The Cultural Economy of Falun Gong in China: A Rhetorical Perspective by Xiao Ming (review)

Xiao Ming's concise book situates Falun Gong within the historically specific cultural ground of reform-era China. The author suggests that Falun Gong was called into being by, and offers a line of flight from an existential dilemma shared by those who did not benefit from the reform program and instead fell through the social safety net in the 1990s. Where rhetoric is concerned, the book seems to oscillate between two modes. Explicitly it offers a disciplined analysis of the rhetoric of Falun Gong. Implicitly it extends a tacit invitation for the reader to grasp the folk religious practice as a collective rhetorical posture, which embodies an emerging ethical inclination on the part of the numerous practitioners. Through her extensive research, including substantial research done in Chinese, Xiao Ming does a helpful job explaining the ideological predisposition of the postsocialist state system, the evolving and diverging psychic makeup of the citizenry, the "folk" nature and rights orientation of Falun Gong, and the incongruity between the cosmology and ethics of Falun Gong on the one hand and the official ideology on the other.

The book illustrates that the rhetorical appeal of Falun Gong partly lays in its enthymematic invocation of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian idioms of the culture that continued informing the Chinese consciousness alongside, or regardless of, the officially upheld Marxist materialism and scientism. The author brings into focus the health benefits of Falun Gong and suggests that in matters of etiology and therapeutics, Falun Gong seemed to have a wider frame of reference than, and therefore some kind of advantage over, officially endorsed medicinal practices, especially Western style medicine. With its combination of spiritual exercise, ethical askesis, social support, and rituals of conversation and silence, Falun Gong seemed to introduce a sense of rhythm, proportion, and communitas to a social field increasingly plagued by a blatant version of social Darwinism and, as such, it offered a treatment for a sociocultural syndrome, not just some narrowly defined bodily illness.

In the section on China's rights generation in chapter 5, the author makes a compelling point by citing O'Brien and Li from their book, Rightful Resistance in Rural China: "'Citizenship is not a collection of rights bestowed on passive recipients. . . . Citizenship . . . is less granted than won, less accorded than made'" (100). Another intriguing point emerges in the section on culturally bound syndromes in chapter 3, where the author invokes Nancy Chen's voice: "a breathing space becomes a social space free from the control of hegemony, and within it the body can be empowered and socially disruptive" (66). Instead of quickly moving on, the author could have made a bigger deal out of this point. Literally speaking, a breathing space is opened up when people practice qigong (of which Falun Gong supposedly was a subspecies) together. This is not to reduce qi (vital energy) to "breath" only. Second, this would have been a good place to talk about "conspiring," in the sense of breathing together for the sake of freedom. The significance goes well beyond Falun Gong per se since such breathing together is indispensable for all social movements, including the ongoing Occupy movement.

The author makes a welcome move in chapter 3 by talking about mind and body in a supposedly Chinese way. The focus is on healing which "begins to occur when patients' bodies are considered a social agency" (55). This would have been a good place to talk also about the composition of a social body—an undeniable dimension of Falun Gong—through the lens of Spinozian ethics. Similarly, the whole movement could have been productively taken account of through the lenses of rhizomatics and nomadology as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. A section on nomad therapeutics as distinguished from state medicine would have been more than a little interesting. The simple reason is that the state exercises its authority and manages its legitimacy partly by regulating...