The Brief

Shen Yun, a performing arts group that tours worldwide and is known for its contentious relationship with the Chinese government, has been accused of forced child labor in a lawsuit brought forth by two former dancers.

The suit was filed last month in a federal district court in New York on behalf of Sun Zan, 32, and Cheng Qing Ling, 28. In a recent interview with NPR, Sun and Cheng said they felt isolated from their families, too afraid to speak up and endured both physical and psychological harm. To this day, they said they are recovering from the physical and emotional toll of their childhood.

The complaint itself alleges that children as young as 13 years old worked grueling 15-hour training schedules at least six days a week, in exchange for little pay and inadequate education. The suit also claims that workers lived under a culture of fear and routinely performed while injured.

A similar suit accusing the dance company of abuse was filed by another former dancer back in November 2024. Both lawsuits came after a New York Times investigation last summer that looked into the Shen Yun enterprise and its treatment of young performers. Both Sun and Cheng were interviewed in the Times' story.

Shen Yun has vehemently denied the allegations detailed in the Times' investigation and lawsuits that have followed. In a statement to NPR, the group firmly rejected that dancers were mistreated or denied medical care, adding that it operates "with integrity" and "committed to upholding the highest artistic and ethical standards."

When asked why he felt compelled to pursue legal action, Sun told NPR, " I just want to be the person that should have been there when I was a kid."

"In our view, this lawsuit offers a chance to hold the powerful accountable for exploiting that kind of vulnerability," said attorney Carol Merchasin, who is representing Sun and Cheng.

What is Shen Yun?

Shen Yun was formed in New York in 2006 by a group of classic Chinese artists looking to revive traditional Chinese culture — or, as the company advertises, "China before communism" — through dance, music and storytelling.

Shen Yun is deeply intertwined with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, which centers on self-improvement and meditation. The movement was founded in the early '90s by Li Hongzhi, who was also named a defendant in Cheng and Sun's lawsuit, as well as the one filed in November.

The Chinese government has banned the practice of Falun Gong, accusing the movement of being a cult. As a result, practitioners of Falun Gong have faced persecution in China, with thousands imprisoned or sent to labor camps, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Shen Yun performances are also not allowed in China.

Since its inception, the dance group has toured in 36 countries and reached over a million people annually, according to the company. Shen Yun has performed in some of the world's most prestigious theaters including the Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

What the lawsuit says

At around age 13, Cheng left her family and home in New Zealand in 2010 to join the Shen Yun dance company in the U.S. Her decision to join was driven by a desire to make her mother — a devoted Falun Gong follower — proud, she told NPR. But over the next five years, the lawsuit claims, Cheng lived in fear, especially of making mistakes or underperforming at dance rehearsals.

" I was in such a survival mode," she told NPR. " 'Oh, thank God at least I'm not the one that's being hit this time. Oh, thank God I'm not being verbally abused this time.' That was the only thing you could focus on and not really, 'Hm, could I have been treated better?'"

Sun, who is also from New Zealand, joined in 2008 at age 15. According to the suit, Sun was invited to New York for a three-month trial period at the group's compound in New York. The suit alleges that, at one point, the instructors forced Sun into a side split, causing internal bleeding and several tears to his leg muscles, which resulted in "extreme pain for several weeks."

After the trial period, Sun became a full-time student at Shen Yun's affiliated religious school Fei Tian Academy, where his long workdays were mainly devoted to dance training, the suit claims.  

"Back then I didn't feel like I really had a choice," he told NPR. "I was kind of just led there — all these adults telling me this is the best thing you can do."

The suit alleges that Shen Yun leaders warned Cheng that "complaining or speaking up would be harmful," while Sun was told his life would be meaningless if he left. After about seven years, Sun was terminated from Shen Yun in 2015 because he was "caught interacting with girls," according to the suit. That year, Cheng was also let go after doing a stint at the costume factory.

Years after parting from Shen Yun, both Sun and Cheng, who are now married to each other, said they are still in the process of healing emotionally and physically.

"You think you can kind of run away from this, but you actually can't, you know?" Sun said. "You're so hurt and so damaged."

For Cheng, one of the toughest challenges has been forgiving her parents, who she said did not protect her from years of hardship.

"At the same time, I do feel like I can't really blame my parents as well," she said. "Because at some point in their life they thought Falun Gong was the right thing for them and hence the right thing for me."

Shen Yun's response

In a statement to NPR, Shen Yun argued that its success depends on healthy dancers, and that they ensure their performers have access to medical care, including physical therapy and rehabilitation, both during rehearsals and on tour.

The company added that it takes its young dancers' education seriously, arguing that students at Fei Tian Academy consistently perform well on standardized tests.

Shen Yun also argued that the dance company and more broadly, Falun Gong, have been under attack by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades through harassment and disinformation. In February, the Kennedy Center had to be evacuated following a bomb threat targeting Shen Yun. The source of the threat remains unclear.

Shen Yun also pointed to a petition made last year, signed by over 1,550 individuals, including current and former performers as well as family members, in support of the dance group. The petition called for the U.S. Justice Department to "investigate sources of this foreign malign influence campaign and bring to justice those behind it."

"While a small number of individuals who were performers with Shen Yun many years ago are now helping to spread the CCP's narrative, we are grateful for the large number of our performers who are publicly standing up for us despite CCP pressure," Shen Yun said in a statement to NPR.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Spain is going back to the World Cup final, after defeating France 2-0 in a dominant semifinal performance.

It was a tough end for France, which had entered this tournament as a favorite, after winning the 2018 World Cup and losing to Argentina in the 2022 final. But France had no match for Spain, which has only allowed one goal this World Cup — and has not been beaten in two years (a 37-game streak: 28W - 9D - 0L).

In fact, neither team had trailed in this World Cup until a Spanish penalty kick in the 21st minute put them up 1-0. Spain got another goal in the 58th minute to seal the victory and managed to stifle the stellar French attacking trio of Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise. Mbappé had entered the game as the tournament leader in the Golden Boot race (eight goals and three assists, just ahead of Argentina's Lionel Messi with eight goals and two assists).

Spain, the reigning European champion and 2010 World Cup winner, enters Sunday's final on a high note and will play the winner of Wednesday's semifinal between Argentina and England.

France will have one more game to play, the third-place match against the losing team of the other semifinal on Saturday.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Maria Franco has lived in the Park Royale Mobile Home Community for 25 years, in the Van Nuys neighborhood in north Los Angeles. The community has just under 150 rectangular homes, lined up neatly on a large field of mostly asphalt, with fruit trees popping up here and there.

Two years ago, Franco faced a string of bad luck. The 65-year-old lost her long-time job packing orders at a distribution company when it abruptly moved to another county, a commute too far for her to make.

Then her hot water heater clonked out, so she hauled warm water from her stovetop to her bathroom, scooping it over her head for a shower.

“I was depressed,” Franco said in Spanish. “I was in shock.”

The Southern California summer bore down harshly where she lived in the San Fernando Valley, its temperatures regularly 10 to 15 degrees higher than those on the coast.

To cool off, Franco relied on a fan and a partially functional window air conditioning unit. When her adult kids and grandchildren came by, they found the heat inside oppressive.

A knock on her door changed all that. A young contractor named Ben Shamoon stood on her step, wanting to know if he could install a new water heater, and an HVAC system that both cooled and heated her home. The cost to Franco? Absolutely nothing.

Heat pump customer, Maria Franco, outside her home in Van Nuys on June 11, 2026.

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“It was an inexplicable experience, a blessing from heaven,” Franco said.

Shamoon won over customers by canvassing trailer parks. By working with families who lived in close proximity, he could buy in bulk and work more efficiently to complete projects faster. The approach maximized incentives from a state program — aimed at supercharging heat pump adoption — to improve homes at no cost to owners.

He found a climate solution with a lot of wins — for customers, tradespeople and the planet. The approach cracked the nut of one way to bring heat pumps, which run on electricity rather than gas, to low-income Californians.

Best of all, Shamoon brought safety and comfort to families.

Cold calls to San Diego

In July of 2024, Shamoon was working to get his home upgrading business Bryge, then called LivSmart Home Services, off the ground. Tons of state and federal money was flowing to homeowners and contractors at the time through an initiative called TECH Clean California, to help deploy appliances like heat pumps that cut pollution. Low-income customers received the highest incentive.

Shamoon is based in Los Angeles, but the government incentives in the current funding cycle were exhausted in most parts of the state. He saw that there was some money left — about a million dollars to install heat pump water heaters for low-income customers in San Diego.

Shamoon often passed by a mobile home community at the end of his street. One day, an idea came: why not pitch mobile homeowners on the upgrades?

He could install the units at no cost to the customer and the roughly $8,885 incentive per job would be enough to pay for the equipment, labor, permits and profit.

Shamoon and a colleague found a list of San Diego mobile home parks and started cold-calling managers’ offices. Most said no, he could not go door to door, hoping to keep predatory schemes away from residents. Shamoon’s offer of free upgrades was hard to believe.

But a few said yes.

Door-knocking his way through each community, Shamoon picked up clients.

He found that — along with a higher concentration of potential customers — the mobile home parks were home to many families who made under 80% of the median income in the area, which meant they qualified for state assistance, and higher incentives.

“We started to see a trend,” Shamoon said. Not only did most customers qualify for incentives, but like Franco, they needed the help.

He met senior citizens who’d been living without working hot water heaters for months. And people with no air conditioning on days when outside temperatures exceeded 100 degrees.

“It was just one door after the next, after the next,” Shamoon said. He started to see his work as not just about comfort, but about dignity.

As installations began, Shamoon stumbled on wins. Sending contractors to one community cut down on commute times and meant he could get three to four jobs done in a day, as opposed to just one or two. He could bulk order supplies and get lower prices.

After he and his colleagues first canvassed mobile home parks, word traveled fast through the tightknit communities.

People who had initially turned his company away visited their neighbors’ homes and were assured that they had indeed paid nothing for their fancy new appliances. They called Shamoon back and wanted in.

For most customers who had older, inefficient air conditioners and live in hot, dry areas, their monthly bills went down noticeably.

While walking through a neighborhood in Van Nuys, Ben Shamoon (right), founder of Bryge and LivSmart Home Services, showed Evan Kamei, a director at Energy Solutions, one of the ways he creates social media and word of mouth awareness for Bryge.

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The process was not without challenges: electrical panels in some homes did not have capacity to power the upgrades. Different mobile home parks had restrictive rules about where appliances could be placed on the outside of homes.

But Shamoon was not deterred. He repeated the process, adding installations of heat pumps to warm and cool homes.

In the beginning, he worked with homeowners of all income levels, as there were incentives for people with high incomes too, but he eventually zeroed in on low-income homeowners.

Wealthier clients proved high-maintenance, despite getting free appliances, he said. Low-income families were incredibly grateful, and experienced a dramatic improvement in their quality of life.

Hundreds of miles north in Oakland

Consultant Evan Kamei started to take notice.

He had never met Shamoon, nor heard of his company before he started seeing its name pop up on spreadsheets. Kamei works in Oakland for Energy Solutions, an environmental consulting company that implements the state’s incentive program.

He keeps track of where heat pumps are being installed and how that impacts customer bills.

Kamei realized more and more mobile homeowners were participating in the program thanks to Shamoon.

His company has installed the majority of the roughly 1,500 TECH-funded heat pump HVAC and water heaters in mobile homes statewide. California’s incentive program has funded about 80,000 heat pump installations on all types of homes.

In Franco’s mobile home park, Shamoon has completed 38 projects.

“That’s the beauty of having a market-based solution of enabling contractors to figure out something that could work,” Kamei said, reflecting on contractor creativity, “It’s not something you typically see with an incentive program like this.”

A lot of wins, and some limits

What Shamoon is doing, swapping gas-powered heating and cooling for electric versions of appliances, lowers carbon pollution by pulling from the state’s mostly green grid. But it also could improve indoor air quality.

Esperanza Sanchez is breathing easier after she upgraded her HVAC system to a heat pump with Shamoon’s help. Sanchez lives in the Blue Star Mobile Home Park in the San Fernando Valley’s Sylmar neighborhood.

Sanchez had previously avoided using her gas heater because it triggered her asthma. “It stung my nose and I couldn’t stand it,” Sanchez said in Spanish. After making the switch, she said her respiratory issues were gone.

Maria Franco’s heat pump takes just 15 minutes to cool down her two-bedroom home on a scorching day.

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“It’s a public health thing. It’s an equity thing,” said Ethan Elkind, a UC Berkeley lawyer and policy researcher who’s studied how low-income Californians can adopt more planet-friendly appliances.

“It’s almost a human rights thing in these really hot climate zones — giving people access to reliable air conditioning,” Elkind said. “It checks a lot of boxes for what we need to do.”

But there are limits to this solution. There’s no way for the state to provide incentives for every low-income Californian to make the switch. California has doled out more than $219 million so far, but bringing electric appliances to all low-income residents would cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Elkind said, money the state does not have.

A settlement from a 2016 gas leak in the San Fernando Valley will funnel roughly $30 million in incentives to nearby residents through TECH starting late this summer. It’s unclear when these funds will again be available for Californians who live outside that region, and are not eligible for the settlement money.

One way to stretch the state’s limited funds is to use public dollars to attract private investors, Elkind said. Under this model, the state pays the interest upfront — giving low-income homeowners access to no-interest loans — and covers the loss if a borrower defaults. This safety net eliminates risk for private lenders, allowing them to finance the initial equipment upgrades. Homeowners would then pay back the loan principal over time, using the savings many see from now lower utility bills.

But that could only go so far. National policies incentivizing heat pump adoption like those in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, done away with under the Trump Administration’s tax bill, would need to be reinstated to achieve large-scale adoption.

Reaching renters is another story. Gas appliances are cheaper upfront. So landlords have little financial incentive to make the switch — while there are bill savings, those go to renters.

Elkind said achieving this shift would take policies like those slated to roll out in the Bay Area in 2027, requiring all new water heater installations be electric.

The most glaring limit is California’s high cost of electricity. For many, monthly bills for a gas appliance are lower than electric alternatives. But for Californians like Franco, who replaced old, inefficient window air conditioners, their bills often go down. That’s because new technologies use less energy to do the same – and often a better – job.

Cool air, hot showers

Three months after that knock on her door, Franco watched two men install her new water heater. It had been half a year since she had the ability to step into her shower, turn a knob and have hot water come out.

“That first time using the shower was beautiful,” Franco said.

A month later, she welcomed a new mini-split heating and cooling unit, blowing crisp air in her living room.

The single unit is powerful enough to transform her two-bedroom home from oppressive to refreshing in just 15 minutes.

Before the changes, her gas bill, which covered her furnace, water heater and stove, was $40 to $50 per month. It is now just $10. Her electricity bill went from $150 to around $80. The savings are meaningful given her monthly social security benefits of $1000.

Without Shamoon and his coworkers, Franco would have never learned about the state incentives, and never made the change.

“When I needed help the most, it came,” Franco said. “If it weren’t for them, we’d be suffering from the heat.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new housing affordability law on Monday, aiming to cut red tape and spur housing construction.

At a press conference in Oakland’s Chinatown, the governor didn’t mince words when it came to confronting the state’s cost-of-living crisis, which is top of mind for residents.

“It’s Econ 101,” Newsom said. “We need to build more damn housing, and we need to lower the cost of construction.”

The reforms signed into law are expected to reduce the per-unit cost of affordable housing by $60,000 to $70,000, the governor said. One primary change is slashing impact fees, which local governments add onto new housing developments to generate tax revenue.

The one-time fees levied on developers are used to support municipal services — including schools, public parks and sewage — for residents in the new affordable housing units.

A report by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, a UC Berkeley think tank focused on housing challenges, recently found that across the state, affordable developments paid an average of roughly $300 million in impact fees annually. In his announcement on Monday, the governor called the fees “comical.”

“They’re outrageous. It makes it quite literally impossible to build an affordable unit,” Newsom said.

State Sen. Jesse Arreguín, D-Berkeley, and other officials at the conference credited the state’s investments in housing with alleviating some of the heavy burden of the housing crisis on residents and municipalities — and resulting in a 9% drop in unsheltered homelessness statewide over the past year, Arreguín said.

This announcement was also an opportunity for Newsom to trade barbs with President Donald Trump after he refused to sign a major housing bill from Congress, which became law over the weekend.

“The President may not be familiar because he did not take the time to sign a bill,” Newsom said when asked about the federal legislation, but “it looks a lot like what we’ve been doing here in the state of California.”