As white, native English speakers, we were ethnic and linguistic minorities in the birthing unit of our local Canadian hospital for both of our daughters’ births (they’re 2 3/4 years and 7 days old). My daughters and I are covered under Canada’s socialized health care system, but Jessica isn’t because she’s American; she’s on international health insurance. Similar to a growing number of people in Canadian maternity wards, she was a foreigner giving birth in Canada.

Jessica’s foreign status means a $6000 deposit from us before the hospital deals with the insurance company and personal visits from Accounts Receivable agents hours after the child is born. Literally right as I was meeting my parents and daughter at the reception desk when they were coming to see the new baby for the first time, an agent showed up for a 20-minute lecture/interrogation, asking us the kind of questions you get when going through customs: When did you arrive in Canada? How long do you plan to be here? Where is your permanent residency? Etc. She was friendly and reasonable and I had no problem with her (don’t shoot the messenger, right?). But I was already annoyed at the idea of a $6000 deposit (which I negotiated down to $3000 and eventually $1000), and in my mind I was thinking: You know we’re insured. How is any of the rest of this your business? She even photocopied Jessica’s passport, even though Canadian border agents don’t usually stamp American visitors’ passports. I get them being all on top of securing Jessica’s insurance info, but what’s her status in Canada have to do with it?

It turns out that there are different prices for foreigners and non-covered residents. But I may have discovered another part of the answer in the high school staff room this morning, where the Vancouver Sun was open to this story:

• Ottawa to tackle ‘birth tourism’: Some ‘gaming the system’

Apparently they’re on the lookout for “passport babies” and “birth tourists”:

Citizenship and Immigration Canada is poised to crack down on so-called “passport babies” or “birth tourism” – the practice of travelling to Canada to give birth so that child can have Canadian citizenship.

The Canadian action comes an investigation by a Hong Kong newspaper found that bogus “consultants” are teaching Chinese women how to hide their pregnancies and how to apply for Canadian visitor or student visas.
[...]
The government will introduce changes to the citizenship laws in the next year, Malcolm said.
[...]
“By definition the hospitals don’t ask. You know, when the birth certificate is issued no one is asking what was the immigration status of their parents. So, there is no statistical register of this,” Kenney said.

(Well, they do now! At least, they asked us. Anyway, back to the article…)

Canada and the U.S. are the only two countries in the developed world that have an automatic inheritance of citizenship if you’re born on their soil, Kenney said.
[...]
“And maybe our citizenship laws are rooted in a time when people couldn’t fly over here, fly in and out so quickly, so easily. I think maybe there’s a need to modernize our approach.”

I wish I’d thought to ask the lady straight-up about Chinese birth tourism. Maybe if we have a #3 I’ll remember to inquire about China-related issues with the hospital staff, but somehow I doubt it… :)

Some Related Stuff (Chinese in Canada, Reverse Culture Stress, Pregnancy, Babies):

• Asian ‘gendercide’ in Canada — our local paper opens an explosive can of worms
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• Foreign Baby in China (topic)
• Lilia Eden
• Chinese “evil cult” propaganda in our Canadian mailbox
• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Cultural Re-adjustment (topic)
• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home
• Vancouver & oh. Canada (topics)

As white, native English speakers, we were ethnic and linguistic minorities in the birthing unit of our local Canadian hospital for both of our daughters’ births (they’re 2 3/4 years and 7 days old). My daughters and I are covered under Canada’s socialized health care system, but Jessica isn’t because she’s American; she’s on international health insurance. Similar to a growing number of people in Canadian maternity wards, she was a foreigner giving birth in Canada.

Jessica’s foreign status means a $6000 deposit from us before the hospital deals with the insurance company and personal visits from Accounts Receivable agents hours after the child is born. Literally right as I was meeting my parents and daughter at the reception desk when they were coming to see the new baby for the first time, an agent showed up for a 20-minute lecture/interrogation, asking us the kind of questions you get when going through customs: When did you arrive in Canada? How long do you plan to be here? Where is your permanent residency? Etc. She was friendly and reasonable and I had no problem with her (don’t shoot the messenger, right?). But I was already annoyed at the idea of a $6000 deposit (which I negotiated down to $3000 and eventually $1000), and in my mind I was thinking: You know we’re insured. How is any of the rest of this your business? She even photocopied Jessica’s passport, even though Canadian border agents don’t usually stamp American visitors’ passports. I get them being all on top of securing Jessica’s insurance info, but what’s her status in Canada have to do with it?

It turns out that there are different prices for foreigners and non-covered residents. But I may have discovered another part of the answer in the high school staff room this morning, where the Vancouver Sun was open to this story:

• Ottawa to tackle ‘birth tourism’: Some ‘gaming the system’

Apparently they’re on the lookout for “passport babies” and “birth tourists”:

Citizenship and Immigration Canada is poised to crack down on so-called “passport babies” or “birth tourism” – the practice of travelling to Canada to give birth so that child can have Canadian citizenship.

The Canadian action comes an investigation by a Hong Kong newspaper found that bogus “consultants” are teaching Chinese women how to hide their pregnancies and how to apply for Canadian visitor or student visas.
[...]
The government will introduce changes to the citizenship laws in the next year, Malcolm said.
[...]
“By definition the hospitals don’t ask. You know, when the birth certificate is issued no one is asking what was the immigration status of their parents. So, there is no statistical register of this,” Kenney said.

(Well, they do now! At least, they asked us. Anyway, back to the article…)

Canada and the U.S. are the only two countries in the developed world that have an automatic inheritance of citizenship if you’re born on their soil, Kenney said.
[...]
“And maybe our citizenship laws are rooted in a time when people couldn’t fly over here, fly in and out so quickly, so easily. I think maybe there’s a need to modernize our approach.”

I wish I’d thought to ask the lady straight-up about Chinese birth tourism. Maybe if we have a #3 I’ll remember to inquire about China-related issues with the hospital staff, but somehow I doubt it… :)

Some Related Stuff (Chinese in Canada, Reverse Culture Stress, Pregnancy, Babies):

• Asian ‘gendercide’ in Canada — our local paper opens an explosive can of worms
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• Foreign Baby in China (topic)
• Lilia Eden
• Chinese “evil cult” propaganda in our Canadian mailbox
• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Cultural Re-adjustment (topic)
• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home
• Vancouver & oh. Canada (topics)

Gendercide usually refers to how people are killing so many female babies that it skews your society’s gender ratio. Most of the “missing daughters” are killed before they’re born when the family discovers the baby’s female gender via ultrasound and chooses to abort her, though some (who knows how many) are still killed after they’re born (in China and Canada). Where I’m from in greater Vancouver, Canada, an area with high percentages of Indian, Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrants, ‘gendercide’ is so prevalent that our particular local ultrasound clinic flat-out refuses to tell people the gender of their baby. We asked one doctor about that restriction during a prenatal checkup, and she told us bluntly it was because they were finding too many ethnic minority babies in ditches.*

When we temporarily returned from China in 2009 to have our first child in my hometown of Surrey, B.C., I was a little shocked to discover signs like the one above in our local clinic. We’d just left the land of the One Child Policy, where it’s illegal for ultrasound techs to reveal the baby’s gender because sex-selective abortion is so prevalent, and arrived in abortion-law-less Canada. How could they get away with withholding personal medical information? Surely that’s a blatant violation of rights — women’s reproductive rights, no less. Our ultrasound tech, himself an immigrant from Pakistan, provided the answer when he said, with a nod at the signs taped to the walls of our examination room: “That rule is not for you,” before telling us he was 70% sure our baby was a girl.

Reporting on sex-selective abortion in North America steps on the multiculturalism social issue landmine because it necessarily involves very bad press for immigrant communities, and in Canada multiculturalism is sacred. (For the record, we both have M.A.’s in Intercultural Studies; we like the multicultural environment here.) But it also picks at the festering scab of the strangled abortion debate by putting the pro-abortion ‘rights’ cause (an even bigger sacred cow than multiculturalism) in a rather awkward position. In Canada we’ve been bullied for decades to believe that women have the unquestionable right to kill their unborn children for any and no reason, period — there are no abortion laws in Canada, that’s the establishment’s position. But along comes sex-selective abortion, and suddenly women — or ethnic minority women, at least — no longer have the divine right to do what they like to their gendered tissue blob (or distinct human being that isn’t a person, or innocent person whose rights are overridden by those of the would-be mother, or female not-a-baby, depending on which pro-abortion rhetoric you favour), at least not if the reasons involve her gender. The voices that have preached for decades that no one can tell women what to do with their own bodies are now doing just that: telling women what they can and can’t do with their suddenly-significant tissue blobs, and for what reasons.

The earlier reports I read about ‘gendercide’ in greater Vancouver seemed to downplay the fact that this is mostly an immigrant phenomenon. But the first installment in a new series in our local community paper (‘I am someone’s daughter’ from the Surrey Leader) shows no such fear:

But while their data shows dramatically fewer second-generation (as opposed to first generation) immigrants choose to have multiple children to achieve a boy, the researchers did not observe such a sharp decline between the generations when it comes to sex selection.

“It could be argued that unlike a preference for high fertility, a preference for sons and a (relative) lack of aversion to sex selective abortion is not costly to maintain in the West,” says the research paper.

For those who work closely with Surrey and Delta’s immigrant community, the fact women continue to get rid of unwanted girls is no surprise.

They barely mention China, instead focusing on the larger Indo-Canadian community while also mentioning east Asians, though it’s a given that this phenomenon exists in the local Chinese population as well.

(Interestingly enough, the main opinion piece in the other local community paper was all about how unfortunate it is that the Indo-Canadian community often gets bad press, because a few bad apples don’t reflect the community as a whole, with no reference to gender-based abortion choices. I have no beef with that article, but it was curious that it appeared on the same day as the other.)

For more about Asian gendercide in Canada or gendercide in China, see:

• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”
• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• Interview with Chinese exile, women’s rights campaigner and founder of All Girls Allowed
• The All Girls Allowed 2011 annual report

P.S. – Apologists for abortion ‘rights’ are welcome to comment, if you’re willing to own your statements by answering my challenges to them (I promise not to yell).

*P.P.S. – I don’t understand our doctor’s explanation that the ultrasound restrictions are because too many babies were being abandoned. Wouldn’t allowing sex-selective abortion result in less abandoned babies? I can imagine situations where her statement makes sense, and anyway I get her general point, so maybe she just misspoke.

Gendercide usually refers to how people are killing so many female babies that it skews your society’s gender ratio. Most of the “missing daughters” are killed before they’re born when the family discovers the baby’s female gender via ultrasound and chooses to abort her, though some (who knows how many) are still killed after they’re born (in China and Canada). Where I’m from in greater Vancouver, Canada, an area with high percentages of Indian, Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrants, ‘gendercide’ is so prevalent that our particular local ultrasound clinic flat-out refuses to tell people the gender of their baby. We asked one doctor about that restriction during a prenatal checkup, and she told us bluntly it was because they were finding too many ethnic minority babies in ditches.*

When we temporarily returned from China in 2009 to have our first child in my hometown of Surrey, B.C., I was a little shocked to discover signs like the one above in our local clinic. We’d just left the land of the One Child Policy, where it’s illegal for ultrasound techs to reveal the baby’s gender because sex-selective abortion is so prevalent, and arrived in abortion-law-less Canada. How could they get away with withholding personal medical information? Surely that’s a blatant violation of rights — women’s reproductive rights, no less. Our ultrasound tech, himself an immigrant from Pakistan, provided the answer when he said, with a nod at the signs taped to the walls of our examination room: “That rule is not for you,” before telling us he was 70% sure our baby was a girl.

Reporting on sex-selective abortion in North America steps on the multiculturalism social issue landmine because it necessarily involves very bad press for immigrant communities, and in Canada multiculturalism is sacred. (For the record, we both have M.A.’s in Intercultural Studies; we like the multicultural environment here.) But it also picks at the festering scab of the strangled abortion debate by putting the pro-abortion ‘rights’ cause (an even bigger sacred cow than multiculturalism) in a rather awkward position. In Canada we’ve been bullied for decades to believe that women have the unquestionable right to kill their unborn children for any and no reason, period — there are no abortion laws in Canada, that’s the establishment’s position. But along comes sex-selective abortion, and suddenly women — or ethnic minority women, at least — no longer have the divine right to do what they like to their gendered tissue blob (or distinct human being that isn’t a person, or innocent person whose rights are overridden by those of the would-be mother, or female not-a-baby, depending on which pro-abortion rhetoric you favour), at least not if the reasons involve her gender. The voices that have preached for decades that no one can tell women what to do with their own bodies are now doing just that: telling women what they can and can’t do with their suddenly-significant tissue blobs, and for what reasons.

The earlier reports I read about ‘gendercide’ in greater Vancouver seemed to downplay the fact that this is mostly an immigrant phenomenon. But the first installment in a new series in our local community paper (‘I am someone’s daughter’ from the Surrey Leader) shows no such fear:

But while their data shows dramatically fewer second-generation (as opposed to first generation) immigrants choose to have multiple children to achieve a boy, the researchers did not observe such a sharp decline between the generations when it comes to sex selection.

“It could be argued that unlike a preference for high fertility, a preference for sons and a (relative) lack of aversion to sex selective abortion is not costly to maintain in the West,” says the research paper.

For those who work closely with Surrey and Delta’s immigrant community, the fact women continue to get rid of unwanted girls is no surprise.

They barely mention China, instead focusing on the larger Indo-Canadian community while also mentioning east Asians, though it’s a given that this phenomenon exists in the local Chinese population as well.

(Interestingly enough, the main opinion piece in the other local community paper was all about how unfortunate it is that the Indo-Canadian community often gets bad press, because a few bad apples don’t reflect the community as a whole, with no reference to gender-based abortion choices. I have no beef with that article, but it was curious that it appeared on the same day as the other.)

For more about Asian gendercide in Canada or gendercide in China, see:

• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”
• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• Interview with Chinese exile, women’s rights campaigner and founder of All Girls Allowed
• The All Girls Allowed 2011 annual report

P.S. – Apologists for abortion ‘rights’ are welcome to comment, if you’re willing to own your statements by answering my challenges to them (I promise not to yell).

*P.P.S. – I don’t understand our doctor’s explanation that the ultrasound restrictions are because too many babies were being abandoned. Wouldn’t allowing sex-selective abortion result in less abandoned babies? I can imagine situations where her statement makes sense, and anyway I get her general point, so maybe she just misspoke.

From Nankai Rob’s Chinese New Year 2012 post “Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load“:
“…parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.”

For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:

• Happy Rabbits! Chinese New Year 2011 fireworks from Tianjin, China!
• Photo Gallery: Tianjin 2009-2010 Fall & Winter
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!

From Nankai Rob’s Chinese New Year 2012 post “Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load“:
“…parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.”

For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:

• Happy Rabbits! Chinese New Year 2011 fireworks from Tianjin, China!
• Photo Gallery: Tianjin 2009-2010 Fall & Winter
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!

Last Friday I started teaching a month-long EFL “Winter Camp” program for nine Beijingers aged 8-13 who arrived the night before. We have English class in the mornings and field trips in the afternoons. They’re all staying with Canadian families and it’s a shocking cultural adventure for them. Almost everything is different. It’s rare to get a group this “fresh”, and I plan to have fun with it.

We’re using a classroom in a posh local private school that is pretty impressive even by Canadian standards, so the facilities and grounds are really nice; they were awed by the interactive white board, for example. But they were also excited just to walk down the hall to the bathroom, armed with their cameras, taking photos of everything from the vending machines to the high school classes in session with their doors open. I’ve taught this kind of EFL gig before, and sometimes the kids have already traveled so much that being in a developed Western country isn’t so special, but not these kids. They’re apparently doing this kind of thing for the first time. I felt like a celebrity in the classroom with all the cameras aimed at me.

I’ve decided to keep the fact that I can speak basic Mandarin a secret from them for as long as I can, so I can listen in on their conversations as much as I can. Between my limited Mandarin, my teaching responsibilities, and the fact that four excited 12-year-old girls babbling away at once is hard to decipher in any language, I don’t get to tune in to their conversations near enough to satisfy my curiosity, never mind pausing to scribble down notes of what I hear. But it’s still funny what I do catch.

Friday morning was their first morning in Canada after their first night and breakfast with a Canadian family. Before class started they were animatedly telling one another about how BIG everything in their homestays’ house is, even the bookshelves. Then they were talking about what they were fed for breakfast and what was packed in their lunches, how it was either gross or they didn’t know what it was. It was funny in its own right, but extra funny to hear the “foreigner” experience in reverse. We’ll see what the next month brings!

Other experiences of teaching Chinese students in Vancouver:

• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Survived ESL camping
• When ‘our’ food is the foreign food
• First trips to church
• Teaching ESL in Vancouver
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?

You can browse all of our ESL/EFL teaching post here.

Last Friday I started teaching a month-long EFL “Winter Camp” program for nine Beijingers aged 8-13 who arrived the night before. We have English class in the mornings and field trips in the afternoons. They’re all staying with Canadian families and it’s a shocking cultural adventure for them. Almost everything is different. It’s rare to get a group this “fresh”, and I plan to have fun with it.

We’re using a classroom in a posh local private school that is pretty impressive even by Canadian standards, so the facilities and grounds are really nice; they were awed by the interactive white board, for example. But they were also excited just to walk down the hall to the bathroom, armed with their cameras, taking photos of everything from the vending machines to the high school classes in session with their doors open. I’ve taught this kind of EFL gig before, and sometimes the kids have already traveled so much that being in a developed Western country isn’t so special, but not these kids. They’re apparently doing this kind of thing for the first time. I felt like a celebrity in the classroom with all the cameras aimed at me.

I’ve decided to keep the fact that I can speak basic Mandarin a secret from them for as long as I can, so I can listen in on their conversations as much as I can. Between my limited Mandarin, my teaching responsibilities, and the fact that four excited 12-year-old girls babbling away at once is hard to decipher in any language, I don’t get to tune in to their conversations near enough to satisfy my curiosity, never mind pausing to scribble down notes of what I hear. But it’s still funny what I do catch.

Friday morning was their first morning in Canada after their first night and breakfast with a Canadian family. Before class started they were animatedly telling one another about how BIG everything in their homestays’ house is, even the bookshelves. Then they were talking about what they were fed for breakfast and what was packed in their lunches, how it was either gross or they didn’t know what it was. It was funny in its own right, but extra funny to hear the “foreigner” experience in reverse. We’ll see what the next month brings!

Other experiences of teaching Chinese students in Vancouver:

• Racism in Vancouver, Canada and my ESL student’s experience
• A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Survived ESL camping
• When ‘our’ food is the foreign food
• First trips to church
• Teaching ESL in Vancouver
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?

You can browse all of our ESL/EFL teaching post here.

As soon as I saw this in our mailbox today, it reminded me of something I’d read in the news a couple years ago. A certain religious group in China, famous for being brutally persecuted by the gov’t in the late 90′s, was apparently squandering Western public sympathy by selling tickets to Chinese cultural stage performances that contained explicit (but unadvertised) political and spiritual messages. This was making some Euro-Americans feel deceived. People felt ripped off that they’d come for a family show and got explicit politicking and proselytizing.

I didn’t know if this was them or not. My suspicious were heightened when I read the vague but very spiritual introduction section and this statement:

A performance like Shen Yun can no longer be found in China today because many of China’s best artistic traditions have been lost in recent decades.

The last page confirmed my guess. Turns out the performance advertised in the pamphlet (not mailed but hand-delivered to our door by an elderly Chinese man) is put on by the “evil cult” at the top of the Chinese government’s hit list — one of the largest, most viciously persecuted Chinese religious groups in the last fifteen years. There were propaganda posters in our neighbourhood in Tianjin denouncing them (see here for images and translations), and you have to walk past their demonstration to get into the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. To avoid tempting China’s net nanny I won’t write their name here, but here’s a picture:

I don’t blame them for presenting their religion and protest message through art and entertainment like they do. We Westerners are, after all, well-accustomed to ideological propaganda in our entertainment; that — and money — is what our entertainment is all about. But it takes a little more nuance and subtly to do this effectively to a Western audience, as evidenced by the negative reactions they’ve provoked (here’s an example). Who knows, maybe this go around they’ve tailored their message a little better.

Anyway, it’s interesting to find yet another example of China popping up in the daily life of Canadians. For more about this particular “evil cult”, see:

• Recent propaganda from Tianjin, China: evil, scheming, bloodthirsty cults! (China Hope Live)
• Shen Yun Performing Arts
• Politics and art blend in contentious Chinese show (Toronto.com)
• Shen Yun’s Display of Traditional Chinese Culture Scares Chinese Regime (Epoch Times — the ‘evil cult’s’ news agency)

P.S. – “Shén​ Yùn” refers to charm or grace in art and poetry. Literally it is “God/spirit/divine” (神) + “beautiful sound/charm/appeal” (韵). Here are some different dictionary entries.

As soon as I saw this in our mailbox today, it reminded me of something I’d read in the news a couple years ago. A certain religious group in China, famous for being brutally persecuted by the gov’t in the late 90′s, was apparently squandering Western public sympathy by selling tickets to Chinese cultural stage performances that contained explicit (but unadvertised) political and spiritual messages. This was making some Euro-Americans feel deceived. People felt ripped off that they’d come for a family show and got explicit politicking and proselytizing.

I didn’t know if this was them or not. My suspicious were heightened when I read the vague but very spiritual introduction section and this statement:

A performance like Shen Yun can no longer be found in China today because many of China’s best artistic traditions have been lost in recent decades.

The last page confirmed my guess. Turns out the performance advertised in the pamphlet (not mailed but hand-delivered to our door by an elderly Chinese man) is put on by the “evil cult” at the top of the Chinese government’s hit list — one of the largest, most viciously persecuted Chinese religious groups in the last fifteen years. There were propaganda posters in our neighbourhood in Tianjin denouncing them (see here for images and translations), and you have to walk past their demonstration to get into the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. To avoid tempting China’s net nanny I won’t write their name here, but here’s a picture:

I don’t blame them for presenting their religion and protest message through art and entertainment like they do. We Westerners are, after all, well-accustomed to ideological propaganda in our entertainment; that — and money — is what our entertainment is all about. But it takes a little more nuance and subtly to do this effectively to a Western audience, as evidenced by the negative reactions they’ve provoked (here’s an example). Who knows, maybe this go around they’ve tailored their message a little better.

Anyway, it’s interesting to find yet another example of China popping up in the daily life of Canadians. For more about this particular “evil cult”, see:

• Recent propaganda from Tianjin, China: evil, scheming, bloodthirsty cults! (China Hope Live)
• Shen Yun Performing Arts
• Politics and art blend in contentious Chinese show (Toronto.com)
• Shen Yun’s Display of Traditional Chinese Culture Scares Chinese Regime (Epoch Times — the ‘evil cult’s’ news agency)

P.S. – “Shén​ Yùn” refers to charm or grace in art and poetry. Literally it is “God/spirit/divine” (神) + “beautiful sound/charm/appeal” (韵). Here are some different dictionary entries.