CPI Los Angeles Promotes ‘No War With China’ and More Outside Shen Yun Event

By Dan “Nowman” Niswander

The local CPI group in L.A. recently shared messages focused on peace outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles where the Chinese music and dance ensemble Shen Yun was performing. CPI members carried signs that said ‘No War with China, Russia and Iran. No World War 3’ and ‘We Need A Government of Action For Working Families.’

Myself, a compatriot, and our sign

What is Shen Yun, and why did CPI intervene? Shen Yun consists of eight ensembles and almost five hundred performers which tour around the world every year with performances that include dance and symphonic music. However, it is not just a performing arts and entertainment group.

Shen Yun is a non-profit performing arts and entertainment company that was founded in 2006 by a group called Falun Gong, which is considered a ‘new religious movement’ in the West and an illegal extremist organization in China. Falun Gong is based in the United States, and is made up of Chinese expatriates who seek the overthrow of the Chinese government. Their Shen Yun shows advertise the tagline “China Before Communism” to portray a rosy version of Chinese history before 1949, emphasize the ‘tyranny’ of the Chinese government, and downplay the Communist Party’s achievements in ending widespread poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction.

Putting CPI’s message next to a Shen Yun poster

As an anti-imperialist organization focused on promoting growth and progress and avoiding the terrible dangers of a potential World War 3, CPI L.A. felt this was a useful venue to show up with our banners and share a message of peace. Though most people were focused on getting inside the auditorium to see the show, we did get a lot of looks and some thumbs up as people passed by.

Two Shen Yun volunteers took particular interest in talking to us about their personal perspectives as Chinese immigrants to the U.S. They were specifically focused on how mainland China is ruled by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, and how they came to the U.S. for freedom. We discussed the show’s promotional tagline ‘China Before Communism’ with the volunteers. Though we explained that in the United States that would be considered political, they insisted that it only pertains to Chinese culture.

We discussed how China before communism was a feudal society that still had many problems including economically, and how their economy has been intertwined with the U.S. economy for a long time. We also discussed how China’s economy has been on the rise and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. China has a population of over a billion people while the U.S. which is the richest country in the world with a population close to three hundred and thirty million people, still has hundreds of millions of people who don’t have greater access to wealth or are struggling with enormous debt as our government spends trillions of dollars on endless wars. That is a massive issue that the Chinese government doesn’t have.

We knew that we wouldn’t be swaying them in any way and had no intention of doing so. We also reiterated that our primary purpose for being there was to promote the idea that we don’t want war of any kind, including war with China.

Scholar Weihsuan Lin once wrote that Shen Yun’s “reviving five thousand years of civilization attempts to question and separate the entanglement between the party and the State; it enacts, globally, an alternative geopolitical discourse in which a culturally rich and prosperous China without the CCP existed in the past and is coming in the future.”

In addition to building a movement because we do need a government of action for working families that doesn’t primarily serve big corporations, CPI also makes education one of its priorities. We understand how each country has its’ own specific ‘characteristics.’

As always, we want peace and are peaceful, and that is how we left the scene.

Interested in learning more? View Dan’s morning message about the event here: