Our north star for everything we do in terms of our standards for projects is Shen Yun.  This is an example provided to us by Master Li Hongzhi.  Applying the show to our own projects is always going to be a layered subject.  It requires that each practitioner to contemplate how the show exists, how its execution pertains to his or her own tasks, and of course how to related it to study of the books and lectures.  Here are some points:

• Shen Yun appeals to everyone in the upper class, across the political spectrum.  People from all kinds of backgrounds in the upper class attend and appreciate the show, as long as they are interested in the performing arts. No one feels alienated, no one feels like he or she can’t agree with the show.
  • In whatever we are doing, we should appeal across the political spectrum, including when our project’s target audience lies outside of the upper class.  Otherwise, it will limit our reach in society.  Though we don’t need to make everyone happy, we know that everyone should like what we produce, just like everyone in the upper class likes Shen Yun.
    • This is possible but is not happening at Epoch Times and NTD.

• In Shen Yun, dancers and members of the orchestra push themselves to be the best in the world, and they are all on the same page with respect to this.  They have guidance from Master Li Hongzhi to turn their hard work into something the entire world respects and follows.
  • For the show to be pulled off on such a tight schedule, everyone has to cooperate well, and no one can slack off in terms of skill or the show cannot happen.  The dancers are always holding competitions and trying to do better than the previous year.  This is how it was set up for them, a structure provided for all who work there. There is no reason practitioners in New York can’t be this way at our own projects (though not competitive, of course).
    • Not only should cooperation seem vital to the task of working at a practitioner-run project and feel just as important as if everyone is working at Shen Yun, each practitioner should also hope to do better with each passing year in terms of skill, standards, and presentation.
      • This is not exactly what happens at Epoch Times and NTD, where there is no indication that there are efforts to continuously improve the appeal paper, which is lately quite bland and the news feeds look generic.
  • At Shen Yun, you might say that high standards are possible no matter what the cultivation states are of the practitioners involved, because the entire show receives powerful direction for everything. 
    • At other projects, practitioners should tie the importance of their own cultivation states to getting superb outcomes; only by letting go of ego in any difficult situation, in any conflict, can you reach an acceptable standard. 
    • You have to care about what you are doing at the project, and you have to be concerned when something isn’t right, in your own work or someone else’s. 
    • On any given day, you want to hear from another practitioner about how to do better in anything, first for your own cultivation progress and then at the same time because any problem you overlooked will negatively affect the impact of your work at the project. 
    • You don’t get angry when someone says something you can improve on,  because that’s what you’re hoping to get, which is a way to do better than the previous month, week, or day.  Additionally, you aren’t afraid to get flack from someone after they receive criticism from you about something they need to improve on, because that is their job too, to improve themselves, and you know what your goal is, which is to make your group’s project run as an example for society.  As long as you delivered the criticism fairly without intention to harm, you will be fine because there shouldn’t be any situation where you were pushed beyond the limit at Epoch Times.
    • Getting criticism isn’t upsetting to you; it’s what you expect everyday, and you are happy it can help you improve what you are doing.  Though it stings your ego, you are happy it can remove any flaw in yourself that holds you back.  You don’t want flaws in yourself.  You want to be better than ordinary.  You want your project to be doing well.

Mandatory Fa-Study at Practitioner-Run Projects

NTD, Epoch Times, and other practitioner-run projects should implement mandatory Fa-study, including for any non-practitioners who work at these places. Implementation has to be assessed in person and could entail sending out specific reading assignments.  Though making Fa-study mandatory is something usually not allowed, such as at practice sites, it is permitted to set this as a requirement for these projects.  If you don’t want to do it, just leave. 

• I already don’t like that there are non-practitioners working at these places, so they have to conform to what we need. The issue with hiring non-practitioners is that they have a tendency of feeling uneasy about the practice because they are ordinary people who worry about what other people think of them, and they accidentally express it at times, in their speech or writing, sometimes on the air, which is why their roles have to be scrutinized in the future if they are to continue working there.  They truly need to understand the practice by regularly reading the books and lectures. We may need to make them practice the exercises too, which they shouldn’t object to. Because of their relation to us as outsiders, they might say some remarks that undermine us when they are spending time with social contacts outside of our buildings, fearing loss of reputation from someone who doesn’t know what Falun Gong is and has critical thoughts towards spirituality in general.  This is just what happens, non-practitioners are not that strong at resisting social pressure, so it has to be mitigated.  Non-practitioners are to be avoided at all times for project tasks.

Returning The FalunDafa.Org Website to Its Normal Condition

In the last decade, there have been several unauthorized and seriously wong changes made to the English Falun Dafa website.

• In English, the translation at the top of the website is supposed to be Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance, but some practitioners changed this to Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance a decade ago to suit their notions.  “Benevolence” is the middle character translation to use at the top of the website like before. Think about this: why did they even do that?  Why didn’t they leave it alone since it was there the way it was for a long time?  They had an agenda to be more broadly accepted by the outside world.

– The “Classes” hyperlink label has to be switched back to “Contacts”.  This should be self-explanatory, as we don’t hold classes.  This was done by a specific individual who is attached to scholarship, who is related to “Team Yellow” and the 2018 “cultural translation” of Zhuan Falun.  He wishes that the practice is like going to college, but it isn’t, so he changed “Contacts” to “Classes.”  Everyone should be clear that this phenomenon is talked about in Zhuan Falun, Zhuan Falun II, and Essentials for Further Advancement.

– The 2018 “cultural translation” of Zhuan Falun has to be taken down because it violates the absolute prohibition against interpretations.  This “Team Yellow” tried to get around that by way of the task of translation, and they came up with this term, “cultural translation.”  Translations have to be accurate and reflect the original Chinese without the translator’s own notions being introduced.  This issue is emphasized strongly in Zhuan Falun II.

– Changes to older translations that were made by “Team Yellow” have to be reverted back to the originals.  In the future, any improvements made to earlier translations have to be suggested by native Chinese speakers unless the translator is a genuine scholar in the field who has near-native fluency, which “Team Yellow”
does not.  Translations by “Team Yellow” have to be removed everywhere because they deviate from the Chinese in an interpretive way.  Additionally, “Team Yellow” is a combative individual who has misunderstood the requirements of the practice, which disallow anything like the online feedback form on the English website he made that attempts to pre-empt criticism by asking personal, vetting questions about the person (“Do you know any foreign languages?”).  Cultivation is a serious matter, and the English website is not a playground for this reckless translator who makes up odd, academic-sounding understandings of the practice inside his own translations.  He then pushes them on everyone by reorganizing the official Falun Dafa English website. That is such a serious violation and it is also disgusting.  He may not realize it now, but he has to issue an apology on Minghui for his actions or face karmic retribution.

Epoch Times and NTD

• What is the difference between “traditional” and politically conservative views? An enormous amount, actually.  Politically conservative individuals are known to favor what they conceive of as the traditional, but you might not realize how limited their understanding of it is compared to ours.   If it were otherwise, they wouldn’t express in video testimonials how it expanded after seeing Shen Yun. Let’s consider what we at Epoch Times and NTD call “traditional,” which is that belief in ghosts and “paranormal” activity are real.  Are politically conservative individuals truly aware of how ghosts and paranormal activity are real?  Actually, because it is the modern era, they don’t necessarily believe in these specific phenomena anymore despite professing Christian beliefs.  Do they think people can be possessed by spirits?  They often don’t.  Their traditional views are vestiges within our modern times, they are defined within a narrow range, often as they can be expressed politically. Important to note is that these values often get mixed up with politics.  This means that these people become a liability to us if we align our articles with their goals. 
• We will also alienate others, such as those who know that supernormal phenomena are real but who are averse to anything ideologically “right-wing” and wouldn’t know to categorize their own belief in ghosts as a “traditional” viewpoint.  Should we then write lots of articles about ghosts?  We could, as they relate to ancient China, but we have other topics too. 
• In the course of distortion of society, the “traditional” became associated in many modern people’s minds with people who are self-stifling and stifle other people.  They believe they follow rigid cultural doctrines, commonly valuing pursuit of business profit over interpersonal warmth.  That is often not true, but if we shape our media to appeal to “tradition” as it is understood inside the political sphere, it will be a distorted version, it will be the same as the degeneration of mankind in this era, and it will harm our publications and practice.   The word itself has to be provided context today. 
• There has been confusion at Epoch Times and NTD as to what we as practitioners should broadcast as “tradition” too, maybe just someone in ancient clothes or someone with a traditional family.  What tradition is can have universal appeal, just like Shen Yun does.  Since “tradition” isn’t understood by the society of today, it is better that we don’t emphasize the term that much in the publication.  So, it is my goal to remove the confusing and vague tagline, “Truth, Tradition, Hope.”  It simply evokes political conservatism and we can’t do that.
  • If you want to write about the traditional and you see that people dress sloppily, you can write about how to tie a tie, what kinds of clothing people could try out on their own that looks better, and how to do the things that people did back when people were more normal, before the 1950s.  You can also explain why you would want to wear tidy clothes or comb your hair instead of walking around with ragged clothes.  If the tradition is lost, something has to put it back in place, not just the promotion of people who believe in it today.
• I would also like to point out that some people were brought up in politically conservative environments that they experienced as too restrictive, authoritarian, or insular, and they live their lives in revolt to their upbringing. Isn’t this already known?  Why would you not accommodate these people with anything you publish? You act like this doesn’t exist.
  • Some things we know might be challenging for political conservatives. We know that environmental pollution is very serious. We know that people are morally corrupt with respect to profit. Both of these topics the way we would talk about them might be upsetting to political conservatives. Don’t confuse the traditional with politically conservative.

• Political media products, such as the “The Real Story of Jan. 6 Documentary DVD” and “Gotaways: The Hidden Border Crisis DVD” have to be removed from the EpochTV online shop.  Our goal is to make sure people know we are not involved in politics.  Can we report on January 6, 2021 events?  In actuality, we should try to avoid covering it and similar events, and this is a change I hope to make at Epoch Times and NTD.  If there are dozens of news outlets reporting the same stories in lock step, hardly differentiable from one another in the overview and details, every practitioner should see this as decay (cowardice) resulting from a chaotic era of mankind.
  • It isn’t the job of Epoch Times to expose ordinary human political corruption (e.g. January 6, 2021 US Capitol events, deliberate importation of illegal immigrants).  We know this is corruption and since the whole world sees it, there are many right-wing outlets doing this already.  More importantly, as practitioners of Falun Gong we have understandings of societal phenomena that go beyond the ordinary news outlets.  When practitioners cannot distinguish between reporting the news as practitioners and exposing the bad things going on, it shows that their minds are not on the Fa but instead intending to rectify society’s corruption.  We aren’t interested in rectifying society’s corruption at Epoch Times or NTD.  For this reason, a large variety of exposé content that Epoch Media Group has made has never actually been permissible, but until now no practitioner has intervened. 
  • It is crucial that every practitioner at Epoch Times and NTD understand that we don’t want to invite needless interference from political forces who are in the fray of ordinary politics, people who will perceive us as a political threat to them.  That will happen again if practitioners’ approaches at NTD and Epoch Times are not shifted towards the Fa.  We have numerous news subjects we can discuss instead of what we find elsewhere.  I would say that this is a mission we should put on a plaque at the building so that everyone is reminded of it.
    • Whatever exposé content that Epoch Media Group has made is information that someone already knows and is circulating behind the scenes in society and they also don’t want that corruption.  So we will let them take care of those issues instead of us.

• A problematic aspect of Epoch Times and NTD is its lack of focus on affairs that are not already discussed elsewhere.  We don’t want Epoch Times and NTD to be positioned in people’s minds next to Rumble, Breitbart, or politically conservative figures on social media, which was a point of confusion by practitioners at these media in the past. 
• We can succeed without ever having a seat at the White House press room, without ever getting an interview with a high-ranking official, because we can include information that people don’t have at other outlets.  Our articles will not go in any particular political direction but instead follow our own goals as practitioners.  Additionally, we can now utilize AI to assist us in this task.

• We want to make, as a main focus of our media, investigations into the limits of empirical, modern science.  We want to discuss the philosophy of science, the shifts in mankind’s beliefs over history that led to the present day, and we want articles that showcase the dire consequences of people being immersed in this epistemology.  This includes discussion of the environmental damage that science has caused, its destructive consequences (e.g. the nuclear bomb), and the warping of people’s values that make them prize such a destructive way of looking at the world as the vehicle for their own future.

NTD

• The sets for all programs should be changed to traditional or ancient Chinese settings.  I also believe that news anchors should be dressed in traditional Chinese wear or a modern version of it.  This is not a fixed dictate and should be tested out before it is implemented on air.
• External video channels from practitioners who went off on their own should be under the NTD name.  Tianliang Zhang and Allen Zeng are two examples.  If their video channels are not up to standard, then they need to update what they are doing.  It is bad that there are some Chinese practitioners who make social media independent from NTD and are producing videos that look like they are possibly part of it.  Everyone should be on the same team and since NTD already exists these extra YouTube channels should find their place somewhere in it.
  • This also points to the importance of bringing in Gan Jing World (which should be renamed) and integrating it with NTD and Epoch Times.
• Boring shows and segments are prohibited from this point on.  It isn’t allowed to air the World Falun Dafa Day parade for an hour and a half. Airtime is expensive and too few viewers will watch this.  Practitioners should use rationality when evaluating what is worthy of airtime.  Coverage of a World Falun Dafa Day parade might be limited to 3 minutes during a news segment. World Falun Dafa Day isn’t an official holiday within our practice anyway.