing to “make sure no other children go through what I went through.”

Every year, hundreds of performers tour with Shen Yun, including a large number of teenage dancers and musicians. To train for performances, children travel from all over the world to enroll in school at the group’s headquarters in Cuddebackville, N.Y., northwest of New York City.

Like most Shen Yun performers, Ms. Chang grew up as a Falun Gong believer. She joined Shen Yun after her father died, and she was told that dancing for Shen Yun was a holy honor because the group was personally overseen by Li Hongzhi, the founder and spiritual leader of Falun Gong.

Mr. Li and his wife, Li Rui, are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

Many children arrive at Shen Yun’s headquarters, known as Dragon Springs, with little ability to speak English and no network in the United States. After being separated from their families, they are plunged into “a system of coercion and control that extends to nearly every aspect of the dancers’ lives,” the lawsuit said.

They cannot leave without permission, kept inside the compound by armed guards, according to the lawsuit. They are prohibited from reading unapproved news outlets or from contacting people who quit Falun Gong.

Ms. Chang was once scolded by Shen Yun’s leaders for the contents of her private diary, the lawsuit said. She said she was allowed to call her mother once a week and was told her calls were being monitored, and that the dancers were encouraged to view Mr. and Ms. Li as their new parental figures.

Even though Shen Yun is registered as a nonprofit, its core motive, the lawsuit said, is to generate revenue, including for the personal financial benefit of Mr. Li and his wife, though the suit offered no evidence of that beyond asserting that they have a bodyguard.

Ms. Chang is also suing International Bank of Chicago, a community bank, which the lawsuit accused of profiting from the trafficking scheme by ignoring “red flags” about the exploitation of Shen Yun’s child performers while opening accounts for them, including their meager pay.

Representatives of the bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bank’s founders are Falun Gong practitioners with close personal ties to Mr. Li, the lawsuit said. Its only branch outside of Illinois is in Port Jervis, N.Y., about a 15-minute drive from Shen Yun’s headquarters.

For more than a decade, bank representatives were permitted to visit the guarded Dragon Springs compound to open accounts for new recruits, according to the lawsuit.

Those recruits typically enroll at Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, a boarding school inside Dragon Springs, which then feeds into Fei Tian College on the same campus. But the schools provided minimal levels of education so that dancers could spend most of their day training for the show, the lawsuit said, ensuring “an ongoing supply of forced child labor to Shen Yun without attracting scrutiny.”

“These sham schools operate as a cover for the forced labor scheme,” the lawsuit said.

While on tour for months at a time, students had no teachers. Ms. Chang was given a tablet and “told she could watch the sitcom series ‘Leave It to Beaver’ to learn English,” according to the lawsuit.

Ms. Chang said performers were sometimes given expired beef jerky and ramen noodles. Once, after becoming ill from the food, Ms. Chang was told that Mr. Li had given her the expired food “to cleanse herself from the inside out,” the lawsuit said.

Even though Fei Tian students receive free tuition, food and housing, Shen Yun performers were told that they must pay back the value of their scholarships if they quit the group, the lawsuit said.

Shen Yun also tried to discourage students from quitting by seeking to discredit the people who spoke out against the group.

After Ms. Chang was quoted in The Times, Gong Shujia, a professor at Fei Tian College, spread “false and defamatory” statements on his YouTube channel that she and her husband were agents of the Chinese government, and that the government had invested money in their dance studio in Taiwan, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Gong, who goes by the pseudonym Zhang Tianliang and was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit said that even as Shen Yun has been the victim of ongoing persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, the group has adopted some of its persecutor’s practices.

Performers who broke the rules, such as by reading comic books, were sometimes berated onstage by Shen Yun’s leaders and forced to apologize during “mass criticism sessions.”

After Ms. Chang left Shen Yun, the lawsuit said, she was diagnosed with clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Recently, the suit said, Ms. Chang learned that Shen Yun had organized mass criticism sessions targeting her.

Ms. Li, the leader’s wife, claimed the group had agents in Taiwan monitoring her, the suit went on, and that Ms. Chang “has recanted her allegations against Shen Yun and regrets making them — which, as this lawsuit shows, could not be further from the truth.”

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