Organ Theft and Disappearance of Family Members is Personal to Shen Yun Performers
This week marks 26 years since the Chinese Communist Party launched its ongoing persecution of Falun Gong—a peaceful spiritual discipline once practiced by tens of millions across China. While most Americans have little exposure to this atrocity, a growing body of evidence shows that the CCP has gone far beyond propaganda, surveillance, and imprisonment. They are now systematically harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners—targeting them precisely because of their healthy, meditative lifestyle. Shen Yun performers practice Falun Gong.
While Falun Gong is growing, so too is the practice of organ harvesting by the CCP, which is expanding its operations.
Available for interviews are performers and speakers from Shen Yun, the acclaimed New York-based classical Chinese arts company. Leeshai Lemish has been an emcee for Shen Yun since 2006. Prior to that, in 2001, he went to Tiananmen Square to protest the persecution of Falun Gong. While there, police arrested him, broke his jaw and threw him in jail before sending him back to the U.S.
Nearly 100 Shen Yun artists have immediate family members who have been detained, tortured, or killed by the Chinese regime. Many of them have personally lost loved ones to the very crimes your audience would find unthinkable. Organ harvesting is a very real fear for all involved. These are Americans with powerful, firsthand connections to a genocide the world is still too slow to confront.
Why Falun Gong? Two chilling reasons:
- Numbers — At its peak in the 1990s, Falun Gong outnumbered Communist Party members. The CCP feared this independent thought and spiritual resurgence more than anything.
- Health — Falun Gong practitioners are known for their exceptional physical health due to disciplined meditation and clean living. For a regime profiting off transplant tourism, they became unwilling but ideal “donors.”
Shen Yun’s performers speak fluent English and are deeply articulate, offering a rare combination of personal vulnerability and clarity. They can break down the CCP’s organ harvesting program in stark, easily understandable terms. Their stories humanize what might otherwise sound like a distant, abstract horror.
This is not just a foreign policy issue—it’s a human rights emergency unfolding in real time, and it affects American citizens with family ties in China. Shen Yun’s mission is not only artistic; it is truth-telling. These speakers can give your audience a firsthand glimpse into what happens when a government turns its medical system into a death machine—targeting the very people who pose the greatest moral threat to authoritarianism: the peaceful and principled.
We would be honored to arrange an interview with one of these extraordinary individuals.
Relevant Article(s)
READ THEIR STORIES
Shen Yun Performing Arts | 7.20: When Persecution Hits Home
State Department Calls on CCP to End Campaign to Eradicate Falun Gong | The Epoch Times
Shen Yun Artists Join Falun Gong Para… | NTD News | Gan Jing World
Exiled Chinese lawyers grieve loss of civil society decade after crackdown
https://www.ganjingworld.com/s/VKvgoKR1pV
OPTIONAL Q&A:
- Why does the Chinese Communist Party view Falun Gong as such a significant threat to its authority?
- How has Falun Gong’s emphasis on health and clean living made its practitioners prime targets for forced organ harvesting?
- What evidence exists to support claims that the CCP is systematically harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners?
- How have nearly 100 Shen Yun performers been personally impacted by the persecution of Falun Gong in China?
- What does it mean for an American arts company to carry the trauma and truth of a modern-day genocide on stage?
- How has the CCP used surveillance, propaganda, and imprisonment to dehumanize Falun Gong practitioners before exploiting them?
- What steps can Western governments or media outlets take to bring more attention to this atrocity?
- Why is it vital that American audiences hear firsthand stories from Shen Yun performers who have lived through this persecution?Where can we learn more about the beautiful art of Shen Yun, and how it motivates others?
- The official website can be found here. Tickets for shows are also available there for purchase. You are not only going to see a performance like no other but you are being a champion for freedom.
ABOUT LEESHAI LEMISH…
Leeshai Lemish has been with Shen Yun for 18 years. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Chinese history and language from Pomona College, California, and his master’s in international relations from the London School of Economics. He has spent extended periods studying, working, and conducting research throughout East Asia, and has authored articles on Chinese current affairs in both English and Chinese. He joined Shen Yun Performing Arts as an MC when the company was founded in 2006 and has since emceed close to two thousand performances with the company, taking the stage with Shen Yun at prestigious theaters such as Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, the London Coliseum, Tokyo Opera City, and many others worldwide. In addition to his performance role, he has tracked and documented on his website over 100 cases of the Chinese Communist Party and its agents trying to sabotage Shen Yun internationally. He has testified on transnational repression in front of Congress, has been a featured guest on television and radio shows around the world, and is the host of the podcast Shen Yun Voices.
ABOUT NICK HALEY…
Nick Haley is an MC with Shen Yun Performing Arts. Shen Yun is the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company with the mission of reviving “China before Communism.” Before joining Shen Yun, Nick served as a researcher at the Falun Dafa Information Center, where he investigated the Chinese regime’s persecution of Falun Gong. His reporting covered cases of detention, torture, and deaths in custody, and he contributed research and analysis to the Center’s publications on both domestic persecution in China and the CCP’s transnational repression campaigns abroad. Nick also participated in government advocacy, briefing U.S. government offices and staff on the Center’s findings. His unique background gives him insight into how the CCP targets peaceful faith communities––and how its tactics are now reaching American soil.
ABOUT YING CHEN…
Ying Chen is an orchestra conductor who has been with Shen Yun from the very beginning. She can offer insights and personal stories about how Shen Yun started as an all-volunteer group of first- generation immigrants, and through hard work, faith, and a relentless dedication to a grand vision to revive a culture almost destroyed in communist China, created the fastest growing performing arts company in American history.
Ying can also tell the horrific story of her family’s detention and torture in China, an experience that helped drive her and the entire community at Shen Yun to create a production that would shed light on the tyranny of the Chinese communist regime, while also inspiring people around the world with hope and a renewed sense of our common humanity.
The story of Ying, her family, and community at Shen Yun is a quintessential tale of facing the evils of the world with resilience and faith, and never letting others, even the largest totalitarian regime on earth, take away one’s hope.
ABOUT LEVI BROWDE…
Levi Browde serves as the Executive Director with the New York-based Falun Dafa Information Center – an organization dedicated to ending the human rights abuses against people who practice Falun Gong in China.
A career software entrepreneur, Levi’s life changed dramatically in 1999 when his best friend came to the office one morning and announced the Chinese Communist Party had taken away his mother in Beijing to be tortured and “brainwashed.” This marked the beginning of his volunteer work to defend human rights in China. Two years later, Levi himself was detained in a Chinese jail outside Beijing for secretly meeting with Western reporters and protesting on Tiananmen Square.
Over the past 20 years, Browde has been interviewed and quoted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, the Associated Press, TIME Magazine, BBC, AFP, and other media outlets. He has spoken about Falun Gong and human rights in China at briefings on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, at the United Nations human rights sessions in Geneva, Switzerland.
Browde studied East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University and is an avid supporter of traditional Chinese culture. He founded several software start-ups, and lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
Samples of Levi on camera:
https://tv.faluninfo.net/unmasking-chinas-gestapo-610-office/
https://tv.faluninfo.net/levi-browde-exposes-the-new-york-times-distorted-coverage-of-human-rights/
CONTACT: Todd Baumann at 512-966-0983 or by email Jerry McGlothlin at bookings@specialguests.com.
