Weird Anti-Communist Chinese Institutions
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I’ve long wondered about these institutions popular in the West that define themselves as some sort of nostalgic pre-Mao China providing The Real Thing to the Whites. Like, what exactly is going on here? Well, it seems that one thing that is going on is something that they have a lot in common with the Chinese Communist Party, which is the massive exploitation of child labor:
For years, New York labor regulators stood by while a prominent dance company headquartered in the state relied on children and teenagers to stage shows worldwide, earning tens of millions of dollars per season but offering little or no pay to the underage performers.
That changed in recent months when the State Department of Labor opened an inquiry into the group, Shen Yun Performing Arts.
The agency, which is tasked with enforcing laws on child labor, overtime and the minimum wage, declined to specify what it was examining. But the inquiry was opened following questions from The New York Times, which in August documented numerous instances of what legal experts and former performers describe as questionable labor practices by the group.
Shen Yun, which is operated by the Falun Gong religious movement from a guarded, 400-acre campus in Orange County northwest of New York City, requires its performers to keep grueling tour schedules and train under abusive conditions, former performers have said.
Many of its young dancers and musicians were the children of ardent Falun Gong practitioners and had traveled from overseas to enroll in school at Shen Yun’s headquarters, Dragon Springs. They received full scholarships, plus room and board, and were told performing was part of their studies. Many received no pay in their first year on tour.
“It seems like it’s perfectly reasonable,” said Eugene Liu, a violinist who said he performed in 200 Shen Yun shows over two years starting at age 15 but never received more than $300 a month. “But if you then consider the fact that these are all people with no ability to negotiate any kind of labor, wage situation, then I don’t know how this stands up.”
I’m glad New York is taking this on, though I do wonder where this was for the last twenty years and why we continue to have these loopholes in our child labor laws.