Latest / Man in America Podcast / They Erased 5,000 Years of Culture. Now They're Coming for Ours. w/ Leeshai Lemish

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They Erased 5,000 Years of Culture. Now They're Coming for Ours. w/ Leeshai Lemish · Man in America Podcast

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Hullhouse. So there's a documentary that came out in March 2026 called unbroken, the untold story of Shen Yun. It hit millions of views online in its first month. And within days of its release, Beijing sent direct threats demanding that it be pulled offline.
• 0:39
  You're in America. Right? First amendment. Okay. But think about that for a second.
• 0:44
  Right? This is an American made documentary, and the Chinese Communist Party has mobilized to kill it. So what's in this film that has scared them so badly? Here's why I think it is. It's human culture.
• 0:58
  Imagine that. Human culture is so powerful. What we make together with our families, with our communities, and what builds into generations and into a long history over lifetimes is greater than any state and the powers that control those states, and they know that. So we have to understand it too. We have to protect our culture wherever we're from.
• 1:20
  And sometimes, as you'll hear from my guests today, sometimes the stakes are very high and went to fight through unbelievable challenges to succeed. This story is proof that bad actors may try to destroy human culture, but they can't destroy a culture forever. Because when you take away a people's history, their art, their faith, their connection to something greater than the state, people just don't forget it. They carry it inside of them. We all do.
• 1:46
  And then one day, they bring it back. And so I talk with all kinds of people about what has happened to the America that we used to know, the culture, the history that we want to remember and learn from. And my guest today gives us a clear example of how culture is absolutely worth defending and what it takes to stand up to the world's largest totalitarian state to bring back what matters. And this isn't something that's happening far away overseas. This is happening right here on America's American soil.
• 2:15
  And so that's why I think that this is important and why this story resonates so deeply with Americans right now. Because we're watching the same playbook that's being run here, the attacks on our history, our faith, our entertainment, our art, what they're teaching our kids in school. And you start to realize that this isn't random. This is what it looks like when a culture is being deliberately taken apart. So who's my guest today?
• 2:38
  His name is Leeshai Lemish. So Leeshai has been Shen Yun Performing Arts founding emcee since day one. He's hosted nearly 2,000 performances, and he's just coming off of the end of Shen Yun's twentieth anniversary tour that performed on the top stages in almost a 170 cities around the world this year, reaching a million audience members despite being attacked at every level from slander and disinformation to violence and death threats. And his story is one that's at the heart of this new documentary. So there's a moment in unbroken where Leeshai breaks down on camera, which I'll play in today's show.
• 3:14
  He's reading a death threat, a threat that specifically targets children, and he's thinking about his own young daughters. So if you're a parent or a grandparent, that moment's gonna hit you somewhere deep. I know it did for me. It's a scene that brought audiences to tears. And, you know, look, I've got two young girls.
• 3:31
  Right? And I can't imagine, like, suffering that kind of pain of someone not just threatening, but threatening my actual children. It crosses a line. But this story isn't just about art or politics or even China. It's really a story about what it means to protect your family and to protect what you believe in when no one's watching, when it would just be easier to stop.
• 3:52
  And if you haven't seen the documentary, it's free to watch online until the end of May. So there's a link in the description below. So let's talk about human culture and why we must defend it and what happens if we don't. So this is my interview with Leeshai Lemish. Leeshai, it's good to have you on the show.
• 4:10
  This is our first time doing an interview together and I appreciate you being here and we've got a really important story to tell. So thanks for being here today with us.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's an honor to be here. I'm a fan of the show, a fan of your work. So I'm glad to be here and looking forward to our conversation.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Thank you. And it's interesting kinda getting into my roots because I've spent a lot of my adult life really in in whatever way possible trying to kinda fight back against and expose the evils of communism. And early on, you know, for me, in my probably early twenties, it was much more focused on the CCP and look what's happening in communist China. And now it's really expanded into what I see as much more of a globalist kinda communist threat that's, in many ways merged with a, you know, kind of globalism. So you have a lot of stuff coming out of Europe, and there's a whole kind of complex web of this, you know, kind of specter, the specter of communism that's infiltrated, you know, most areas of our world.
• 5:07
  And we've always thought that here in America, okay, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, which it is, and there's religious freedom here, which is really one of the core tenets of the founding of this country was religious freedom. And so but the story that you've got is showing how religions are being heavily targeted and and really attacked even here in America by dark communist forces. And so, anyway, I'll let you just kinda give your introduction, and then I know we've got a trailer that we're gonna watch. It's kinda highlighting some what you're talking about. But let's first start with a little bit of your your story.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah. I mean, you set up a good conversation because I think it's both. It's both this globalist communist movement, and it is centered, in China. The, the CCP is really the driving force behind it right now. They picked up the baton from the Soviet Union, and they've taken all the lessons from The USSR and all the lessons from ancient China and merged them together, and then they have this very advanced strategy that now has AI and bots and all these other things, too.
• 6:10
  People probably know me as the emcee for Shenyun Performing Arts. We are based in New York. We're the world's premier classical Chinese dance and music company. My role as part of the performance is to narrate the dances in advance, go on stage and choose the next piece, crack a joke or two, get out of the way, and do that about 20 times per show, and I've done that for twenty years. I joined the company when it was first formed in a place called Dragon Springs, which is in Orange County, New York, about two hours outside the city.
• 6:41
  I didn't anticipate that this would be my career. I'd done a few shows at that point, did some did some emceeing for other events, and and really had a good time with it. And I didn't realize how powerful art can be in touching people and conveying a message and inspiring people. And I didn't know how big Shinyin was going to be. We were just one group of people and happy to talk about kind of our origin story, but we grew from one touring company to two and three, now we have eight.
• 7:07
  And we tour around the world every year. You've seen our billboards everywhere. China before communism is always a beautiful dancer in flowing silky gowns and sleeves, and that's what we do. We just finished our tour, our 2026 tour. My group finished it.
• 7:21
  There's still a couple out there performing. We've come under attack, as you alluded to, the last few years in particular. And so I've been dealing with that a lot and a lot of public facing work. We've had this documentary that came out now that was done about us, and that's, getting a lot of attention, which is great.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: And so I'll play the documentary trailer shortly, but I want to just kind of look at a broader principle that we see. Right? So obviously, here in America, a lot of people have, really, the past five to ten years especially, really kind of come to realize that there's definitely a a communist and globalist threat that is really trying to consume America. And as part of what we've witnessed is we've seen the attacks on the American culture, like the attacks on the history of our of our nation. And really, also, just it's it's the his the attacks on the history of the Western world and what used us to really kind of become a foundation of the Western world was this beautiful art.
• 8:21
  Right? This art that was really honoring God, honoring the divine. And there's this these standards that were set forth, that art largely, if you look at what's happened with the modern arts movements, the modern architecture movements, a lot of this is really rooted in these much more European communist origins that were really set out to destroy, you know, the beauty of mankind. And I think that we've discovered that kinda going back to and rediscovering that old culture that's been hidden and demonized and destroyed is really important. Yet if you look at China, you know, China is is it's over 5,000 years old as this as a civilization.
• 8:58
  It wasn't just the country of China. I mean, we're talking history of dynasties and just this amazing history. It's always fascinated me. But then, you know, in the forties when Mao and when communism came in, it was one of the earliest things at the very beginning. They had to destroy that old culture.
• 9:14
  Right? Because I think that if they want modern man to sever his ties with God and just kind of fall into materialism and into the desires, they also in addition to the the indoctrination and teaching atheism and evolution, they have to destroy that culture that reminds us of our origins and reminds us of just how magnificent the human race is as it was created in God's image. Yet, if you look at China, they have five thousand years of that culture that was just destroyed over the course of a couple of decades. And am I correct in understanding that when you look at Shen Yun, you know, say China before communism, and I've I've seen the show a couple of times, and it's it's it's phenomenal. But what you can see, though, is that it's really trying to revive culture that used to be there.
• 9:59
  Like, we look at China, we think modern China, but China used to be one of the pinnacles of human civilization in terms of just their sciences, their understanding of just the human body and of society and how to build a healthy society that was moral. And so I see that Shen Yun is trying to just show the world, like, what used to exist there in China and how that's a big threat. And so how do you see, Leeshai? What do you what do you see the role of traditional culture and that divine nature versus what this, again, this communist specter globally has been doing to destroy these cultural roots that we have? Why is this important for human beings?
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, Seth, I think you you really gave a really good summary of of what we're doing and what China has been through and the role of Xinyuan, and and that will lead us also into what are, some of the documentaries about in terms of why the Chinese Communist Party is so afraid of Xinyuan. So, basically, when Mao took power, the first thing they had to do was destroy the culture that had been there. Otherwise, how can you get people who have a spiritual faith, who have a strong consciousness of the afterlife? And it may not be the Judeo Christian one, but it's still they believe that what goes around comes around.
• 11:07
  There's consequences to what you do, be it reincarnation or facing your ancestors in the afterlife. And so, how do you get people like that to then go and beat up their teachers turn in their parents and their classmates and really toe the party line and do all the things that they have done for seventy five years now and counting, you have to destroy that culture. It took them several generations of people and campaigns, what they call political campaigns, most notably the Cultural Revolution. They take monks and nuns and marry them. They burn the temples to the ground.
• 11:41
  They burn artwork. They forbid any traditional Chinese readings, classics, even Journey to the West was not allowed to be read, classical music was banned, artwork, because all of those have this deeper faith and moral compass. And of course, Christianity is not allowed, traditional Buddhist and Daoist practices are not allowed during this time, and we can get into this in terms of what's happening with them now, and really sever an entire civilization from its roots. And so Shen Yun comes around, and we're not shy about this. We say we're bringing back the China before communism.
• 12:15
  And this is mostly ethnic Chinese people doing this. And in a way, this is it brings in all these themes that you talked about, the story of China's destroyed culture that was almost brought to the brink of extinction being revived. It's got your globalist communist movement as opposed to traditional culture battle over there. And it's got something really truly American because only in America could you have a community of immigrants, first generation immigrants, many of whom escaped persecution themselves, many of them talented artists and dancers and musicians, composers, choreographers and so on. And then there are kids now coming in, and they say, Well, we're in America.
• 12:54
  We have the freedom to do what we couldn't do in China, what our colleagues in China can't do. It's not that there aren't any talented people there. There are, but they don't have the freedom. And so some people from China are leaving China to join Shen Yun here in America with this mission of bringing back this culture, showing the world what China was really like before communism. And what's interesting watching this as an American non Chinese and seeing people's reactions wherever we go, but especially in The United States where I've toured the last few years, is people realize that even though we have China in the news all the time, and there's there's fentanyl, there's the cheap products, the IP, and then there's Taiwan, and there's support for Iran, and you can go on and on, and I'm sure you have about this, What people realize when they see China before communism is they see, okay, the stories here are about courage and integrity and loyalty and faith and humility in front of the higher powers of the divine, And they say, Wait a minute.
• 13:50
  This is not just Chinese. And they realize we as Americans, and Americans broadly define, we have a wide spectrum of Americans for sure, all kinds of faiths and non faiths and so on, but they realize that at the core values, the American people and what our country was built upon and the Chinese people as portrayed in Xinyuan, what it was before communism, have a lot in common. And so you're seeing a Chinese show with Chinese history and stories, and it's very foreign in many ways. That's why you have MCs introducing everything. But at the same time, you realise, wait, we actually have a lot in common with the Chinese people and their traditions.
• 14:26
  Then you realise, well, our enemy is actually a common enemy, it's the Chinese Communist Party because they're persecuting the Chinese people. They've done that for closing on eight decades now, and they're also infiltrating The United States in many ways, not just through fentanyl and spies, but also through Confucius institutes and media control and censoring Hollywood and all these different things, and you realize, oh, Americans and Chinese people are not the enemy. We have a common enemy. It's the CCP. So that's something that Xinyuan has really been able to show people when they leave the theater, they realize this.
• 15:00
  And what you were talking about before in terms of traditional virtues and the idea of the art being as a way to glorify the divine or to connect the human experience with the divine and remind us, right, if you go into Sistine Chapel, you go into Dunhuang Caves in China, and you look at these and you have a sense of awe and admiration because it's physical depiction of divine powers in different traditions around the world. When people go to church, a beautiful cathedral, they get that same feeling of awe because it was created by artists who had that reverence, who have that piety in the face of the divine, they're looking for divine inspiration. They often get it. And then they create this beautiful art that can really move people. And our first line out of the show is our journey begins with the ancient legend that people were once divine and that we followed the Creator to take on human form and establish a glorious civilization on Earth.
• 15:52
  That's how we start the show. And we end the show by talking about that even in the face of great adversity, we see that holding fast to tradition and kindness is the way to return to our heavenly home, to our divine roots, to however you interpret it with your religious faith. And so from beginning to end, the whole performance weaves this thread of the connection between human beings and the divine and what's really important and putting things in perspective. And I think that really moves people because it's done through beautiful art. So that's kind of the story, I think what you said is really on point in terms of what we're trying to do.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's funny because there's, you have, there's singers that will come up with lyrics, and I remember thinking, oh, this is pretty bold because it's even in in the kind of modern America, you'll have these, you know, kind of almost like poetry, these lines of these songs up on screen as as they're singing. They're basically, you know, calling out atheism is a sham. You know, the modern evolution is a sham. Like, it's it's making some pretty bold claims that for some people, they'll be squirming in their seats.
• 16:54
  But I think that actually that that's the point is that it's like, yeah, if if you start to kinda look at the big picture and you look at how have humans been misled so much? How do we get to a place where the moral fabric of our society, here in America, let alone in communist China, has been just torn to shreds? And like, well, yeah, because they're teaching kids that they evolved from monkeys in school. They're teaching kids that science can't prove god. They're teaching kids these fundamental things, which that's why we're homeschooling our kids because we're doing the exact opposite.
• 17:25
  But you can see though that that that's it's just part of it is, right, that there's been this very concerted effort to sever our connection to God and to the divine. And so I think that, you know, you're right that anything that is working to reestablish that connection is obviously a threat to Satan himself. Right?
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think I think what you're really seeing here is this kind of courage to challenge the mainstream narrative. And you put a timeline of about five, six years of people really waking up to what's happening. That puts us right at COVID. And at that time, that was at the peak of censorship of any contrarian opinion. You have Harvard doctors saying, Wait a minute, I don't agree with this COVID policy here, and they were de platformed.
• 18:19
  You have the guy who invented the vaccine that everybody ended up using saying, This is still not safe. He's de platformed. You have people like The Epoch Times and Newtown and Nixie Television saying, This is from Wuhan and here's why. Then they're criticized for conspiracy theories. All these things that we now know are true.
• 18:37
  And we were forced to do all these ridiculous things and you were not allowed to question it. That was the main thing. And it was everybody in the media and the government internationally in The US saying the same thing and you could not challenge it. And to the point that, yes, if there's a song that questions atheism and evolution in the performance, some people will squirm. I don't if they're the majority.
• 18:55
  I don't think they are from what I'm seeing in the audience. But the point is, let's have this conversation. Can people say, wait a minute, what is the evidence behind some of these things that we've taken for granted? You know, let's say, let's look at evolution. There are many books and movies about what the problems with this theory are.
• 19:15
  Can we even have a conversation about this? Can we have a conversation about what we're calling different phenomena like climate change, let's say? Just can we even talk about it without you saying, okay, I'm a flat earther, and I'm a conspiracy theorist, and and just shut me up. Right? And so I think that there's a lot look.
• 19:30
  There's so much that we don't know about life and the universe. Right? And the claim that we understand what's actually happening is really bold and I think shows our idiocy if we say we actually know what's happening. Scientists have been saying for a few hundred years, a couple hundred years ago, there was a famous physicist who said, oh, we know everything there is to know about physics. And now there's all these different experiments.
• 19:51
  Sometimes it's interesting, it's coming from people who are really on the border, what we consider science, discovering all these other phenomena that nobody can explain. And of course, theology can explain many of them. Know, people with faith can understand them from their perspective. And so I think just bringing these questions out and having these conversations, and when you see it on stage, beautifully performed in the song, very heartfelt, I think people are more likely to be open to it and to consider those questions.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: Exactly. So let me I'll play the trailer now, that we've got for the, because that's what, you know, a lot of this kickoff is, you know, this is, like, the twentieth year anniversary of Shen Yun, and there's a new documentary that they just put out called Unbroken. And so let's go ahead and I'll I'll play that, and then that will kinda we can kinda enter into the next stage of this discussion.
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: For athletes, dancers,
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: have called us the number one show in the world. Lovely job, guys. Thank you.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Very nice.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: I just hope I can continue this career for as long as I can because I don't want anything else in the world.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: But never would I have imagined what battle I joined. Hey, buddy. You guys are okay? Specifically targeting Shen Yun performance. No one wants to hear a bomb threat to the institution where your children are.
• 21:38
  We had a sense of anticipation. We didn't know how it would go. This is not a normal cut. This was done with the purpose of the tire exploding on the highway.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: This is this is crazy. These are open Chinese spy organizations.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: They've gotten threats to shoot up the performance.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: All the noise and all the distractions around you.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: This is a machine that can be used against any American. Why are they doing this? How much more of this are we gonna be able to take? We feel like we're we're at war. It's not gonna stop us.
• 22:21
  We can't let it stop us. Sound check. What can I do to tell people our side? This tour is our chance to do it.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: Doesn't matter what the obstacles are.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: We're doing this together.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: So powerful, well done trailer. And it really kind of shows a lot of the the background of this, but you, you you had a small clip that showed you in there, but you're you're at the middle of this. Right? You're you're right in the center of a lot of what's happening here. And so from the inside, I know that you're a father, you have children, what's what's this been like for you?
• 23:20
  What has this process been for you?
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: So, I mean, this movie, my first interaction with them when and I think it was really the beginning of the movie, was when we were performing at the Kennedy Center, now the Trump Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, February 2025, so last a bit over a year ago. We're just getting ready to set up for a performance, actually a 12 show run at one of the most top two, three venues in the country, very central to our culture, And we we go there every year. And so we're we're setting up. Usually, we have a show at night. We're setting up during the day, and all of a sudden, there's a fire alarm that goes off.
• 24:05
  And, okay, so we start waddling out of the theater, and all of a sudden, somebody comes over to a loudspeaker and says, this is not a drill. Evacuate. Immediately go around the building. And the way that there's all this security closing in, and they're moving us around to a whole other part of the complex. And the way that they're doing it is what you would expect if there was a live shooter or a bomb that was discovered.
• 24:28
  There was such urgency. The whole complex, multiple buildings, had about 600 different performers from different companies there. We're all standing outside in 20 degree weather for three hours while they look at the building, and media showed up. Just stopped random people walking around and nobody could tell them what was going on. So I walked up, it was, I think, NBC from Washington, I walked up and I said, I know exactly what's going on.
• 24:52
  I can tell you. And I said, this is probably a bomb threat that the theater received and saying that if you do not cancel the Shenyun performances, we will turn this place to rubble. And sure enough, very shortly after that, we discovered from the theater manager that's exactly what happened. They got a bomb threat. Was nationwide news.
• 25:11
  After three hours, we were allowed back into the theater. They had the canines, they had the police, they discovered there was no bomb as there never really is, never is, in these situations. And, we rushed through the rest of setup and had a performance that night for a full house and continued the run. At that point, Steve Lands and Penny Jo and, Fiona Young, who produced this movie, approached me and they wanted to interview and get more stories behind it. Yep, there it is.
• 25:38
  I actually wrote this while we were outside on my laptop, and it was very surreal. But it was for me the first time we had been evacuated, but it was maybe the fortieth or fiftieth incidence of a bomb threat that we received. It started the previous year. We got these in Atlanta, in San Jose, in Vancouver, and they were traced back to China. So these are email threats to theaters all over the world.
• 26:05
  We have documented over 150 of these at this point, and they're basically saying, listen, if you don't cancel the show, we're gonna kill all these people. Sometimes it's mass shootings that they're threatening, and in no case has there ever been a threat. These are just people in China sending these, And of course, it's a threat not just to our performance, it's a threat to artistic freedom, freedom of belief in anything. If all you need to do to cancel an event is call in a bomb threat. And this unfortunately happened in Toronto, where they actually canceled the show because of this.
• 26:36
  And the police said the threat was unfounded. And still, the theater there said, Well, we're gonna cancel it anyway. And actually, now they rescheduled the shows a couple months later. But that was very disappointing because if you don't like the performance, if you don't like a message in the Book of Mormon or Hamilton, and just call it a bomb threat and they will cancel it. That's the message that's being sent.
• 26:58
  There has never been any actual threat. We do take it very seriously because you never know if it's the boy who cried wolf situation and the threats are very gruesome. You ask me about my family and for those who see the movie, do break down at some point during a press conference, which we had in Washington the next day. I was just reading off, I said, the journalists were there and they said, Do you have examples of the bomb threats? Said, Yeah, I have some of them printed out here.
• 27:23
  I just started reading them one after the other, and it goes from we're gonna blow up the theater to you. We're gonna kill the president. You were gonna kill all your supporters and celebrities, and then they start talking about our kids. And they say, well, we're gonna take all the children of Shen Yun performers, the girls, and we're gonna throw them off of a building after we gang raped them and mutilate them. And for me as being on the front lines of this, we don't have that many performers with kids and especially ones with young daughters, and I knew this was directly targeting me.
• 27:55
  Even though you know it's just they're trying to scare you, it's just terrorism of fear, it's still when you read that, it creates an image in your mind. Your brain creates this vision of what that would be, of your daughters being thrown off a building. That was really hard for me to My go through daughters, I try to shield them from this. My older daughter, who's almost 12 now, came to the screening of Unbroken, which we had in New York City, and that was a lot of fun for her to see and she could handle, the movie is for the most part, scary. It does do an excellent job.
• 28:30
  And we can get into this drawing, connecting the dots of how the CCP is behind so much of what we're seeing. But she got to be there and be around the other dancers there in your beautiful outfits. It was a very wonderful evening, and there have been multiple screenings since then. Think it's still available online. So it's a really nice movie, I hope it's the beginning of, it's a wake up call for America because if they can come after Xinyuan Performing Arts, such a successful American company, in this way, they could come after anybody.
• 28:58
  It's really a blueprint for foreign regimes, specifically the biggest dictatorship in human history, coming after anybody they don't like in America to shut us up.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna play that clip real quick. I think it's about, forty nine seconds just for just for context. Yes. We'll do that here.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: This was, an email simultaneously sent to Shen Yun headquarters to, Faitian schools. Children of American Falun Gong members under the age of 10 will be kidnapped, taken to high rise buildings in The United States, and pushed down from the top. It's particularly hard for me to read because I have I have two young daughters at home. Daddy, remember that time when we were reading the Pin May story? Yep.
• 29:48
  It hits close to home. When you read the message, we're gonna throw them off a building after they were gang raped, that creates an image in your mind. You see that image and you think about your daughters.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've got two daughters, I think younger than yours, mine are two and five. And, you know, a lot of what I cover on this show is crimes against children. Right? You know, I interview people that have come out of, you know, really, really bad situations, people that work in rescuing, you know, child, you know, sex trafficking and kidnapping and all kinds of stuff. And that's I oftentimes think, you know, with my own little girls, I I see these things and it's it hits you differently when you're a father.
• 30:35
  And I've got know, call me a little bit, paranoid, but I've got, you know, security cameras, I got a big gate out front, you know, we live in the country, I've kind of, you know, kind of building a small compound. It's like, okay, kids, you can just roam free here. You have everything you need, but, you know, I'm gonna protect you from this outside world for as long as I can. When you've got threats coming directly at you from it's not just from some random kinda crazy person. You know, this is one of you know, right now, it's the world's most powerful dictatorship, the most powerful communist nation in their entire block.
• 31:12
  That's where these threats are coming from. This is the this is the nation that has a history of, you know, killing upwards of a 100,000,000 people. And so I, yeah, I can't imagine I can't imagine those kinds of things, because they're real. This stuff is real. So, man, I yeah.
• 31:31
  So what what tell tell me more about that that experience for you.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I have security cameras at home as well. I have gotten threats specifically targeting me with my name on them and a picture of a machine gun next to a baby crib and things like that. But you can't let that stop you. And we haven't gotten to the point that I feel like there's more that we need to do, but part of it is knowing that I I've seen over the years how a lot of what the Chinese Communist Party does is just reliant on empty threats. And you you don't need to actually sever economic relations with the city.
• 32:08
  All you need to do is threaten them that you're going to. If you don't cancel the show, we're not gonna bring a performing arts company from China to your theater here in LA or your theater here in Copenhagen. And that is often enough. They don't actually need to follow-up on anything because if they just encounter somebody without a spine, that'll work. And when people push back, I remember we were in Little Rock, and they were at the Robinson Music Hall there and a really nice venue, and the embassy there's a consulate from Houston, sent them a letter and told the theater manager, cancel the show.
• 32:41
  This is gonna affect, you know, Arkansas China relations or whatever they were threatening. And the manager went on, news media and said, this is America. You're not gonna tell us what we can and cannot watch here. Go away. We performed there.
• 32:55
  We performed there ever since. That was seventeen years ago. I think, I mean, obviously, I have my family support. I do keep my wife updated about what we're dealing with, and this is not a secret that we're facing this. But we are in this together, and we believe in a bigger cause.
• 33:11
  We believe that we're not alone in this, and there's not just the support of kindhearted people everywhere, but there's also greater forces at play, and it's a historical battle. If you look at our heroes from history, from ancient times to today, if they didn't do what they needed to do because of fear, we would be in much deeper trouble than we are now as a world. So I think that there are moments like that where you have to make that choice. On a day to day basis, we don't think about it that much. It's more of, Oh, there's a bomb threat.
• 33:44
  Okay, how do we make sure everybody understands what's happening here, that this is not a real threat, that this is just a scare tactic, but how at the same time do we get the police in and scan the building? We were just in Orlando, Florida about a week ago and I'm there in the morning setting up and there's a K-nine and a police officer and he's just looking through stuff like, Hey, here's my bag. You want check it? That's And that's just part of our reality now. To think that we go through airport security, we're used to certain things now, sporting events, you have to have the clear backpacks or whatever, But we don't really think of that as being, Oh, we have to do this because somebody in Beijing doesn't like what we're saying here.
• 34:22
  They're trying to censor us here. That's why we have security. And then when you combine that with the modern tools that they have, so things like impersonations of people on X and on other social media platforms, using images of our performers, creating fake accounts in their names, using bots to amplify disinformation to target us. They're not even real accounts of people. They have the whole 50¢ army of commentators online doing all these different things.
• 34:48
  Then you combine that with things that we've experienced like tire slashing and death threats, you get this sense of what we're really up against here and how this really can come after anybody in America.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: Well, I wanna talk a little bit about just modern China because I think that there you've seen there's been this big push, and I'm seeing it too even with, you know, a lot of so called kinda conservative strong voices that they've become oddly pro China in recent years. And you you're seeing a lot of this stuff about, oh, look look how great these cities are in China, and America's a dump. And, you know, they're kind of they're really capitalizing a lot of the corruption that we see here in our country. Not to say their country is is pure evil, but it's also very far from being pure good, especially at the higher up you go. There's a lot of corruption, like, just to put it very lightly.
• 35:41
  But things in modern China are very different than here in America. And that was actually what, you know, I mentioned before that in my early twenties, I just kind of something hit me. I was like, okay, I just I need to dedicate my life to trying to expose the truth and expose the threat of communism and globalism in this, you know, this kind of energy and this this push to really kind of consume the whole world in this darkness. And one of the big catalysts for that for me was I was going to college. I went to art school, private art school in Columbus.
• 36:14
  And through a mutual friend, I met this guy who was on a full ride, I think his master's degree in mechanical engineering out of, China. He's, like, top of his class at, I think, at Tsinghua in in China. This guy named, William. And I got talking to him. He like, really nice guy.
• 36:30
  You know, he's probably a decade older than me. You know, maybe he's in his, like, early or mid thirties. And I could tell that he had some sort of background to him, like, I that was kind of hidden. You know, you know, the Chinese are. Right?
• 36:42
  They're you you'll see a whole different story behind them that's not kind of being told to you. Right? Because they're they're they're not as open and and just like we are in the West. So, like, hey. How's your how's your day going, Bob?
• 36:52
  And, oh, it's going great. The chains are very different. Right?
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: There's a cultural reason for that, but then there's also a very practical modern reason for that, which they have to be protective. They're not gonna give you any information they don't need to because you don't know how it could be used against you.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: That's a good point.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: They're constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly thinking about, can I say this thing to this person? Right? How's this gonna come back to haunt me? Will this person feel inferior if I say this and try to get back at me? There's all of this from the surveillance state to what we call, my Chinese friends call, party culture, which is not Ohio Buckeye's campus This is communist party culture, which is one of backstabbing and one of looking out for yourself one of just trampling on other people to get up, to get to the top, and lots of lying just without even thinking about it, just automatic reflex lying.
• 37:48
  And so, in that world, yeah, people are not gonna come out with their story, but please, what what was
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: the best story? I I've I've I got talking to him, and I found out that he had spent, I think it was eight years in a labor camp in China. And it wasn't like that, you know, labor camp in China wasn't that he was making Nike sneakers for a dollar an hour. Right? So he was he was arrested.
• 38:06
  He was tortured. He was forced one of the things that he did was was crack pistachio nuts. Like, that was one of his things that he did for sixteen hours a day, which is crack pistachio nuts, which Yeah. The Chinese call happy nuts cause they smile. But, actually, companies in America were shipping their pistachios to China to be cracked.
• 38:23
  But he was doing it, not making a cent, but, actually, he was also tortured. He he told me about being like, they they turn a bed frame up against a wall, they'd straps onto the bed frame and torture them with cattle prods, right, or force feeding, starvation, you know, locking them up, tying them to a tree in the freezing winter, dumping water on them. I mean, things that I just I you know, from at that point, maybe I was 20, you know, growing up in a very kind of cushy kind of environment of just, you know, feeling protected here in America. And it really broke something in me. It was like, wait.
• 38:54
  This is still happening? And and so, like, what did you do? Right? Is this did you, like, kill somebody? It's like, no.
• 38:59
  So the he was he practiced this meditation called Falun Gong, right, which is being persecuted really heavily still to this day over in China. And that was when it really hit me. It's like, wow. Like, how can I sit here and just enjoy these freedoms here yet ignore what's happening to my fellow humans? And, of course, it's difficult, you know, because you can't cure every ale.
• 39:20
  You can't end, you know, end world hunger. You know, these things are difficult, but it really connected with me. And so, you know, looking at China, I mean, as I know that you you are a lot around a lot of Chinese, and you understand this very deeply. Like, what is what does current China look like for a spiritual person? Right?
• 39:38
  Whether you're Christian, Buddhist, Falun Gong, any any religions, what does it look like if you're trying to practice a true religion in communist China right now?
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Well, the the the basic principle here is that if you're in China, you have to recognize that the Communist Party is the church state. The Communist Party is the official religion. This atheist party is the official religion of China. So as long as you're okay with that, you can worship anything you want. But if you're a Christian, how can you be okay worshiping the atheist regime and being a Christian?
• 40:15
  This is a fundamental contradiction. And so if you actually want to read a Bible that has not been edited by the Chinese Communist Party, or you want to actually practice Buddhism, or you want to practice Falun Gong, or Tibetan Buddhism, and so on, you are in a fundamental conflict with the state, and they will come after you. So the last two years for house Christians, these are people who are worshiping in a church that is not sanctioned by the state, that does not recognise the Communist Party being the Jesus of Jesus, being above everybody else. And you actually want to read a Bible that was maybe smuggled in at great risk, and you're meeting at somebody's house. That's why it's called the house church.
• 40:56
  The last couple of years has been escalation of arrests of pastors, of elders, people being detained and they don't send them to labor camps anymore. They send brainwashing centers and prisons. There's tortures rampant, people disappearing. There's very little legal recourse. So for example, people being sent to labor camps, the Chinese police state, the Communist Party's police state could pick anybody up off the street and administratively.
• 41:23
  So without a day in court, send it to three years on a labor camp just based on suspicion that they have a faith that's not approved. And those are the biggest group of people. And the story you told me, I interviewed over 100 people. This book here called, The Slaughter, which was by Ethan Gutman, and I was his research assistant, and this is from we did these interviews, quite a while ago now, but it's still happening today. We went to Thailand, we went to Hong Kong and Taiwan and Australia, Canada, and a few countries in Europe, interviewing people who just came out of labor camp, just like your friend, very similar stories.
• 41:59
  Tortured, witnessed people being tortured to death next to them, fifteen plus hours in a labor camp doing all kinds of work, know, digging trenches on little sleep. Then what we started finding out were these people were also being tested. They were being given physicals. And so we started asking them about this, and we said, Were you given a physical when you were in detention? And they said, What do you mean?
• 42:21
  I was being tortured. I had broken bones from being beaten up. I had wounds all over my body from electric batons. I said, well, we understand that, but did they give you a urine sample? They said, well, yeah, they gave me a urine sample, but they didn't care about my health.
• 42:33
  We said, we get that. Did they give you a blood sample? Yes, they gave us a blood sample. Did they look at your cornea? Yes, they did.
• 42:38
  Okay, so what about the people who do not practice Falun Gong? Not prisoners of conscience, people of faith, like the the the rapists, the drug dealers. No. They didn't get a physical. So they're torturing them, and then they're giving them physicals to test the usability of their organs, and then people start disappearing.
• 42:57
  In the middle of the night, bands would come over to these labour camps and prisons, and people would just disappear, often shortly after they were given these tests. And so, Ethan Gutman and others who looked at this started putting this together and discovered that these people were being recorded for their blood type and tissue type for reverse on demand organ harvesting. They're being killed for their organs. So typically in The United States, other countries, you have on your driver's license, whether you're an organ donor, if people tragically die of a car accident, a motorcycle accident, they are rushed to the hospital, and then if they can still use their organs, and let's say they're brain dead, they can get the organs, and then you have a list of people, and they make sure that there's a match in terms of blood type and tissue type, and then they get the transplant. But in China, if you're a rich bureaucrat or if you're military hospital that does business with people from other countries who need an organ who are on long waiting lists, who are very desperate, and then you can go and find a matching unwilling donor, kill that person, take their organs, make a lot of money.
• 44:05
  And from the state's perspective, you're getting rid of an unwanted group. It's a form of genocide, and you're making money at the same time. And this has been widely exposed now. There's congressional hearings about this, but that is something we discovered in our interviews, which I was doing during my off season as a performer, these two worlds that I was in, that it was not just Falun Gong practitioners, they were probably house Christians, they were probably Tibetan Buddhists, and the largest group now is the Uighurs in Xinjiang, Muslims. And so, all these people of faith, and the Uighurs also have a different ethnicity, have been targeted, as far as we know, for organ harvesting.
• 44:44
  We don't really know the scale. We don't know if we're talking tens of thousands per year, or we're talking millions at this point. We don't really know. We probably won't know for a while. That is what people are facing in China.
• 44:55
  That's the extreme of it. And then the more mundane examples are you're just being silenced. You're just not allowed access to the internet the way we are. You're not allowed to get other opinions as much as we feel like we're being censored or de platformed for challenging something in China, the stakes are much higher. And for people in Shenyun, getting back to the day to day here, we have many performers who are from China, escaped China, have family members there still.
• 45:25
  And so, for example, one of my friends here, her parents would get visits from the Ministry of State Security, like your KGB there. They visit them on a weekly basis and say, We know what your daughter is doing. Make her stop. We don't like the fact that she's in Shenyun, and they're threatening them in all kinds of ways. And another friend of mine, her father was ill and she can go see him one last time because she's blacklisted.
• 45:49
  All of our performers are blacklisted. And so, you have to make a choice between your family back in China and freedom and this message of hope and reviving a culture and fighting this dictatorship outside. And that's true for anybody who considers themselves a dissident, a critic of the Chinese Communist regime, including people like myself who are not Chinese, including some of our leading professors on Chinese history, people like Arthur Waldron, blacklisted for years because they published something that the Chinese Communist Party didn't like, there's surveillance, and they're not allowed to get visas. And if you're a journalist trying to cover something in China, can't get a visa, let's say you spent years learning Chinese, then more years building up your contacts there. Are you gonna throw all that away and get kicked out of the country for one human rights story?
• 46:36
  So, we had this woman testify in the London Tribunal on organ harvesting, which was a big milestone for documenting what's happening. A woman who was a journalist for the New York Times, Didi Tatlau was her name, still is her name, and, she she wanted to do a a story about organ harvesting in China, and her editor at the New York Times said, no. You killed the story. And that's what we're facing. We're facing censorship by our own supposedly trusted media.
• 47:05
  The New York Times is probably the biggest culprit of this, but it's also Bloomberg and CNN and Time Magazine and on and on and on, who are not giving us the truth of what's happening in China. And they're doing it because of their own interests in opening, keeping keeping their websites open and their magazine on stands there and having access for their journalists. You have some exceptions. Ian Johnson of The Wall Street Journal is probably the the biggest one that comes to mind. He won a Pulitzer Prize.
• 47:28
  He's this, you know, blue eyed blonde haired guy, and he would put on contact lenses and a wig and go into the countryside and interview people. And he wrote a series of articles about the persecution of Falun Gong in China. And, of course, he couldn't stay in China much long. He went on to Germany and other bureaus after that. So, it is possible, but it takes fine.
• 47:49
  It takes faith in what you're doing and maybe in higher powers. It is possible. But otherwise, it's this very slow infiltration, the kind of stuff that Skalsin, and I'm sure you've talked about him on your show, and the Naked Communist, a book that was written in the 50s and 60s, outlines there the goals of the communist movement and step by step they're happening. It's the stuff that Yuri Bezmanov talked about in terms of how the Soviets were trying to take down America. You see the CCP using all these playbooks and they're doing it one step at a time.
• 48:19
  And so you need people talking about it like your podcast. You need performances like Shen Yun. You need the movie Unbroken, and you just to wake up and realize this big threat. It's not distant, they're not gonna come after us with, I mean, might, but the threat is not from their nuclear arsenal. It's not from conventional warfare.
• 48:37
  It's the stuff that they're doing right now. It's the fentanyl that's killing all our military aged men. It's the control of our social media stream, it's TikTok, and it's censorship of our arts in Hollywood and our media, and dumbing us down and not allowing us to really see what is happening.
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's, because I remember, you know, you mentioned, the different ethnic groups there. And, you know, one thing that you you start to see with the organ harvesting is that they're targeting people that are generally healthy. Right? So Yes.
• 49:05
  It's like you could assume that your typical house Christian is of a different health than the local mob boss who's probably full of, you know, drinking alcohol and smoking and, you know, and same for Falun Gong. Right? You know, typically, don't drink or smoke.
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: They don't smoke. They don't drink. They don't do drugs. You know? So they may have some surface injuries from torture, but their kidneys are fine.
• 49:24
  Exactly. So, yeah, that's what they do.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: Well, I remember one of the earliest interviews I did on the show is I interviewed a guy named, doctor Invertoti. Mhmm. And, you know, he was someone that had, fled. I mean, he was literally forced to do live organ harvesting, and he, shortly after, led or kinda left the country. And I think he was an Uber dry he was, like, a brilliant surgeon, yet he was an Uber driver in The UK when I spoke to him.
• 49:47
  And, you know, one thing and this was probably four or five years ago. And one thing he said that really shocked me in talking about the Uighurs, he was like he was explaining how, oh, yeah. The Uighurs are key for their organ harvesting because all the wealthy Middle Easterners that are Muslim, they want the halal, the kind of Muslim they they don't wanna eat Right. Or they don't want an organ that's been eating pork. Right?
• 50:08
  Which, you know, the Chinese eat a lot of pork. It's a very common, you know, kinda meat source in China.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: And so he said, yeah.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: He's like, they were yeah. Yeah. You're right. They he
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: said they were the number one customers for the Uighur organs. And you look at that and you think, of course, you know, we we're we try to be aware of of persecution and, you know, these things, tyranny everywhere. And, of course, we're seeing some of these things emerging here in America. Even under Biden, you had people that were, you know, strong kind of pro America Christians being labeled as domestic terrorists. Right?
• 50:41
  So these are things that
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: To me, it's like, okay. These are red flags. But in China, it's like, if you don't practice the state run version of your religion, where literally they've edited out the miracles of Christ from the Bible. Right? Because you have to believe that the CCP is the highest power.
• 50:57
  And so it's like, if you don't do that, you could literally be walking on the street one day, have a a van pull up, black bag over your head, you're gone, no one asked a question. Right? Because I've been to China many times, and that was my feeling there. It's like this it's like, how do you how I describe China? It's the sense that you could be on a street, a black van could come up and take someone away with the bag over their head, and everybody would just look away because they knew that they could be next if they did anything about it.
• 51:23
  So that was just the overall atmosphere there. But if you look at just the insanity of it, that they're scooping up what I think are often as the best people of a society, the most moral, the most principled people, torturing them, throwing them into prisons, forced labor, but then they're just plucking them off to harvest their organs, which is and they've probably made billions and billions and billions of dollars selling the organs. And and from what I've read, they will take someone who's a father and a husband. He's in he's he's been there for a couple of years. They cut them up.
• 51:57
  That's usually how they execute. It's it's execution via organ extraction. They they will just give them some sort of injection to make them say can't move, but not to calm you know, not to kind of stop their pain. Remove all the organs, cremate the body, then the body gets handed to the family. Oh, your husband committed suicide when he was in prison.
• 52:16
  Here's your bill for his cremation. Here's your bill for his stay. I mean and this is just happening every single day nonstop in China, like, to this very day. It's just it's insane to to think about.
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad you had Tati on your show. The man I mentioned, Ethan Gutman, who wrote the book that I worked on with him, The Slaughter, he actually just came out, and I'll do a little plug for him here, with a new book called The Xinjiang Procedure. You might talk to him also, and he interviewed not just Tut, he went traveling throughout Central Asia, and actually part of the book is almost reads like an adventure novel because of his kind of backroads there in Kyrgyzstan, all these different places, trying to find these Uighurs who escaped and getting their stories, and there you go. And he discovered that, that's right, it's right there in the beginning, the text here says to 28 years old, he discovered that that was the average age, like the magic number that they were looking for. So, these are young, healthy people that they're targeting now in basically concentration camps in Xinjiang.
• 53:18
  And this is the same China of the Olympics and the China of the movies and then the electric vehicles and all this stuff, this is what's happening there. This Nazi style concentration camp that instead of gassing people, you kill them for their organs and charge the family for the cremation. What a missed opportunity for the Chinese regime for a developing country with such a proud history, instead of saying, hey, we have all these people of faith. We have a 100,000,000 people, a 100,000,000 people practicing Falun Gong, believing in truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. We have Christians here who wanna be kind people, who wanna live a moral life and help their fellow man.
• 53:57
  And these are often people who have success. These are not just country bumpkins who have no education. Not that there's anything wrong with being a country bumpkin, but these are people with PhDs and government officials and leaders in society and saying, Wait a minute, what's more to life beyond the material? I believe there's higher power here, and they pick up a faith. And instead of promoting this and, Hey, these are good people, they make them enemies of the state.
• 54:22
  And then these people, because they have a spine and because they have a faith in the afterlife, they don't just give up. It's not like, okay, I won't do yoga. I'll do Pilates. Like, no, this their identity now and you're going after their identity and they'd rather die. They don't do it willingly, but they will take the risk.
• 54:38
  They will go to Tiananmen Square and hold up a banner. They will go and they'll hand out leaflets in the middle of the night, and they will go to church meetings in somebody's basement. So that's what I think the Communist Party underestimated is the power of faith and the power of people's conviction, the force of their conviction when they have a strong belief. And I believe that that power will outlast the Communist Party. I believe that Shen Yun Performing Arts will perform in China one day.
• 55:04
  We're banned from there now, but I believe it will be there. And that, frankly, is something that keeps me going. When the going gets tough and we get all these bomb threats and it's long hours of travel away from the family, I think about that. I really do. That one day, and I hope to be on stage for that or at least witness it.
• 55:20
  Maybe it'll be my daughters on stage. We'll see. But I we do believe it's a matter of time. I I have no idea. People ask me often, how long will the Communist Party stay in power?
• 55:30
  There's big, big questions. What happens after Xi Jinping? He's basically killed off anybody who could succeed him. The country's fragmented. They have a huge demographic issue.
• 55:39
  The economics are terrible. We still don't know how many people died during COVID. You have all these empty cities, but you're right. And then you have these young Americans going to China, some of them are very popular on YouTube and on TikTok, and doing these almost identical videos about, look at the roads here, we have potholes in New York. We do have potholes in New York, but that's not the point.
• 55:59
  They talk, it's all of this propaganda for the CCP, And then they think, yeah, why? And you have these people crying, oh, if I were in China, I could get an apartment. And here in America, this is not the dream that I believed. All this emotional stuff and all the algorithms just build this stuff up to try to sell us this lie that you'd be better off in China. I recommend for people who really think it's better off, live there for a while and see what happens.
• 56:23
  You see how you're treated there, and it's not that there aren't kind people and happy stories in China. It's that if you're part of that group that in some way the Chinese Communist Party is going after at that time, at any given time, that group can change, and it goes back and forth over the years, you will be targeted. So you're playing Russian roulette with your life being out there. And if you're just opportunistic or hedonistic, you don't care about anything, yeah, maybe you could do okay. If you actually have a faith and you wanna make the world a better place and take care of the people around you, good luck.
• 56:56
  That's why so many people leave there.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: And they come here and they start a new life here.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And so, in wrapping up, how can people learn more? Where can they watch this documentary? Where can they find a Shen Yun show? Is is are they still on tour this year, or is it into the season?
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: So our season goes from around, late December to early May. There will be performances in Toronto, where our shows were canceled. They're rescheduling them for June. We have some performances in Paris if we have French listeners, but next December we'll have a whole new show. It's an all new show every year.
• 57:36
  In the meantime, can go to shenyun.org, shenyun.org, you can see a lot of videos for free there. You can see the colors and learn about the performers and some of their stories, including the people who have overcome tremendous tragedy in their life to still perform with so much joy. And Unbroken, if you just look up The Untold Story of Xinyuan on YouTube or just Google it, you should be able to find a free version of it. I believe it's still available, and we're doing screenings in LA and in Washington and other cities. So there's a lot of good information out there.
• 58:10
  There's a lot of disinformation out there. You very likely come across as you're searching for this, and that's a whole thing we haven't talked about, although Unbroken does a really good job in getting into that, how the Chinese Communist Party is really pulling the strings behind the New York Times coverage, behind these YouTube videos attacking us, paying YouTubers to do these kinds of things. So there's a lot of disinformation out there. You have to really sift through it to get to the real content, shows like yours and, some of the websites that I mentioned.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: Well, good. Well, Leeshai, thank you for giving us your time today, but also thank you for really sacrificing a lot of the last twenty years of your life for this. I think it's it is important, and I think that I do believe that one day it will be you know, we'll return back to China, not to communist China, but I also agree that there's a lot of indicators that show that the the CCP is really they've climbed a very tall ladder with no way to get down. And now, Xi Jinping is sitting up there all alone, and, it's yeah. We'll we'll see.
• 59:09
  Think that, you know, only God knows when, but I think that the the CCP is doomed, to collapse. I think that we'll see massive changes globally when that happens, and, we can hope and pray for that, as we do any any kind of tyrannical regime that shouldn't exist here on Earth. And, yeah, just, you know, thank you again for doing what you're doing, and thank you for giving us your time. And I'll make sure that the links for what we talked about are gonna be in the description for the show so people can, you know, look at shows in their area, for next year, the next season, watch the unbroken documentary, and more. So, again, thank you so much for coming with us today.
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Seth. Thank you so much for your time.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.