This article is a summary of a spoken conversation between two human beings. It was condensed into written form using AI, and then edited by a human being.
Watch the Full Interview Here
So there’s a documentary that came out in March 2026 called Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun. It hit millions of views in its first month online. And within days of its release, Beijing sent direct threats demanding it be pulled offline.
You’re in America. Right? First Amendment. Okay. But think about that for a second.
This is an American-made documentary. And the Chinese Communist Party mobilized to kill it.
So what’s in this film that scares them so badly?
I think it’s this: human culture. Imagine that. What we build together with our families, our communities, across generations and lifetimes, is greater than any state and the powers that control it. And they know that. So we have to understand it too. We have to protect our culture, wherever we’re from.
Because here’s the thing. Bad actors may try to destroy human culture. But they can’t destroy it forever. When you take away a people’s history, their art, their faith, their connection to something greater than the state, people don’t forget it. They carry it inside them. All of us do. And one day, they bring it back.
That’s what this interview is about.
Who Is Leeshai Lemish?
So who is my guest today? His name is Leeshai Lemish.
Leeshai has been Shen Yun Performing Arts’ founding emcee since day one. He’s hosted nearly 2,000 performances. He just came off the end of Shen Yun’s 20th anniversary tour, which performed on the top stages in almost 170 cities around the world this year, reaching a million audience members. And they did it while being attacked from every direction, from lies and smear campaigns all the way up to violence and death threats.
His story is at the heart of the new documentary.
There’s a moment in Unbroken where Leeshai breaks down on camera. He’s reading a death threat, a threat that specifically targets children. And he’s thinking about his own young daughters. If you’re a parent or a grandparent, that moment is going to hit you somewhere deep. It hit me. Hard.
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 protect what you believe in, when no one’s watching, when it would just be easier to stop.
What Shen Yun Is Really Doing
Most people see the billboards. A beautiful dancer in flowing, silky gowns and sleeves. “China before communism.” And they think it’s a dance show.
It’s so much more than that.
Shen Yun started from one group of people at a place called Dragon Springs, in Orange County, New York, about two hours outside the city. Today they have eight touring companies performing around the world every year. That growth didn’t happen by accident. It happened because what they’re doing touches something deep in people.
Their mission is simple and radical at the same time. They are bringing back traditional Chinese culture. The China that existed before Mao. Before the Communist Party showed up in the 1940s and set out to destroy everything.
And here’s why that matters. China is over 5,000 years old as a civilization. Dynasties. Incredible history. Sciences, philosophy, a deep understanding of the human body and society, art that honored the divine. And then communism came in, and within a few decades, they worked to burn most of it to the ground. Literally. They burned temples. They banned classical readings. They forced monks and nuns to marry. They forbid traditional music and artwork, anything that carried a moral or spiritual compass. Even Journey to the West was banned in classrooms.
Why? Because if you want people to sever their connection to God, to fall into materialism, you have to destroy the culture that points them back to their origins. Back to who they really are.
So Shen Yun comes along and says, not on our watch.
Leeshai describes it this way:
“Only in America could you have a community of immigrants, many of whom escaped persecution themselves, talented artists and dancers and musicians, saying, We have the freedom here to do what we couldn’t do in China. And we’re going to use it.”
Right? That’s deeply, uniquely American. And the audiences are feeling it. People leave the theater and realize something they didn’t expect. That American values and traditional Chinese values, before communism, have a lot in common. Courage. Integrity. Loyalty. Faith. Humility in front of something greater than yourself. The same things that built this country. The same things being attacked here right now.
The show opens with this line:
“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.”
That’s how they start every performance. With that.
And it ends with the message that holding fast to tradition and kindness is the way to return to our heavenly home.
You understand now why Beijing hates this.
The Bomb Threats. The Tire Slashings. The Death Threats Targeting Children.
So let’s talk about what the Chinese Communist Party is actually doing to try to stop Shen Yun.
Leeshai was at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in February of 2025. They were setting up for a 12-show run. A fire alarm goes off. Someone gets on the loudspeaker:
“This is not a drill. Evacuate immediately.”
Six hundred performers from different companies stood outside in 20-degree weather for three hours. Police, canine units, media everywhere. Leeshai walked up to an NBC camera and said, I know exactly what this is. This is a bomb threat, telling the theater that if they don’t cancel the Shen Yun performances, they will turn the place to rubble.
He was right.
That incident became national news. And the film crew for Unbroken was there. That moment became part of the documentary.
But here’s what most people don’t know. That was not the first bomb threat. It was maybe the 40th or 50th incident they had received. Over 150 documented bomb threats to theaters all over the world, traced back to China. Email threats sent to venues saying cancel the show, or we’ll kill everyone inside.
One theater in Toronto actually canceled the show because of this, even after police said the threat was unsubstantiated. That was deeply disappointing, Leeshai said. Because if all it takes to cancel an event is a single phoned-in threat, that sets a terrifying precedent. Any production with a message someone doesn’t like. Just call in a bomb threat. Done.
Thankfully, other venues have held firm. A manager in Little Rock got a letter from the Chinese consulate in Houston demanding they cancel the show, threatening Arkansas-China relations. That manager went on the news and said,
“This is America. You don’t get to tell us what people can watch here.”
They’ve been performing in Little Rock every year since.
But the threats don’t stop at bomb scares. Leeshai has received threats with his name on them. Photos of machine guns next to baby cribs. Slashed tires on the highway, done with a method specifically designed to cause a blowout at speed. Fake accounts on social media impersonating Shen Yun performers, amplified by bots, running disinformation campaigns. What Leeshai calls “the 50-cent army,” Chinese state-sponsored accounts flooding online platforms with coordinated attacks.
And then there are the threats targeting children.
At a press conference the morning after the Kennedy Center bomb scare, a journalist asked if Leeshai had examples of the threats. He started reading them out loud. They escalated. We’re going to blow up the theater. We’re going to kill the president. We’re going to kill your supporters. And then:
“We’re going to take the children of Shen Yun performers, the girls. We’re going to throw them off a building after they’ve been gang-raped.”
Leeshai broke down on camera reading that. He has two young daughters. He knew, with so few Shen Yun performers who have young daughters, that this threat was written specifically for him.
“Even though you know they’re just trying to scare you, it still creates an image in your mind. Your brain creates this vision of what that would be. Of your daughters being thrown off a building. And that was really hard to go through.”
I’ve got two little girls myself. I cover crimes against children on this show. And when I heard that, I understood exactly why he broke down. Because it’s not abstract. It’s real.
What Religious Persecution Actually Looks Like Inside China
So this gets us to the deeper picture. What is life actually like for a person of faith inside Communist China right now?
Leeshai has spent significant time researching this. He worked as a research assistant for Ethan Gutmann, author of The Slaughter, interviewing over a hundred survivors who had just come out of Chinese labor camps, in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, and across Europe. People with the same story, over and over.
The basic principle is this: in China today, the Communist Party is the official religion. The atheist party is the state church. You can worship whatever you want, as long as you accept that the Communist Party sits above your God. For Christians, that’s a contradiction they can’t live with. For Falun Gong practitioners, for Tibetan Buddhists, for Uyghur Muslims, for house church members reading Bibles that haven’t been edited by the state, this means conflict. And conflict means the state comes after you.
In China, police can pick you up off the street without a day in court. No trial. No charges. Just administrative detention. Three years in a labor camp for practicing an unapproved faith.
Leeshai and Gutmann discovered something even more disturbing. Prisoners of conscience, the Falun Gong practitioners, the house Christians, the Uyghurs, were being systematically given physicals. Blood samples. Urine samples. Corneal exams. Testing their blood type and tissue type. The regular criminals, the drug dealers, the violent offenders? None of them got physicals. Then prisoners started disappearing in the night. Vans would pull up, people would vanish. Shortly after receiving those tests. They were being harvested for their organs. Killed and used as an on-demand organ supply for wealthy patients, foreign buyers, military hospitals with paying clients who couldn’t wait years for a transplant in their home country.
There have been congressional hearings. A London Tribunal on organ harvesting documented the practice. Ethan Gutmann has since written a new book, The Xinjiang Procedure, specifically about the Uyghur population. The average age of those being targeted? Twenty-eight years old. Young. Healthy. Viable for transplant.
Leeshai said something that I keep coming back to:
“Instead of saying, hey, we have a hundred million people practicing Falun Gong, believing in truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, we have Christians here who want to live moral lives and help their fellow man, instead of promoting this, they make them enemies of the state. And these people, because they have a faith in the afterlife, they don’t just give up. They’d rather die. And that’s what the Communist Party underestimated: the power of faith.”
Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s not just the extreme cases. Leeshai has performers in Shen Yun whose parents back in China receive weekly visits from the Ministry of State Security. We know what your daughter is doing. Make her stop. One performer couldn’t go back to see her dying father one last time. Because she’s blacklisted. All of Shen Yun’s performers are blacklisted.
The Censorship You’re Not Being Told About
Here’s where it gets close to home.
A journalist for the New York Times, Didi Tatlow, wanted to run a story about organ harvesting in China. Her editor killed it. Not because it wasn’t true. Because of what running that story would cost them in terms of access and business interests in China. It’s not just the Times. It’s Bloomberg, CNN, Time Magazine, and on and on. They are not giving us the truth about what is happening in China. And they are doing it because they don’t want to lose their standing there.
There are exceptions. Ian Johnson of the Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the persecution of Falun Gong. He wore a wig and contact lenses and went to the Chinese countryside to interview people. He couldn’t stay in China much longer after that. But it is possible to tell the truth. It just takes backbone.
And then there’s what’s happening here on American soil. Confucius Institutes in universities. Control of social media narratives through fake accounts and bot armies. Censoring Hollywood. Paying YouTubers to make videos praising Chinese cities and comparing them favorably to “broken-down America.” Leeshai puts it plainly:
“The threat is not from their nuclear arsenal. It’s not from conventional warfare. It’s the fentanyl killing our military-age men. It’s the control of our social media streams. It’s TikTok. It’s the censorship of our arts and dumbing us down so we can’t see what is happening.”
That’s the playbook. And we’re watching it run right here.
A Note on Hope
I know this is a lot. I know it’s heavy.
But don’t worry, because we do get to a place of hope. And I want you to know that, because it’s really, really important, especially in the middle of these dark conversations.
Leeshai believes, deeply, that the Communist Party’s time is limited. Xi Jinping has eliminated every potential successor. The Chinese economy is crumbling. The demographic crisis is severe. The secrets are coming out. And more than that, he believes in something stronger than any state: the power of faith, the power of culture, and the power of people who refuse to give up what they know is true.
“I believe Shen Yun will perform in China one day. We’re banned from there now. But I believe it will happen. And honestly, that’s the thing that keeps me going when the bomb threats come in, when the hours are long, when I’m away from my family. That one day. Maybe it’ll be my daughters on stage for that. We’ll see. But we believe it is a matter of time.”
So do I.
What You Can Do Right Now
Start by watching Unbroken: The Untold Story of Shen Yun for free. Search for it on YouTube or Google. It’s still available online through the end of May. Watch it with someone you love and have a real conversation about what you saw. Not a mass post. One person. One real conversation.
If you want to go deeper, see a Shen Yun performance. Shen Yun will return to the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto this June. Go to shenyun.org for tickets, videos, and performer stories. And check out Ethan Gutmann’s new book, The Xinjiang Procedure. It reads like an adventure novel and will open your eyes to what is still happening right now.
And if you haven’t already, consider joining the Ark Community over at buildtheark.com. Because what Leeshai is describing, the attack on culture, the attack on faith, the attack on what makes a society strong, this is exactly why we build. This is why we don’t do this alone.
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