Shen Yun Dancers Persecuted by the CCP

A new documentary called Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun premiered on March 24, 2026, and was released to the public on March 25, 2026. The film explores the rise of Shen Yun Performing Arts and details the targeted sabotage, smear campaigns, and threats the company has faced from the Chinese Communist Party. It follows classical Chinese dancers who performs globally and chronicles how some of them, with training and persistence, made it to the international stage. The film also explores how they have been the target of political intimation and threats of violence on many levels.

Why would the CCP target a dance company of all things? The film explores this and gives explanations such as how the company performs classical or traditional Chinese dance—an art which was revered before Mao—and because the troupe also practices the spiritual exercises of Falun Gong.

Each performance expresses stories of the old Chinese culture, through dance movement. There’s also numbers of how authoritarian power came to crush the old ways. The CCP does not want any of this history to be expressed on any stage.

Shen Yun, means “beauty of divine being dancing” and indeed the shows are truly beautiful. But the CCP recognizes no divine being, much less one that dances, because Communist China is an atheist country.

Shen Yun Performing Arts was founded in 2006. It is based in New York City. Each dancer is highly trained and the shows give spectacular visuals. The documentary lays all this out, as well as how CCP hires attack agents to smear the troupe, and give false and defamatory information about them. In short, the CCP has aimed to take them out.

In the program below, my guest is the executive producer of the documentary. He is Steve Lance, an investigative journalist with the Epoch Times’ NTD-TV arm. He is also the host of Capitol Report, a political news show in Washington DC. He chose to produce this film in some measure to find out why stories and reviews about Shen Yun printed in the New York Times were so full of factual error. Twelve stories published for the Times were outright slanderous and false. Why? What was behind this? Have a listen.

—from The Terry Gilberg Show, TNT, Dynamite Discussions. June, 2026.