957: Is the CCP Controlling American Media?

Speaker 1  0:00  
Instead of

Brian Nichols  0:10  
focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show. I am, as always, your humble host joining you from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in sunny Eastern Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered yes by cardio miracle, the best heart health supplement in the world. So if you want to learn how to lower your resting heart rate, lower that blood pressure while improving your pump at the gym, stick around. We're going to talk about that more later in today's episode. But first we're digging into all things yes. CCP, the Communist Party there in China. What are they doing, from a censorship perspective of dissenting voices, heck, even folks going out and trying to partake in art and performance, they are also getting censored. We gotta discuss all that and more, and I can't do that myself, so joining me today on the show from the Shen Yun performances. Leisha lemish, welcome to The Brian Nichols Show the Shay, how you doing?

Unknown Speaker  1:22  
I'm great. Thanks for having me. Brian, absolutely

Brian Nichols  1:24  
looking forward to today's conversation, looking forward to unpacking all that's been happening behind the scenes, outside of the world of Trump and tariffs and all the things that have been leading the evening news at night or leading the headlines. But I before we dig into today's conversation. Do the audience a favor. Do yours truly a favor here, and just introduce yourself to the audience. And why are we talking about today the CCP not only censoring speech, but in this case, censoring performance arts,

Speaker 2  1:55  
right? So my name is Lee Shai. I'm an MC master of ceremonies with shiny and performing arts. I've been with the company since 2006 when the company was founded in New York. I'm at home right now. Between performances, we just wrapped up performances in Boston. We were Indian in Indianapolis couple weeks ago, heading over to Chicago. Next. Shenyan is the world's top classical Chinese dance and music company. It's a huge success. You see our billboards everywhere in the big cities. We have eight companies that tour around the world at the same time. We do about 200 different cities. We perform in front of over 11 million people. The one place we can't perform is China. Our mission is to show China before communism revive traditional Chinese culture. I'm one of a few non Chinese people in the company, serving as a bit of a cultural gap, kind of bridge there between the audience and the stories that we depict on stage. And not only can we not perform in China, the Chinese Communist Party, as you mentioned, Brian, has been trying to stop us and censor us internationally, including here in the US. And they've done this through a range of means, which I'm happy to talk about, and they've done it since day one, so about 18 years, and I've seen this, and I've documented a lot of it, but what we've seen the last year or so is an escalation of it that has really reached the threat of terrorism and the level of infiltrating our media, our social media, our mainstream media narratives, and really trying to pit American society against a very successful American performing arts company. And this, of course, has to do with everything that the CCP is about. It has to do with persecution of religious minority groups in China and dissidents overseas that's been going on for a quarter century and beyond. It has to do with the history of the CCP, from the days of Mao until today. That's your overview.

Brian Nichols  3:51  
So yeah, and Leisha, let's do this right? Because you said a phrase there. I think a lot of the audience wants to dig into, I know I want to dig into. And that was the life in China before the CCP, what did China look like before the CCP, now, I had back on the show in October of 2022 almost, actually, was over 300 episodes ago. It was Jason Loftus. He wrote a actually, he was the director of a show called Eternal Spring, the Falun gongs fight against the Communist Chinese party, facing propaganda and persecution. I'm gonna include that episode in the show notes. But we've heard, you know, we heard that the battle that was taking place between the Falun Gong and China, the Communist Chinese party, that is, but maybe, you know, let's, let's do the audience a favor and take that step backwards even, you know, another couple years ago, like before that. What was China like before Mao, before the Communist takeover? I had Lily Tang Williams on the show. She talked about what life was like growing up in the CCP, but we never really hear about that before time. So what does that before time even look like? Just to kind of set the stage.

Speaker 2  5:01  
Here. So the short answer to that is, if you want to see what China was like before communism, you got to come see shenyu, because that's, that's what we do. We have a two hour performance. It's all about celebrating and bringing to life on stage the ancient China. And it's even even now you're not ancient, you know, 100 plus years ago. So the CCP came to power in 1949 at the tail end of after World War Two, they had a civil war. The Chinese Communist Party, through guerrilla warfare and all kinds of underhanded means, in the aftermath of World War Two, was able to beat the Nationalist Party, which then fled to Taiwan and started its own government and eventually a democracy in Taiwan, and then in Taiwan, they did not have all these various political campaigns like they had in China. That's why traditional Chinese culture has been preserved a lot better in Taiwan, from artwork that they now have in a museum in Taiwan to the script that they use, which is the original mainland Chinese script back before the Communists took over, that's been used for 1000s of years. That's why I studied Chinese in Taiwan, but to get back to China, so you have roughly 5000 years of civilization with its ups and downs, for sure, with dynasties, not everything was great. They had war and famine and floods like everybody else. But what you have connecting this civilization is a set of ideals and virtues, and it's very spiritual. The pillars are Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. And what they have in common is this idea that a moral life is more important than anything else. And so the heroes to Chinese history are the generals and the literary characters and officials who chose virtue over the interests that are right in front of them. And be it a Judeo Christian tradition where you believe in concepts of Heaven and Hell, or a Buddhist tradition with the reincarnation, or a more more folk traditions where you believe in an afterlife, where you meet face to face with your ancestors and you have to be accountable for 1000s of years. Chinese people have a strong belief that what goes around comes around that good is rewarded and evil is punished, and you have to be accountable to your deeds in this lifetime. And so when the Communist Party came over with the Soviet import of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism, and later, they brought in Maoism, of course, the underlying theme for all of this is very militant atheism, the idea that what you have in front of you, this materialism, utilitarianism, all these isms, is what you have in front of you, is all that matters, and there's no consequences to what you do here. And so they had to, from their perspective, destroy all the traditions, the spiritual traditions that were there before. And that's why you have the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 under Mao Zedong, that its entire purpose was to break with tradition, destroy the four olds, to struggle against all these old concepts, what they call, which are really the concepts that have bound Chinese civilization, really any traditional culture around the world for 1000s of years. Because, yeah, China was different, but in a way, not that different from the traditional ideals and values of any traditional civilization anywhere, and the ideas of integrity, of courage, of loyalty, of kindness, of faith, of sacrifice, of truthfulness, right? These are the concepts of traditional Chinese culture, the concepts that we show in the performance. They're the principles of Falun Gong, which is one reason why the Chinese Communist Party has been persecuting it. And so they set out to destroy this and they did that by burning temples to the ground, marrying monks and nuns, getting people out of religious practices, burning artwork, forbidding any classical literature, making teachers struggle against their students struggle against their teachers, putting teachers on a pedestal with the dunce caps and Having the beaten up kids turning in their parents. And not only did they destroy the culture and they destroyed the artifacts that represented that culture, they also killed 60 to 80 million people in the process of doing this under the Communist Party, with persecution campaigns going all the way to today, against Falun Gong, against Uyghurs, against many, many other groups. And they're not done. And so this is what happened to China. So here comes shiny and in 2006 a group of Chinese artists living outside of China, many of them in New York, some of them in Australia, Canada, and they are Falun Gong practitioners. So they've experienced persecution for their faith in China, or they have family members there were experiencing persecution. And they say, let's create our own performing arts company and show the world what traditional Chinese culture is really about. It is not these parties that the Chinese Embassy puts on that are all red. It's all you know, and it's all Republican. It's CCP red. It's all about how great things under communism are, how wonderful China is now under the Communist Party, and they say, let's let's actually show the real China. And as part of that story, let's talk about what's happening in China today. We have dances that talk about the cultural revolution. We have dances that talk about the persecution of Falun Gong. Every year, we have one of two pieces about that. And for these two reasons, the revival of traditional Chinese culture. Showing the China before communism, which allows people to imagine a China without communism, what that world might be like. And for the reason that we expose the persecution and human rights atrocities and the human toll through very, very moving stories on stage. And this is a persecution and a human rights crisis that the Chinese Communist Party claims does not exist. They say it's all Western propaganda. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here, and we're showing it on stage. Not only are we showing the brutality of it, which we are, we're also showing the courage or the resistance to it, that it's possible to resist and to have hope and that bystanders matter, and that Your choices matter, and it's not hopeless. And people are inspired by this. And Westerners and non Chinese who see this show, I say, Wow, I really discovered a China. That was the China I used to be interested in when I watch martial arts films or when I look at Chinese artwork, and when I read, you know, books on Daoism and Bucha, this is what got me interested in China. So I came to the show. I found it here in the show. And then Chinese people say, in the performance, I saw stories that my grandmother used to tell me from that she knew from before liberation, before the Communist Party took over. And I have not heard of them since I was a young child. And now I found it again in New York, in Indianapolis, wherever, not in China. You can't see a show like this in China. And so this is terrifying, absolutely terrifying, to the CCP, but it's really important you made this distinction early. Distinction earlier, Brian, to differentiate between China and the CCP, right? I guess I get some lump together a lot, especially in headlines, right? China says this, yes, says that, but as we know, like the US, you know, you and I are different. Everybody here is different. We have our own thoughts, our own opinions. You know, politically, of course, we're very, very different, the same in China, and there's a huge movement in China of people. They're doing this thing called quit the CCP, or 20 in Chinese, which is a huge movement of people basically renouncing publicly, either online or by signing petitions. Their affiliation and support with the Chinese Communist Party is about 400 something million people have done this in China already and and around the world. And so there's a huge movement of trying to get rid of what they see as this kind of, you know, kind of like parasite, something like just latched on to Chinese civilization and is really existing for its own benefit, for its own power. And not only that, we have people from China constantly coming to see the show internationally. When they can, those are going to afford to fly to Taiwan. They fly to Vancouver. In fact, in Vancouver, when we were performing there a few years back, somebody came and found us after the show, and he said, Listen, I was sent here by the Public Security Bureau in China to spy you guys, but I'm actually on your side. Keep up the good work that we have a lot of stories like this, alongside stories of spies that have been caught, of tires being slash, of bomb threats that we're getting.

Brian Nichols  12:47  
Wow, well, and Lee shy, let's just, I mean, for the audience listening, right? It just sounds, I'm sure, for a lot of folks, just like, it's like a movie, right? Like spies, terroristic threats, bomb threats, all for just presenting a different perspective. And I know, I know we're in 2025 I know tensions are high. I know we've seen the only constant in our world right now is change, right but the fact that there is such a knee jerk reaction from the CCP towards what you guys are doing, it does speak to what I think you just outlined perfectly, and that's that, is that they're afraid, right? That they are obviously afraid of this, this version of Chinese history and culture, for that matter, being shared to, not just, you know, folks in China, because, to your point, it's not allowed, but rather to the rest of the world to show what could be based on what was. And I guess you know, for the average person listening to today, this is where we really we miss out on just the understanding the context of what things could be like, right? Like we see the censorship, the tech censorship here in America, we feel that the social pressure we get it, but I'm not worried about my values, my perspectives, being censored to the point that I'm locked up and tossed in some some re education camp somewhere in the countryside, right? Like that is so alien to us today. So just for the audience listening here, I know you painted the picture of the atrocities that took place back under the the changing of the guard, you know, back in the 40s, to where we are today in China. But just help paint that picture right, just black and white. What deep what freedoms, liberties, you know, did you have prior to the communists taking over? And then fast forward to today. What? What does life in China look like? I mean, is it that, you know, every person out there, just like us in America, like they live their lives, they go to work, they do their thing, they don't really think about all the stuff going around them. They have what they had to focus on, which is, how do I support my family? How do I pay the bills, stuff like that? Or is there to your point earlier, you know some of this? This, you know this, wishing to understand, understand that the past, right? The Oh, I talked to my grandma, and she tells me these stories of what life used to be like. Or I hear Lily Tang Williams on The Brian Nichols Show talking about what life was like when she was growing up, and hearing what life used to be like before the communists. Like, just help paint that picture for us. If you could. Lee shy, sure. I

Speaker 2  15:21  
mean, there's a lot to unpack there. If you go back to the Qing Dynasty, and you know the movie The Last Emperor, you go back to the 19th century, these are already pretty turbulent times in China. Every Dynasty in China has this rise and fall and the decline of empire, sort of process that they go through. And towards the end of the 19th century, especially the middle of the middle of the 19th century, have the Opium Wars. You have various rebellions, and things are kind of starting to fall apart a little bit. And then you have a Republican era in the beginning of the 20th century that says, You know what, let's have a constitutional republic. Let's have something that maybe moves towards democracy. Let's learn from the West, because they saw the West, and how more advanced it was, whereas China had been more advanced before. And you see all these inventions like the paper and the compass and gunpowder, all these things coming out of China. And then you enter this period of decline. And they see the West is getting more advanced with the industrialization in the West, in the military build up. And they say, Okay, we got to learn from the west if we want to catch up with the world. And this is what happened to begin the 20th century. But then as you get with you have Japanese invasions. It gets very complicated that basically, as you get into World War Two, the Chinese government there, the nationalist or the KMT, the gomindang under Chiang Kai Shek, are busy fighting the Japanese, and the Chinese Communist Party are busy stabbing them in the back at the same time. And so they later claim that they freed China from the Japanese, but we now know that that really was not the case. They're basically forcing the Nationalist Party to fight on both fronts, against the Japanese and against the CCP that's fighting with guerrilla warfare. And then at the end of this, the nationalist is exhausted, the CCP takes power, and what the biggest transition that you have is you lose your freedom of thought. You lose your freedom of belief, right? You always had periods of poverty in China, and there's a lot that is happening around the world to lift people out of poverty, not in China, not just in China, but you had the freedom to worship. You had the freedom to think what you wanted. And that is immediately gone on the CCP, and you have these struggles, and you have, you know, it's like woke ism on steroids. If you disagree, you're going to be beaten to death. And my friends who are in Shenyang, some of the older ones, they talk to me about seeing people down the street with their heads getting smashed like watermelons with poles and almost starving to death by a man made famine that Mount Zion created that killed 30 or 40 million people, and people and their parents being sent to labor camps. They don't even know why, and this is what happened in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. Then you have a period of a little bit of openness and a little bit of hope in the 80s, leading all the way to the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and you basically have a feeling that, okay, maybe we have some freedom of expression, some freedom of the press. Maybe we can actually agitate for democracy. And then with a massacre that was mostly around Tiananmen Square, at Tiananmen Square as well, but mostly the streets surrounding tenement squares where most of the people were killed that night on on June 4, 1989 those dreams collapsed, and now you enter a period where people are saying, Okay, well, this dream is we're not going to get democracy in our lifetimes. I can get our freedoms. Let's kind of just, let's make some money and and just kind of take care of our family and let things be and during that time, there's also spiritual vacuum. And in that period of the 70s and 80s, there's this thing called the Qigong boom. Qigong is you could call it Chinese yoga, slow moving exercises. Tai Chi is part of that. And you see in the parks in China, at dawn, over 100 million people doing these slow moving exercises. They find it's beneficial for their health, and it helps them relax, and it connects them with something that's very traditional and Chinese. Some have martial arts elements. Others talk about super normal powers, all these different healing all these different things going on. And then towards the end of that, you have some charlatans who come in and say, Well, I can make money off of this. And they claim to have all these various abilities and healing powers, and they make a lot of money, and people are starting to speak in tongues. All these different things are happening. And in 1992 Mr. Lee Hong Ji comes over and he said, Okay, let's, let's, let's figure this out. Here's a practice. It's called Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. It's been around for many, many, many generations, but it's never been brought to the public before. It's kind of like Qigong. I'll introduce it as Qigong, but really it's got a more of a spiritual purpose to it, and its spiritual purpose is moral elevation. It's becoming a better person. It's becoming above and beyond what the standards are. It's returning to something more fundamental about human nature and the nature and the nature of the universe, which is believed to be truthfulness, compassion and forbearance, and aligning yourself with those principles, along with doing five meditation exercises, is going to help you elevate yourself physically and spiritually. And this practice becomes extremely popular in the 1990s so from 1992 with nobody practicing this and. All the way to 1999 by 1999 Chinese government estimates believe there's 70 to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong in China. At that point, the Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, at the time, says there's more people doing this, and they're members of the Chinese Communist Party, which was 66 million at the time. We have to ban this. Many of the other leaders, including the standing members of the Politburo said, we don't need to ban this. We have family members who practice this. It's perfectly fine. They're party members practicing. It's not a conflict. It's like you could be a Republican and do yoga or democrat and do Qigong. It doesn't matter. And said, Nope, this if in the Jiang Zemin said, and this was quoted all over the press, if the Chinese Communist Party cannot defeat Falun Gong, this will be the greatest embarrassment to Marxism and to the CCP. So he pits the whole party against 100 million Chinese people and creates make some enemies of the state overnight. And this is where you get this Orwellian or cultural revolution type moment, where you have vans driving on the streets with loudspeakers blasting propaganda. 24/7 all the TV plays is how bad Falun Gong is. When just a few months earlier, the Chinese government sports administration was praising this for the health benefits, and surveys were showing people were getting healthy, and all of a sudden it's all turned upside down. And then people are saying, No, this was Falun Gong practitioners. They have no political background. They're just they're just people practicing this. Farmers, you know, construction workers, steel industry workers, academic scientists, lots of people, any walk of life, and they say, this must be a misunderstanding. The government doesn't really know who we are. Very innocently, they go to the petitions office, and then they're arrested, and then the family members go and hey, you rested my family. Then they're arrested, sent to labor camps, and then they're beaten up, and they get their body back in in an ash container, and they're tortured to death. And we have 5000 cases of document that people who were tortured death, but we unfortunately believe the number is much, much higher. And then the propaganda just escalates. And this seems to be saying all these crazy things, and none of them which can be proven, and a lot of them are against the very fundamental beliefs of the practice. And then by the early 2000s around 2005 2006 we start hearing that Falun Gong practitioners are being killed for on demand organ transplant industry. So basically, what's happening is they're going into the jails, in the labor camps and military personnel, nurses and doctors are blood and tissue typing all of the prisoners. They're all the Falun Gong practitioners, not the ordinary criminals, just to follow in prison subconscious, they're getting their urine samples, are getting their blood samples, and then they are basically a database of people that they can they can find when a rich official or people from United States and many other countries, unfortunately, who get a heart transplant. We're not talking about kidneys, hearts, livers, kidneys as well, corneas. And we don't know what the numbers are. Estimates from the London tribunal had 60 to 90,000 organs a year. We at the time. And I remember when this first came out, we were saying, If this is not stopped, it's going to expand to other groups. And sure enough, a few years later, when the Uyghurs were arrested in mass over in western China, on the men, all the young, healthy men, started disappearing. And we believe there's quite a lot of evidence. And Ethan Gutman has written a lot about this, about organ harvesting from Uyghurs as well. And so this has been what some people are calling the crime of the century, the genocide of the century, as almost entirely unreported by the Western press, the New York Times, which has made made she knew performing arts Mike company at Target in recent months, has completely ignored a story they had a reporter named Diddy tatlow who wanted to write about this for the New York Times, and her editor in China told her to drop the story. So we have all kinds of issues here of Western media being in cahoots with the CCP, prioritizing access to China and the Chinese market over reporting these atrocities. The New York Times has a history of doing this. It did not report on the Holocaust. It buried it buried it in the back of the paper. There's a book about that called bury the times, of course, the Ukrainian Genocide as well, at least. How about the movie? Mr. Jones, so this is, in my opinion, the third time that the Times has buried a genocide deliberately with both a combination of the specific correspondence and editors choices, as well as a newspapers policy.

Brian Nichols  24:03  
Why? Why, though, why would they do that? And again, I'm not trying to be, you know, I'm not trying to poke the bear here, but like, well, let's go that. Let's go, oh yeah, let's poke away. Then, all right, like that feels like it's, it's a calculated decision on behalf of the New York Times. And I just, I have to ask that question, why? Why is that? Yeah,

Speaker 2  24:23  
so, I mean, we can do there's, like I said, there's books written about the other one, so you can look at that and find out why the decisions were made at the time. But when I read those books, I saw so many parallels to what's happening today. So first of all, you got to start with the just atmosphere of Western correspondence working in a dictatorship, and so in China, if you cross the wrong person, you write the wrong story, you're going to get your visa revoked. You're going to be kicked out of the country. You might have spent years mastering the language and building your network and trying to get to this position to be able to report from Beijing. You may even have a wife and kids there and now, or a husband and kids there, depending you. Yeah, and now you're losing that over one story that you wrote. And so what correspondents tend to do is they tend to write the stories that can not get them into trouble, and while they're there, and then when they come back from that country, then they write what they actually think. And this is very common pattern that we've seen. But while they're there, they want to maintain their access the newspaper. Same thing. We saw this with CNN. We saw the Time Magazine, especially in the early 2000s before the Beijing Olympics, certainly before Xi Jinping, there was this dream that I think Washington and New York certainly were promoting, of engagement with China will lead to openness, will lead to more freedom. They will naturally want to emulate the American way of life, and they'll be more exposed to these open ideas, and they will not be able to be able to go back to this kind of totalitarian system. And it's more important to keep engaging than to actually, you know, really report on the hardcore issues. And from its very beginning of existence, the CCP has used a rule called the 95 five rule, which is basically, at any point in time, 95% of the population is fine. It's these 5% that are the problem. As long as you have a clean line of demarcation, use a communist term between you and them, you will steer clear of trouble. So when we say that the problem is people with foreign connections, you better not have a foreign connection. You better denounce those who do. If we see a problem as intellectuals, it's rightist, it's conservatives, it's people who practice following along. With people who want democracy, and so they've identified this, and the same is true for their policy towards Western media. You can write about corruption, you can write about environmental issues, you can write about poverty. You can write about our new rail line. You cannot write about Falun Gong. You cannot write about the Uyghurs. You cannot write about Taiwan independence. You cannot write about Tibet. You cannot write about how we're treating human rights lawyers, maybe some of them, and so it's very clear which issues you have to stay away from. So but that did not apply to I mean, some journalists really went ahead and they went above and beyond. Ian Johnson from the Wall Street Journal, comes to mind. He is a blonde, blue eyed guy who wrote The Wall Street Journal. He would put on a wig and contact lenses, and he would go into these, yes, this industrialized parts of northeastern China, and he would interview people. He got stories of how people were tortured to death for meditating. And he wrote about this and got a Pulitzer Prize for it, and then later, could not work in China anymore, but he made his mark on history. Meanwhile, the New York Times was not doing that, and the article that they were writing in the beginning. This is around 1999 2000 2001 a lot of them really mimicked Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and they adopted their points. And in fairness, at the time, Falun Gong did not have a platform. Did not have we didn't have social media, we didn't have spokespeople. We didn't have she knew. We didn't have any way of getting our message out, and so a lot of Western media just copied what was coming out of the CCP, but very shortly after that, there was a lot of information. There were press conferences that I went to in 2001 2002 where nobody showed up, and we said, There's genocide happening in China, people being killed, and nobody would show up. These press conferences, we would send it out, and we'd just be talking to ourselves. I personally went to China in 2001 as I thought, what can I do? And I went there, and I went there, and I went to Tiananmen Square, and I held a banner, along with 35 other people from different countries, 12 different countries around the world. And all we did was we meditated, and we had a banner that said, truth, compassion, tolerance. Within 30 seconds, we were surrounded by police cars. We were thrown to the vans. We were taken to detention center. We were beaten up. My jaw was dislocated. We had people with broken noses, broken noses, broken fingers, broken ribs, and then 24 hours later, because this was still the Western treatment, and we had our embassy calling on our behalf, we were put on the plane, still bloodied and bruised, in my case, barefoot, and we get on the plane and there's a policeman standing there next to me the entire time until we're about to take off, and he gets off, and they close the door and they Hand me the China Daily, which is the English mouthpiece newspaper of the CCP, and it says, foreigners supported by the CIA were sent to China to have an anti China protest. They were treated well, put in a hotel, fed and sent back on a plane. You know, I'm looking around this guy next to him, he's got broken ribs. He's got a broken nose. He spent the night in the detention center. I've been on hunger fast the entire time. So wow, it is really easy to lie to people when you control the media and so. So to get back to your story at around that time, of course, you know this was not in the New York Times in a way that was in other media. There might have been a small mention of some of it, but basically, from that point on, around 2002 2003 The New York Times completely disappears in its coverage of Falun Gong. I had discussions about this with several people from the New York Times and times and challenged them on this. But for many, many years, there was nothing, and the only time the New York Times shows up is the last few years in attacking shenyu and Falun Gong. And it's lately, since August, has written 10 articles about a few disgruntled former shenyan performers who did not like the idea that they had to work very hard for a dance company that the training to be an elite dancer, and other complaints which we may or may not disagree with, and they made us a feature. And they've done 10 articles. They've gone to multiple podcasts to talk about this, and nothing about the atrocities that I mentioned when they talk about organ harvesting. They only mentioned. Asking, and they asked one professor who's got a very questionable background to who just denies it, that's it, ignoring congressional hearings and ignoring a tribunal during multiple books and academic publications about this, and just kind of dismissing it and just focusing on how hard a few dancers had to work. And so you can imagine if they put the resources that they put to this to this, they're actually writing about what's happening to 10s of millions of people in China who are just being crushed by this, the biggest authoritarian machinery human kind has ever seen. We would have a very different situation. And now, why are they doing it? You know, could be access to the Chinese market. Could be a specific bias against against people of faith. Could be a certain bias that they got from the early days of the CCP propaganda could could just be the career ism of the journalism involved, one sensational and get a series on Netflix. Who knows? Now, there's offensive explanations for this, but it is, it is hurtful. It is very unfair. We actually rolled out a press conference at Lincoln Center in New York City a couple weeks ago, where we had a petition signed by 1500 she knew performers, past performers and parents of performers, saying, we want the Department of Justice to investigate. We want to know who's behind these journalists, why they're doing this, the transnational repression that we're facing, the bomb threats, who's behind that? We want the media to report on us fairly, with transparency, because some of the issues is some of the people that they talk to have undisclosed ties to Beijing. They basically work for our competitor, the Beijing Dance Academy, which, so you can imagine, you know, a whistleblower coming out, saying something about Apple and the New York Times, writing about it, and not disclosing that this person works for Samsung or Huawei, and that, like not being part of the story this, that's a very important piece of information that the audience would want to know about. Want to know about. And so there's all kinds of problems with this, including a lot of claims in there that we flat out disagree with, that are are verifiably not true. So that's that's a long winded answer to what has been happening with the New York Times. There's just only one part. But let me add one more thing to this, which is about a year and a half ago, we received, as I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of people inside China who support us, who are against the CCP, and part of what some of them do is leak information out. And so every once in a while, we'll get documents from communist party meetings saying, watch out, there's gonna be a round of arrest Chinese New Year. But watch out, this is coming. That's coming. So we got documents from two different sources saying that the Ministry of State Security in China has basically come to terms with the fact that their campaign against Falun Gong, which is a large part of the overseas force of Falun Gong, is in the United States, and Shen Yun, their campaign to try to stop us has failed 25 years of this, and they failed, and so they need to up the game. And they talk about a new strategy, an end game type of strategy to crush it, Falun Gong shenyuan. And they talk specifically about warfare in terms of sorry, in terms of law Fauci, in terms of investigations, and in terms of weaponizing social media. And so in terms of law Fauci, what we've seen is frivolous lawsuits filed against shenyon, against our headquarters, in particular, by individuals with ties to China, and they try to file lawsuits on environmental claims, and they were dismissed repeatedly, and finally, they were dismissed with prejudice, which means you can no longer file this lawsuit. Stop harnessing this group and interfering with the court. You cannot keep filing these frivolous lawsuits. So we've seen that, and then we've seen investigations that started based on these claims. And then what we're seeing in terms of weaponizing social media is there are two influencers, Chinese individuals, one of them United States, one of them in Japan, that are mentioned by name in these meeting notes from the history of State Security in Beijing. And they're saying, we need to support these people, basically identifying them as assets to take down shenyu and then follow along. And these are the people, a lot of them. In particular, is the one who introduced these interviewees to the New York Times. He brags about it on X he talks about it on YouTube. I was the one who got the story to New York Times. I'm the one who's gonna take shenyon down. And this is identified as a CCP asset. Again, not mentioned in The Times article, but their source of information as a CCP asset. So all this came out before the New York Times started their series of hit pieces against

Brian Nichols  34:08  
us. All right. Li shy, I have one final question for us today, and that is, well, what are the prospects for China look like right now? I would say you mentioned 100 million plus Chinese citizens who are practicing Falun Gong, right? I'm sure that number has increased. I know I was looking at my old notes here from back when I interviewed Jason Loftus 1999 that number was 70 million. I heard you toss out the 100 million number. So it's not, it's not a drop in the bucket, right? That's a substantial amount of people that are practicing Falun Gong. At the very least, I would say are starting to question, I would hope authority, question the status quo. So li Shai, do you see a future, be that in the short term or more in the long term? And I'll let you paint the picture of whatever way you. Think makes most sense. But do you see a future where the CCP is no longer the dominating force in China, and that we have, dare I say, a return to some type of normalcy, or at the very least, a return back to a pre a pre Mao China? Is that, even in the cards, and if so, when

Speaker 2  35:20  
I do, I do see that future, but that's the big question, is when? And we've wanted to see that future for a long time. You know, certainly fighting this persecution and everything that we've been doing for the last 20 plus years, this is something that we we look forward to. The idea of taking Shen Yun back to China and bringing this traditional culture is something that drives our performers, is something that really motivates them to put the extra rep in to perform when it's tough, because you know, you're traveling, you're performing for a few months a year, you're away from your family. You know you may have days when you're not feeling up to it, but I think that's what they really lean on, is this dream of bringing the show back to China and not just them, for me as well, kind of being a bystander, watching this whole process and seeing what's happening, to actually witness that historical moment when things are different in China and they it can celebrate its own culture. That's what we're talking about. That's the irony of this. I mean, what a missed opportunity. Going back to the number, I mean, Jason is correct in terms of the 70 million, and I'm correct in terms of 100 million, because the estimate from the Chinese government was 70 to 100 million. So million back in the late 90s. We don't know how many people are still practicing now, but what we do know is that all these people had family and so so many of these individuals, when they were arrested, it impacted so many other people in their workplace and in their family, in our company alone in chiny, where we have several 100 performers, we did a survey just last week. We found there are over 80 performers who, either directly themselves or their family, experience persecution under the CCP, 80 people here in the United States, you know, and we have in our company dances who lost family, who were orphaned, who have family in jail in China. Still, we had a soloist, a musician soloist, whose husband was arrested while she was performing students and sent to prison while she was waiting for him at the airport. She was waiting for for him at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, and he was arrested trying to board the flight in Shanghai. So these stories, and there's many, many more that are not going to make headlines, like my dear friends not being able to go see their father who's ill one last time because they're blacklisted. You know, these kinds of things are the reality for so many Chinese people. And I think there's an awakening of recognizing that the CCP has latched on to the civilization that was once very grand and was not about making cheap products and was about something that was much more valuable and deep, and that it's time for that to reclaim its place in the world and contribute in a positive way. And I think she knew is a big part of that. I think it's part of that spiritual awakening. I think the CCP, from that perspective, is correctly identified as a threat, because when people see shenyu, they realize that this is a real China, and this is a China that's uplifting, that's positive, that's not a threat. And nobody sees shiny and says, I'm really afraid of China. People say this would wouldn't it be great if China was like this? So we could just talk like normal people, because we have shared values and shared beliefs. And you know, I might be Christian or Jewish or Muslim, and you're, you're Chinese. Okay, great. Cool. You believe in Buddhism. Cool. Let's talk. We all believe in doing what's right. So let's, let's, let's get along. And that's not what the CCP is about. CP is about struggle, struggle against Heaven, struggle against Earth, you know, struggling against nature and man. These are these are mouths and owns terms. And it's still true for the core identity of the CCP today, and it's survived by struggling and creating and picking fights with people like wishing. And what a missed opportunity, right with Falun Gong and later wishing you. And here's a company that says, hey, we're going to revive Chinese culture. Cool. Let's promote that. This is good for China. No, we're gonna try to shut that down too.

Brian Nichols  38:44  
Oh, man, I do a segment here called Final thoughts. Lee shy, I'll kick things off, and I'll let you you bring us home, going back to our good friend Lily Tang Williams. She's run for Congress, I think, once or twice now here in the States, and every time I've had Lily on the show or I've talked to her off air, one thing she always brings up to me, she says, Brian, I am so scared that America is following in the footsteps of the country I called home, and to see how we are, more or less, we've been going through. Call it a mini Cultural Revolution or something therein. But it definitely it might not match up perfectly, but it certainly rhymes to what was happening over in China back during the the Cultural Revolution over there. And you see this, this, I don't even know how to put into Word, just like this complete rejection of tradition, of community, of values, of morals, as you are outlining here today, and much more an embrace of the party of the state, and really just an embrace of the self, not really, not in the libertarian sense of like individual. Visualism, but just the idea that you kind of get forced to do your own thing for fear, right? And that, I think, speaks to where a lot of folks in America, we've definitely been very cautious and very nervous about the direction of the country. When I hear folks, you know, saying, Oh, you're on a vote for this candidate over this candidate? Why? Well, big picture for this exact conversation that you and I are having today, that the conversations I've had behind the scenes with Lily Tang Williams, is that we don't want to see America go down the path of the CCP China and to see where China is today, right? And the perception of China on a global stage. It's not one of, I think, love or admiration, but one of kind of tolerance, not in the good word of the presence of tolerance, but rather just we're going to tolerate the CCP running China, because we want to access right? We want, whether that's as a news reporter, to be able to get that juicy story in China, or I'm a business, I want to do business over in China. So we're not going to speak truth. We're going to toe the line. We're going to speak whatever the government says we should speak, because that's how we are able to engage, and that's how we're able to make money or or have some type of of, you know, platform. And that is scary, the fact that that is how so many good people, I would argue, are willing to not do the bad thing, but rather just not do anything. They're not willing to speak out. They're willing actually, to maybe intentionally avoid very uncomfortable conversations. And they do that in pursuit of, again, that access, that status, that notoriety from the CCP. And I get nervous about hearing that. And we started to go down that path back in 2020 here in the United States, where the DEI mentality, the ESG mentality, it was, it was seeping into our corporations, it was seeping into our government. And that has very real negative consequences and ramifications going forward. So at least, I would dare say, you know, I hope Americans have woken up and are aware of what's happening, and for the folks who aren't, I hope today's conversation helps paint the picture of not just what could be, but how quickly it can devolve into a society that you don't even recognize so many folks in America, you know, they talk about, like, oh, the looming civil war and and like they're they're waiting for This big moment to happen that leads off a big civil war, and like you talk to any historian, they just say it happens, not at all, not at all, and then all at once, right? And that's something we have to be aware of. The defenses have to be raised. We have to be consciously aware of what's happening and also having these conversations. Because if we don't have these conversations, if we just, you know, kind of say, yeah, it is what it is, and we go on about our day, nothing's going to change. So I, again, I will include the link to Jason loft. This is conversation with yours truly here where we talk about his his movie The eternal spring from back in 2022 if I'll go ahead and check that out. I think it's over on YouTube for free. It outlines entirely the Falun Gong story and actually talks about, let's see, back in the 90s, when some Falun Gong activists were trying to take over a CCP news channel and broadcast the Falun Gong story to the population in China, so it was a really cool story. Definitely go ahead and check that out. But Li Shai, that's my final thoughts for today. Bring us home. What do you have for final thoughts? And, of course, where can folks go ahead and check out shenyon When it's on tour? And where can folks go ahead and reach out to you to continue the conversation? Should they so choose?

Speaker 2  43:31  
So let me add one more resource, I think, a great book on the history of what's happened the following in China and on organ harvesting. And the fact includes a chapter about that broadcast in Changsha, where we first appeared. That story first appeared is the slaughter by Ethan Gutman. That's G, U, T, M, a, n, n, that's a wonderful book. Disclosure, I was a research assistant on that book. I work with Ethan. We went and we interviewed people who just came out of labor camps and escaped to Thailand via a motorcycle back and boat, and then had landed there, and they did not understand why we're asking questions about blood samples and urine samples. When they said they were being tortured, they thought we were trying to establish how well they were being treated. And in fact, what we were doing is establishing evidence of organ harvesting. So that's a wonderful resource that I think people who want a deeper dive can look into, yeah, I mean, what you're talking about with where America is today. I've had those conversations as well with Chinese people who experienced a cultural revolution. They said this starts to feel a little bit too similar to that. And the idea of your thought control, the idea that you're not allowed to think a certain way. You have to use language in a particular way, or else you're meaning something else. You're bigoted, you're discriminatory, and basically trying to control your thoughts and your speech. You know, 1984 I went back and reread that the George all go, classic. It's such you read and go, yep, that's what's happening. That's what that's what's going on. And the CCP has used all those tools and. It's scary to think of that coming to America, and hopefully we're on the other side of that. I think what I would say, I think you're absolutely right that we face a choice on a daily basis. Do we put our head in the sand and just okay, let me just make my money and take care of my family, go on vacation, watch my Netflix and not care about these other things? Or do I take a stance for what I believe is right, and do I do it in a way that is coming out of love and kindness for people and for a better world, not out of a place of hatred and anger and trying to struggle against other people? And I think I would say, I think a big message, message from Shin Yun is that the way forward to a better future for all of us is to look back at our traditions, look back at the values of stay consistent in our heritage, our own heritage, be it Chinese or non Chinese, for 1000s of years, the values of held civilization together. Many of them are religious based, but they basically can be very universal, no matter what your faith. Looking back at those traditional values, the humility in the face of a bigger picture and greater powers that be and holding on to our kindness tradition and kindness is the way forward. And I think we face that choice. It's very easy. We all face that in our life. Do we? Do we actually take a stance here based on integrity and based on kindness for what's right, or we just take the easy route? I think that's the way forward.

Brian Nichols  46:17  
Awesome stuff. Li shy, where can we go ahead find shenyon, if it's on tour or, you know, they just want to reach out to you where, what are the best plans of action here for the audience today. Okay,

Speaker 2  46:26  
so if you want to reach out to me, I'd love to hear from you. I'm on x. Just joined X recently to be able to have these conversations. So my account is fairly new. You can find me at the shy lemmesh, L, E, E, S, H, A, I, L, E, M, I, S, H. I also have a website, leemish.com where document all the cases of the CCPs, transnational repression against as I got over 150 incidents right now that we haven't even talked about. Shen Yun itself, the performance we're touring until mid May, all over the world. Shen yun.com. If you want to just get tickets and learn more about the show, if you want to learn more about the company and our mission and see more videos. Shinyunperforming arts.org I also have a podcast called shinyun voices on YouTube where you can see conversations with the artists and see what they have to say and hear more from them and what drives them. There's a lot of good information out there. We're very open, and we're being very transparent so people can find out who we are and why we do what we do. I'd love to hear from anybody?

Brian Nichols  47:20  
Good stuff. Leisha, well, hey, I just went ahead and followed you over on X so go ahead and folks, see, I'm gonna retweet leishay as we're going forward here when today's episode airs. So so with that being said, Please, folks, this is one of those episodes where there is a call to action that is support shenyon, whenever, if you want to go check out what China looked like from yesteryear, before the CCP, but also just something. This is an episode you should share with family and friends, because a lot of folks just not aware, or they just don't know what they don't know. And I get it like we all have tariffs that we're dealing with, or taxes or bills, or kids going to sport ball or rehearsal, or whatever it may be, we have something going on, and to just say, Okay, I'm gonna focus my time, energy and effort on on other thing, which, by the way, in this case, it's, you know, 1000s of miles across the world just makes it tough. So instead, let's actually say, hey, no, this is something we should absolutely be, you know, be aware of, but also that we should talk about, right? Or at the very least, start raising up. You know what's actually happening? So more folks can start talking about this, right? Because this is one of these areas where, even though it's 1000s of miles across, across the oceans, right? Like, oh, we're we're surrounded by this, the Atlantic and the Pacific, we're fine, and we got the Gulf of America. Now the shy like, yeah, that's, that's all well and good. But in 2025 ideas spread faster than you could ever imagine. So just because it's 1000s of miles across the world doesn't mean that it's, you know, it's 1000s of miles away from your phone, right? Could be, you know, milliseconds. So it is important for us to share this conversation, and when you do, please do me a favor. Go ahead tag yours truly at B Nichols labor. You can find me on X, Facebook and Instagram and Ask for The Brian Nichols Show. You can find us on your favorite podcasting app, if you'll take your shows on the road. So head over to Apple podcast Spotify, YouTube, music, wherever that may be, hit the subscribe button. And of course, The Brian Nichols Show is also a video show. So if you want to head over to YouTube to rumble X or Facebook, we are airing the entire show over on those different platforms, but we are live streaming over on x and on rumble and on Facebook, actually over on those channels, Monday nights and Friday nights. At 8pm Eastern, we get the channel ready to roll, and then 9pm the new episode. We'll go ahead and drop there. So folks, go ahead, if you've not had that chance to hit subscribe, and of course, that little notification bell soon as a single time, we have a brand new episode hitting your feed. And that being said, we're gonna go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation. Brian Nichols, signing off here on The Brian Nichols Show for leishay lemish, we'll see you next time bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai