The New York Times’ Bigoted Attack on Falun Gong Ignores Evidence, Twists Reality
Riddled with gross distortions of what Falun Gong practitioners actually believe and how they behave, the Times’ latest reporting represents a propaganda coup for the Chinese communist regime
NEW YORK — In the late evening of Aug. 15, the New York Times published an article on the Shen Yun Performing Arts company, which also featured extensive critique of the Falun Gong spiritual practice and its founder. A second piece covering Falun Gong was published at midnight and includes inaccuracies or glaring omissions regarding the faith and the deadly persecution practitioners face in China.
Falun Gong practitioners number in the tens of millions across over 100 countries, with millions of innocent believers in China facing deadly persecution. There are over 1,000 current and former Shen Yun performers. Yet, the NY Times first article is largely based on 25 people who clearly hold a grudge towards Shen Yun, some of whom are known to have ties to a broader disinformation campaign by the Chinese regime to “eliminate” Falun Gong and the performing arts company. The paper uses accounts from this unrepresentative sample to portray the entirety of the Falun Gong faith through a limited and biased secular lens, while excluding robust academic research that affirms the reality of organ transplant abuses and challenges the Chinese regime’s portrayals of the group as a cult.
“It is clear throughout these two articles that the journalists were deliberately selective in cherry picking quotes, interviewees, and even experts that served their narrative of depicting Falun Gong in a ‘cultish’ way, while downplaying the scale and severity of the persecution in China,” says Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center. “For example, we spoke to interviewees who say they shared favorable views of their time with Shen Yun or incidents that contradicted those quoted, but many of these were not included in the article. Using this approach to journalism, one could make any community, faith, organization, or company look like a monster, no matter the actual reality.”
The distortions and omissions take several forms:
1) Throughout the reporting, the paper refers to Falun Gong teachings out of context…
…disregards their broader cultural background, takes comments meant to be metaphorical as literal, and projects Western religious concepts like “hell” onto an essentially Asian belief system. At its core, Falun Gong is a spiritual practice focused on self-improvement and learning from one’s mistakes, drawing on long-standing traditions of cultivation and pursuit of enlightenment. While there is a desire to share the practice and its benefits with others and counter the Chinese regime’s poisonous propaganda, there is no absolute designation of either practitioners or say, Shen Yun audience members, as being relegated to hell with no opportunity for redemption.
2) Particular allegations made against Shen Yun and Falun Gong bear the markings of the CCP’s manipulative efforts to depict the group as a “cult.”
The articles regurgitate points, for example, that give the impression of a fanatical, abnormal community that isolates children deliberately from their families and denies people medical treatment. Sweeping descriptions that are simply untrue. Many students attending Feitian Academy of the Arts frequently see their families, when their relatives live in the nearby surroundings or visit the campus. Those who see family only during vacations are not because of rules that restrict access, but rather because relatives live far away.
Falun Gong’s views on illness and karma are similar to those of Buddhism. Even as practicing Falun Gong has improved the health of practitioners, many—including Shen Yun dancers—pursue medical treatment for a variety of major and minor ailments, and medical records are available that demonstrate as much. The NY Times article also seemingly contradicts itself by showing that Shen Yun considers the quality of its show to be of utmost importance on the one hand and encouraging performers to continue to perform with injuries on the other hand. The two cannot be true at the same time, as injured performers would undoubtedly reduce the quality of the show’s imagery.
The article also refers to former performers not daring to speak against Falun Gong for fear of retaliation. But over 25 years of persecution, Falun Gong practitioners have been strictly non-violent, even in the face of horrific brutality from perpetrators or their accomplices inside and outside China. Moreover, Falun Gong’s teachings make clear that practice should always be voluntary and that forcing someone to do so would be useless, since spiritual improvement is a personal choice and path. The implication that Falun Gong practitioners, or the practice’s founder, would engage in some kind of vicious attack on someone simply because they stop practicing or left Shen Yun is false and misleading.
3) At one point, the articles make reference to the fact that Falun Gong has “denied being a cult,” without providing any further information.
In reality, it is not only Falun Gong practitioners that have voiced such denials. Well-respected experts on Chinese religion who have written books on Falun Gong have concurred with the assessment that it is a new religious movement and that in fact “the cult label was a red herring” invented by the CCP to retroactively justify the persecution. Journalists, human rights groups, and other experts who have conducted rigorous research on Falun Gong have reached the same conclusion. These quotes are easily available on websites like our own. Yet, the NY Times did not relay any of this to its readers.
4) The paper downplays the severity and scale of the persecution in China.
The NY Times’ misrepresentation of Falun Gong is mirrored in its accounts of the persecution faced by practitioners. In the series’ main article, the reporters given only passing mention to the repression in China, while downplaying its size using the vague term “many” in reference to the number of detention. In fact, experts have repeatedly estimated that hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained by the regime, far more than “many” would convey. Even when depicting the transnational censorship campaign that Shen Yun has faced from the CCP, the paper severely misrepresents the scale, citing one example of a diplomat applying pressure to stop a show. A report our organization published in January documented 130 censorship attempts and physical attacks in over 38 countries by the regime and its proxies against Shen Yun.
5) Denying systematic organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and accepting Chinese government statements at face value.
The reporters quote as an authority a lone expert who denies the existence of a systematic program of organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners. Yet this individual is not among the many respected researchers, journalists, lawyers, and doctors who have testified in Congress, authored NGO reports, or written peer-reviewed articles in medical journals about organ transplant abuses in China. The latter all found evidence indicating Falun Gong practitioners have been systematically killed for their organs. Such evidence has also been considered credible by the China Tribunal, the 9 UN Special Rapporteurs, the U.S. Congress, and the European Parliament. Yet the NY Times did not cite any of these experts, organizations, governmental bodies, or their easily available, published work.
The reporters also take the Chinese government’s statement about banning the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in 2015 at face value. Yet the paper’s own former Beijing correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow had evidence that some Chinese transplant surgeons were unaware of this supposed ban in 2016 and that organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience was common knowledge among Chinese doctors. According to her testimony to the China Tribunal in 2019, editors at the New York Times stopped her from pursuing the story and voiced disparaging comments about Falun Gong.
Furthermore, a 2019 academic paper in the BMC Medical Ethics journal found that the Chinese government’s claim of relying solely on voluntary donations after 2015 is also false, as their donation data are apparently falsified. The paper concluded “voluntary system appears to operate alongside the continued use of nonvoluntary donors (most plausibly prisoners) who are misclassified as ‘voluntary.’” But the NY Times ignores all of this.
“The NY Times’ omissions and inaccuracies with regards to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners—which are exposed with easily verifiable and widely available information—alone call into the question the reporters’ objectivity and fairness,” says Browde. “The result of these and other distortions is an undeniably warped depiction of Falun Gong and its practitioners, and what appears to be a blatant and bigoted attack by a major American media organization against a marginalized, little-understood faith community that has endured a quarter century of horrific persecution in its Chinese homeland.”
Aligning with the CCP
Given the above points, it is not entirely clear why the NY Times would engage in such deceitful and hateful reporting. But the NY Times’ approach to Falun Gong matches the disinformation playbook of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda machine and the paper’s longer-term record of misrepresenting the Falun Gong story in a manner that closely aligns with the regime’s preferred narratives. Three points are worth noting in this regard:
- Echoing CCP framing: Throughout the 1990s, Chinese state media was replete with glowing praise for Falun Gong, its health benefits and how it “improves society’s stability and ethics.” But after top CCP leaders grew nervous of the practice’s popularity and decided to ban Falun Gong, the propaganda apparatus had to convince the Chinese people this about-face was justified.
To do so, where previously Chinese state media had praised Falun Gong’s health benefits, they now falsely claimed it taught refusal of medicine. Where they had lauded Falun Gong’s moral influence, they now falsely claimed it was a cult that harmed society. Where before they had showered Mr. Li with accolades, they now falsely claimed his teachings included end-of-days rhetoric and other extreme ideas. And while Chinese state-run media had openly visited parks where Falun Gong practitioners were meditating to get a genuine impression of the practice, they now sought out disgruntled “former practitioners” (some with obvious ties to the Chinese regime) to tell negative stories about the practice—all backed by cherry-picked quotes from Mr. Li’s spiritual teachings—and present the results to the public as the sum-total, de-facto representation of Falun Gong.
The misleading reporting that permeates the NY Times articles follows the same pattern.
- Long track record of distortions: For 25 years, the New York Times has repeatedly failed to cover the CCP’s atrocities against Falun Gong, while amplifying the regime’s propaganda about the spiritual community, with devastating results, as detailed in a report published this March by the Falun Dafa Information Center. The detailed study, which analyzed 159 New York Times articles dating back to 1999, found that the agenda-setting newspaper has significantly and irresponsibly distorted the story of Falun Gong, be it in regards to the nature of the practice or the scope of the persecution. Its coverage is riddled with factual errors and has uncritically internalized key aspects of the CCP’s framing of the campaign.
Indeed, the NY Times has not published a news story focused on these abuses since 2016, even as these violations continue on a large scale. Before 2016, it had been mostly silent on the rights abuses suffered by Falun Gong practitioners dating back to 2002, even while credibly covering other human rights abuses in China. The silence on Falun Gong has continued despite the fact that documented deaths have climbed and a plethora of third-party research has affirmed ongoing and massive violations. The paper ignored major reports by human rights groups and the 2019 London China Tribunal on forced organ harvesting, as it does in this set of articles.
The NY Times’ reporting on Falun Gong has only become more distorted with time. In recent years, the few articles it has published on Falun Gong have been openly hostile, targeting organizations founded by practitioners. These negative pieces repeat prior inaccuracies, incorporate new ones, and in practice, serve the CCP’s goals of maligning Falun Gong and stymying the Party’s critics.
These same shortcomings appear in this latest set of articles.
- Correlation to new disinformation offensive: The paper’s latest reporting also bears the hallmarks of a more immediate CCP-driven disinformation campaign, whether the paper is serving the regime’s bidding consciously or not. A new report our organization released earlier this month found that China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and other CCP organizations have launched an unprecedented campaign to “eliminate” Falun Gong globally, especially in the United States, and to undermine Shen Yun Performing Arts, a critically acclaimed classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners in 2006.
To implement the new initiative, leaked directives from within the CCP’s security and propaganda apparatus call for supporting social media influencers who spread disinformation about these targets, manipulating search engine results, and planning to “activate” a network of agents worldwide. They also refer to feeding CCP-aligned information about Falun Gong to international media.
One internal source explicitly stated that a key element of this new “offensive” against Falun Gong is to:
“Mobilize central state media resources, university think tanks and other unit resources [to] actively share defamatory information about Falun Gong with overseas media. [emphasis added].”
Moreover, just a few weeks ago, a pro-CCP YouTuber listed “media like the New York Times” as one of three target “battlefields” for discrediting Falun Gong and Shen Yun. This tactic of “laundering” CCP-preferred content via local media had long been used by the regime in its campaigns targeting Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora.
“Even as the NY Times tries to turn the world’s attention to alleged misdeeds at Shen Yun and supposedly harmful practices in the Falun Gong community, we hope that thoughtful readers will see through the deceptive reporting tactics used, keep an open mind, and offer support to those in the Falun Gong community who are battling this unfair assault,” says Browde.
For those seeking additional information Falun Gong and Shen Yun, including accounts by current and former performers, please visit:
- 10 Things to Know About The New York Times’ “Investigation” of Shen Yun, Falun Gong
- What is Falun Gong? Falun Dafa Information Center
- Behind the Recent Media Misrepresentations of Shen Yun and past interviews with Shen Yun artists, Shen Yun Performing Arts
- Shen Yun Voices website and podcast
