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16. Magic, Science, and Qigong in Contemporary China
- University of Hawai'i Press
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In this final section of the book, we consider religion and spirituality, long prominent among Chinese but since the Revolution actively discouraged by the Communist Party. Today, the government of China officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, Roman Catholicism (under the aegis of the “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association”), and Protestantism. Religious freedom is explicitly defended in Article 36 of the revised state constitution of 1982. In the two decades since this last promulgation, and particularly in the 1990s, participation in officially sanctioned religion has grown substantially: there are in China today 15–20 million Muslims, 8–10 million Catholics, 10–30 million Protestants, and uncounted millions of Buddhists and Daoists. While these officially sanctioned religions are tolerated (although with notable exceptions, as Jensen points out in the afterword), they are distinguished from superstition (mixin), which can be prosecuted by the state. Religious and spiritual activity other than that registered with the state under the five principal categories is technically mixin and potentially illegal. Forms of divination, lineage temples, cults to local earth, mountain, and water deities, geomancy, and ancestor worship lie beyond the official designation of religion , but they are so widespread and increasingly popular that they are tolerated as features of local custom. Qigong (various exercises, meditation practices , and more fantastic demonstrations of the ability to control qi, “vital energy”), like these local customs, eludes designation within the official rubrics, and it, too, has grown in popularity and in an accelerated fashion in urban centers since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. There are centers for qigong instruction and a welter of books on the salubrious effects of the techniques learned from the few masters of the teaching. Eric Karchmer, a cultural and medical anthropologist, takes on the question of how qigong is viewed in contemporary, post-Mao China (implicitly Beijing ), asking from where it draws its legitimacy. He concludes that these “ancient” practices, formerly considered mystical and superstitious, have largely been purged of those overtones and are now seen as “scientific”— using vocabulary from both traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western 311 ERIC KARCHMER 16 Magic, Science, and Qigong in Contemporary China biomedicine to explain their miraculous efficacy. His work distinguishes analytically between “preventive” and “curative” qigong, with the former much allied with medicine and the latter allied both with astounding feats of power and with healing. Concerned to expose charlatans and frauds, the government has sponsored scientific investigations into qigong, demonstrating a “scientific basis” for some of its claims and the fraudulence of others. Karchmer is ultimately concerned with the centrality of science in contemporary China, where even traditional practices, claiming a five-thousandyear -long past, are subject to scrutiny by the scientific method. Chinese followers of the practice, along with the author, understand that one way in which qigong may be reconciled with official Communist taxonomy is by distinguishing it from religion and also from mixin, by certifying through empirical demonstration its status as science. Through this reconstruction of the theoretical and practical debates concerning the character of qigong, we may discern the complexities underwriting the Chinese government’s ongoing struggle with Falun Gong, a cult whose spiritual calisthenics is grounded in preventive and curative claims very similar to those of qigong. An unregistered religion is in this instance far more threatening than a spiritual practice of dubious scientific merit, and herein lies the unwritten limits of toleration and the battle lines of a new resistance.—Eds. There are hundreds of millions of people out in the fresh air everyday and have been for twenty-four centuries, with the belief that, if they do these exercises [qigong], that is how they will maximize their health. So the question to Western science is, Are they right? Or are they all just deluded? David Eisenberg, in Bill Moyers’ PBS program Healing and the Mind (1993) Since the early 1980s, millions of enthusiasts seeking health benefits, miracle cures, and sometimes supernatural powers have made a system of deepbreathing exercises, known as qigong, one of the most popular activities in China (Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary 1990). By the late 1980s, the local media was calling this enthusiasm for qigong a craze (qigong re), and some sources reported that there may have been as many as 200 million adherents in China (Perry and Fuller 1991, 675). The qigong craze was not an isolated phenomenon. Numerous observers have pointed to the revival of other “traditional cultural practices” in the post-Mao era, such as in religious practices, ritual observances, lineage halls...