Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (review)

For most non-Chinese, qigong is a mysterious exercise that combines patterned breathing and movement in order to increase health, happiness, and (according to some) wisdom. Westerners who study qigong are usually told that it is a discipline thousands of years old, that the regime they practice happens to be the only authentic version, and that their teacher is its only authentic exponent.

This remarkable study will come as a shock to many readers, from the first sentence on: "Modern qigong was launched in the 'Liberated Zone' of Southern Hebei on 3 March 1949, when cadre Huang Yueting proclaimed the adoption of the name qigong to designate a set of body training exercises which a team of clinicians had been researching under his leadership in the previous few years. The creation of qigong was a political act: while destroying the 'feudal' social and symbolic context of traditional masters, the new medical institutions sought to reclaim their knowledge of body techniques and to train a new corps of 'medical workers' to teach and practise them in a socialist institutional setting." What the "authentic exponents" have been transmitting, in other words, is some version of a Party official's invention, a new combination of breathing, meditation, and gymnastics cleansed of what the Chinese Communist Party's doctrine execrates as superstition, but which occidentals tend to think of as ancient wisdom. This is a story of alternating growth and prohibition, of a boom that attracted millions of practitioners, a fever indeed of profit-making, and finally a notorious repression that ended the boom in China by 2000.

David Palmer, a scholar of anthropology and religious studies, originally planned to do a field study of qigong practice. After reaching some depth as a practitioner of several methods, he has traced the history of qigong in socialist China. There is already a large literature on qigong. This book goes further in showing how its evolution-and devolution-were part of the dizzying metamorphosis of Chinese society, politics, and culture between 1949 and 1999. These are the main lines of his narrative:

Qigong moved out of Hebei onto the national scene only with the ideological turn against Western influence in 1953-61. Those in the Party who insisted China could find its own way in the world, guided by Marx, Engels, and Mao, attacked those who saw a need for China to depend more on modern science and technology and less on doctrinal correctness. Many high officials who had been treated with qigong in Hebei appreciated it as a means to health that was intrinsically Chinese, accessible to everyone in a very poor country, and more politically manageable than Western medicine. But in 1961-64 Chairman Mao attacked the Party leaders who had promoted qigong. Qigong books ceased to appear from 1965 to the late 1970's; qigong clinics were among the many institutions that closed down during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernizations (1977) gave priority to modernization, including scientific research. The simplicity, efficacy, and cheapness of qigong made it an important topic of study.

A new kind of qigong sprang up in which masters externalized their qi, focusing it on patients and curing them, often at a great distance. Foreign observers saw them induce mass trance, holy rolling, speaking in tongues. The individual no longer need become adept; the master did the healing. As a 1991 book put it, qigong's "advanced level is shown by Extraordinary Powers: penetrating vision, distant vision, distant sensation, the ability to immobilise one's body, to fly miraculously, to cross walls, to soar spiritually, to call the wind and bring the rain, to know the past and the future"-skills familiar from gongfu movies. Some taught all comers to perform healing and paranormal feats with their own qi.

Many high-ranking scientific and political figures such as Qian Xuesen (H. S. Tsien), the creator of the Chinese missile and space programs, defended these innovations as technical...