Better late than never. Five years after the fact—not having previously seen certain evidence of what happened in 2018—The Epoch Times has published a report on how pro–Chinese Communist Party students at Texas A&M complained to the university and its president to try to stop a performance by Shen Yun Performing Arts.
In the email, Mr. Su attacked Shen Yun and Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline under heavy persecution in China, with language that echoed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, alleging that the performance would make the environment for Chinese students “not safe.”…
Another student, named Bizhu, also asked the box office to “think twice” about hosting the event, claiming the show was linked to politics and might entail negative consequences for Chinese students in TAMU as it was organized by the Southern USA Falun Dafa Association, an organization run by practitioners of Falun Gong….
Such efforts at censorship are familiar to Shen Yun Performing Arts—a classical Chinese dance and music company—which has for years been targeted by an unrelenting campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to interfere with its performances around the globe.
The good news is that Shen Yun’s 2018 performance took place at Texas A&M as scheduled; the anti-free-speech Chinese students failed.
One goal of Shen Yun is to showcase traditional Chinese culture, i.e., the way things were before the Chinese Communist Party took over. It has also dramatized life in contemporary China and the regime’s persecution of Falun Gong. Although the modern CCP does not assail all things ancient with the same all-embracing nihilism and slaughter that characterized the depths of the Cultural Revolution under Mao, the party government is hostile to any criticism of itself or Chinazi policies. And the CCP’s targeting of the members of certain ethnic or cultural groups, like Falun Gong, is unrelenting.
The CCP-inspired complaints that Shen Yun had to contend with at Texas A&M are par for the course. Levi Browde, a director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, tells Epoch Times that such conduct is typical: “Chinese students and proxy associations in other American universities, either deceived by Chinese Communist Party propaganda or under pressure from the Chinese consulate, send collective emails to university administrators lodging complaints where they claim to feel offended by an activity on campus that promotes free speech or runs counter to CCP propaganda.”
