That’s right, traditional Chinese choreography fans! Shen-Fuckin-Yun is back again for another massive marketing campaign that seeks to cover every square inch of the United States with images of its dancers celebrating 5,000 years of Chinese culture reborn. Experience China before Communism, brought to you by a company banned in the People’s Republic and yet somehow every year is able to spend probably hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise the shit out of something with extremely limited appeal to a mass market more comfortable with Marvel superhero movies.
None will be left unaware.
We’ll skip getting into the weeds about how it’s all a bunch of cult propaganda. Jia Tolentino already wrote that piece at the New Yorker. It still doesn’t explain how or why the fuck they put up dozens of posters in a neighborhood that is 0.2% Asian, let alone booked the Lincoln Center for six weeks straight. That’s not how money laundering is supposed to work. If you have $20 million in drug money you spend $1.5 million of it producing some shitty movie that goes straight to the dregs of Amazon Prime video. Marketing it as ubiquitously as Shen-Yun is could attract attention. So it’s probably not money laundering. Probably. It’s still freaking shady as hell, whatever it is.