Even if you don’t dabble, you’ll know that there is a magician’s code.

Some refer to it as the magician’s oath, but the gist remains the same.

Magicians promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless they swear to uphold the Oath in turn.

Enter the Millennials, who are killing the mayonnaise industry, and the diamond industry, and grappling with the ethics of cocaine use, and so on and so forth.

(Good thing the generations that came before wrecked the financial and banking industries, and destroyed our chances of ever owning affordable housing, or we would have to take that on ourselves, too.)

Magicians in China are particularly upset with Millennial magician Li Yunfei, who is now sharing some of their age-old secrets online. This video posted in December has really raised their ire:

According to CNN, Li doesn’t believe he’s doing much wrong, using the ‘but everyone’s doing it’ defence:

In seven months, that clip has racked up 1.6 million views. According to Li, trading secrets for clicks — and thus profit — has become an increasingly common practice among young Chinese magicians.

“There are tens of thousands of live-streaming and video channels dedicated to exposing magic tricks,” says Li, 24, who has over 420,000 fans on Chinese video platform Tik Tok and claims to make over 1 million yuan ($145,000) per year from his videos.

Great for Li, but terrible for older magicians like Tian Xueming, who is an official fourth-generation inheritor of Mu-style magic (one of the two main branches of traditional Chinese magic).

One of the last of a dying art form, he is leading the fight against those trading secrets for profit:

Tian, and other traditional Chinese magicians, have condemned this practice, even forming an association, the League in Opposition to the Revealing of Magic Secrets, to combat this trend. Many of the tricks exposed were invented by their ancestors and passed down via tight-knit, student-teacher relationships.

“All magic is fake but revealing an illusion’s secrets strips its ability to amaze,” says Tian [below].

In a bid to stop his trade from being demystified, Tian has taken an unusual approach for an artist in China.

He is calling on government officials for greater censorship of magic online.

Well, we know that the Chinese government loves a little censorship, so he’s barking up the right tree.

That being said, his efforts thus far have been unsuccessful, and the art’s younger proponents continue to unpack some of the country’s age-old tricks across social media.

To up the ante, Tian says magic tricks should be treated as intellectual property:

Legally, however, this is a grey area. While China’s copyright laws do prohibit the obtaining, disclosing and selling of magic tricks through illicit means, they also allow different people to possess identical business secrets. Therefore, if someone like Li learns about a trick legitimately, through watching online videos, for example, and decides to share that information he is not exposed to a law suit.

His actions would only be illegal if he had broken into a magician’s home, for example, and physically stolen an outline of the tricks. Li has never been sued.

Another brick wall.

Ultimately, as things stand, Li and his fellow Millennial magicians look to be winning the battle.

“When Copperfield or other great US magicians see a good trick, they don’t try to copy it or try to uncover its secrets,” says Tian. “But in China, too many magicians just want to imitate and make a quick buck.”

He’s clearly a purist, and we can respect that, but times are changing.

[source:cnn]