For an eight-year-old boy, the world is usually defined by presence—the reassuring noise of parents in the kitchen, the routine of school, the predictability of a home. For Zhao Jiheng, his childhood was defined by a sudden, deafening absence.
It began with a locked door. Coming home from school one afternoon, he found the house empty, the silence thick and unnatural. There was no note, no warning. His parents, like tens of millions across China, had vanished into the machinery of the state. It was 1999, the year the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared war on Falun Gong, turning a peaceful spiritual practice rooted in Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance into a target for eradication.
Overnight, the meditation that had brought tranquility to an estimated 100 million citizens became a mark of dissidence. Zhao’s reality fractured. His father was swept away into torture and years of fugitive wandering; his mother faced a revolving door of illegal arrests and detentions. The young Zhao was left to navigate a labyrinth of confusion, bouncing between the care of a disabled grandmother and distant relatives, haunted by the question of why.
“They didn’t tell me because I was so young… But slowly, I began to understand,” Zhao reflects. The reason was terrifyingly simple: his parents had dared to believe in something greater than the state.
The Fragility of the Body
Before the political storms, Zhao fought a private battle within his own body. He was a sickly child, plagued by unexplained seizures and blackouts that left Western doctors confounded and traditional physicians helpless. The suggestion of a lobotomy loomed as a desperate, terrifying option.
It was Falun Dafa that offered the first glimpse of light. Introduced to the public in the early 1990s, the practice—combining five meditative exercises with moral cultivation—had spread like wildfire precisely because of its restorative power. When Zhao and his parents adopted the practice, the seizures that had threatened to define his existence simply ceased.
“Falun Dafa gave me a second chance at life,” Zhao observes. This physical restoration was crucial, for he would soon need every ounce of strength to survive the psychological attrition of the persecution. As the state apparatus turned against them, the boy who once feared blacking out was forced to face the darkness of a society that had turned its back on him. He watched police ransack his home and manipulate his emotions, urging him to blame his mother’s faith for his suffering. Yet, the principles he had learned—to be true, kind, and enduring—served as an anchor in a rising tide of malice.
The Crossing
By 2007, the walls were closing in. Blacklisted and denied passports, the Zhao family faced a stark choice: suffocate under the regime or risk everything for a breath of freedom. At sixteen, Zhao found himself in the back of a smuggler’s truck, lying flat beneath cargo in the dead of night.
The journey to Thailand was a traverse through the unknown. Dumped in the wilderness to wait for connecting transport, surrounded by an impenetrable darkness, Zhao stood at the precipice of fate. Any shadow could have been the police; any noise could have signaled the end.
In those hours of suspension between his old life and a potential new one, fear gave way to a profound sense of spiritual protection. He realized that life without the liberty of conscience was merely existence. The risk was the price of a soul’s survival.
A Mirror on the Stage
It was in the humid heat of Thailand, while distributing flyers to inform tourists about the persecution, that Zhao encountered Shen Yun Performing Arts. Watching a performance by the New York-based company, he saw a narrative unfold on stage that mirrored the scars of his own heart: a family torn apart by the CCP, a child left orphaned by ideology.
He was not shocked by the cruelty depicted—he knew it too well, having lost eleven of his mother’s friends to the regime’s brutality. What moved him was the medium. Here was art not as propaganda, but as a vessel for truth. The beauty of classical Chinese dance was being used to expose the ugliness of oppression, restoring the dignity of a culture the CCP sought to destroy.
This realization birthed a mission. Zhao resolved to join this effort, to use his body and spirit to tell the story that had been silenced in his homeland.
The Art of Compassion
Today, as a Shen Yun dancer, Zhao travels the world performing in theaters everywhere except the country of his birth. His work contributes to a renaissance of traditional Chinese culture—a heritage that believes in the harmony between heaven, earth, and humankind, guided by the maxim that “gods are three feet above one’s head.”
In a profound twist of artistic irony, Zhao has often been cast not as the hero or the victim, but as the antagonist. He has performed the role of the “bad police officer”—the very figure of terror from his childhood.
“Actually, I played one of the bad police officers,” Zhao notes with a lightness that belies the weight of the statement. To embody the oppressor requires a transcendence that few achieve. He does not play the role with hatred. Through the lens of his spiritual cultivation, he has come to view the agents of the CCP not merely as villains, but as victims of deception—lives drowned in propaganda, stripped of their own moral compass.
“Everyone has a good side in their hearts… When they understand the truth, I think they will wake up,” he says.
By stepping into the uniform of the persecutor on stage, Zhao performs an act of radical compassion. He lends his artistry to the female lead, helping her portray the tragedy of loss, while he himself dissolves his resentment into the narrative. It is a purification ritual performed under the stage lights—transforming the trauma of the past into a beacon of hope for the audience.
In the end, Zhao Jiheng’s dance is not just about movement or technique. It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit—a declaration that while a regime can lock a door or ban a belief, it cannot extinguish the light that burns within.
