Qigong Fever. Body, Science and Utopia in China.

The best-selling The Great Qigong Master Comes out of the Mountain, a book on the paranormal feats, healings and scientific discoveries of Zhang Hongbao (1954-2006), was one of dozens of hagiographical publications on contemporary qigong miracle makers, usually written by hired journalists, which flooded China’s bookstalls in the early 1990s. Through these books, as well as sensational newspaper reports and television documentaries, the purportedly state-controlled mass media played a pivotal role in fanning a nationwide craze for the paranormal phenomena linked to the practice of qigong. “Qigong fever” (qigong re) can be considered the most widespread expression of urban religiosity in post-Mao China, from 1979, when qigong was officially legitimated, to 1999, when the crackdown on Falungong led to the disbanding of most popular qigong groups. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of qigong practitioners during this period, it is safe to say that at least one in f...

Asian Anthropology, 2003

Qigong was the most widespread form of popular religiosity in post-Maoist urban China. The paper traces the shifting combinations of practices and concepts which came to be associated with qigong from 1949 to 1999 in an evolving ideological and political context, and ending with an analysis of Falun Gong's rupture with qigong groups. Qigong as a social movement was the product of an ambiguous marriage between the Chinese state and popular groups, and the Falun Gong crisis resulted from the breaking of this alliance. The case of qigong and Falun Gong illustrates the unresolved tensions between modernity, tradition, nationalism and politics in contemporary China.

2017

Guest Editor’s Preface Shih-Wen Sue Chen ‘Aspiring to Enlightenment’: Buddhism and Atheism in 1980s China Scott Pacey Activist Practitioners in the Qigong Boom of the 1980s Utiraruto Otehode and Benjamin Penny Displaced Fantasy: Pulp Science Fiction in the Early Reform Era of the People’s Republic Of China Rui Kunze 王瑞 The Emergence of Independent Minds in the 1980s Liu Qing 刘擎 1984: What’s Been Lost and What’s Been Gained Sang Ye 桑晔 Intellectual Men and Women in the 1980s Fiction of Huang Beijia 黄蓓佳 Li Meng 李萌

The American Historical Review, 2005

ties to restrict their activities. Mengin argues that these activities reconfigure power beyond the dichotomous reach of state sovereignty. As might be expected from a conference volume, the "blurring of frontiers" that is summed up across a discrete set of empirical studies adds up to a fuzzy picture. Each empirical chapter forms a snapshot in and of itself, but the compilation mainly reinforces the impression that Chinese excel at forming networks that cross official boundaries but also that the resources that enable individuals and groups to do so are unevenly distributed, leaving some, such as unemployed workers, in an invidious and marginalized situation. Overall, the volume reminds the social scientist of the contrasting cosmologies that Joseph Needham attributed to the West and to China: the former sees the world as a complex mechanism working in accord with transcendent Laws of Nature given by a divine legislator, while the Chinese see the world as a complex jigang or seamless web of relations and forces constantly reshaping itself through an endless displacement of nodes and connections. This reality of a networked China has come more clearly into focus as artificial attempts to impose both order and disorder have receded into the historical background.

2019

The objective of the study is to critically examine 氣 (qi) from the perspectives of various academic disciplines: philology, philosophy, religious studies, medicine, natural sciences, health and movement sciences with regard to their significance for martial arts. Hermeneutics is chosen as the method. It is based on an extensive literature search. The main finding is that 氣 is not a phenomenon, but a construct and as such a pre-enlightenment attempt to give a name to the-experienced, perceived, and observed-inexplicable. This happens in everyday-pragmatic and utilitarian regard, whereby humans can be imagined as "body of 氣" and "body in 氣". Contextuality is seen as a promising approach to the understanding of 氣.

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 1996

It is not unusual to hear about Daoist qigong' (Daojia gong) and Buddhist qigong (Fojia gong), but rarely do we hear about Confucian qigong. at least not in a literal sense. However, according to Yan Xin, a grand qigong master from China,' Confucianism should literally be understood as a qigong system (Rujia gong). After a careful reflection, I € i d this interpretation of Confucianism very insightful and significant to the scholarship of Confucianism. In this paper, I will first introduce this interpretation as both a new understanding of Confucianism and of qigong and cite some Confucian texts to support the interpretation. Then, I will show some advantages and significance of the interpretation by comparing it with some other readings of Confucianism. I. The key connection between qigong and Confucianism, says Master. Yan Xin, is morality. The Master repeatedly emphasizes that morality is the ultimate source, the root, or the fundamental technique of qigong power.' New participants of Yan Xin qigong workshops are often surprised and puzzled by the fact that during those workshops, the time the Master spends on taking about morality usually goes longer than the time he spends on teaching body gestures and breathing control. Once, when asked about how to defeat fear, the Master says %e more filial to your parents!" Here to be filal to one's parents was not given as a moral An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Ninth International Congress

This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before the crackdown, the falun gong represented a successful new religious movement, from a Euro-American perspective. However, most of its strengths as a movement have become adversarial to its survival in the specific historical and political condition of China. for useful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Religious Studies Review, 2009