This piece follows on from the introductory post on this topic I previously shared. Please read that first if you haven’t already.
1: On Qi
Popular representations of “Chinese religion” imagine a landscape populated by strands of belief easily categorisable under the headers of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. To represent, though, is necessarily to simplify, and this loss of information is apparent in the frequent invocation of a “residual category” encompassing folk and vernacular traditions that cannot be cleanly identified as aspects of these ‘major’ faiths. If we are to provide a representation that conforms even more closely to reality, then, we must look beyond this awkward three-Real-categories-and-a-Bonus-fourth schema; contemporary analysis holds that these four ‘types’ of Chinese religion are defined just as much by their fluidity, porosity, and overlap as they are by their respective semantic qualities. In the Chinese cultural context, it is common for adherents to selectively take up a diverse range of practices, creeds, observances, and deities, drawn less from the major faiths themselves than from what Benjamin Penny terms in his book The Religion of Falun Gong an encompassing and intersecting “popular pantheon”. This interplay that links together the three more clearly codified traditions is made visible in their shared incorporation of certain metaphysical concepts. The object of our interest in this examination of Falun Gong is the notion of qi.
Though traditionally associated most closely with Taoism, qi plays some role in all Chinese systems of religious belief. Qi has been variously translated as ‘breath’ or ‘energy’, although these terms do not capture the fullness of its definition as both an energy essential to the existence of life, and the fundamental element of the material world. One possible analogue is “atom” – in the classical Greek sense, connoting indivisibility – though this too is inadequately expressive as it does not capture qi’s additional connotation of universal interconnectedness. Regardless, qi is understood as the fundamental force or substance that animates life and motion, serving as a metaphysical bridge between the material and spiritual realms. These notions of the nature and function of qi inform its role within the majority of Chinese meditation schools, wherein it is imagined as a vector by which individuals can, through bodily practice, strengthen the connections between their physical bodies and the surrounding worlds within which they are situated – both mundane and transcendent.
2: From Qi to Qigong
The ubiquity of qi across Chinese religious tradition, and its ritualistic role as a conduit to the realm of the spiritual, is a vital piece of context for understanding the range of body cultivation practices that exist under the contemporary catch-all term qigong. Though the school of meditation and exercise practices to which it refers has historical roots in traditional practices dating back several millennia, the earliest available evidence of these techniques’ initial incorporation under the qigong umbrella is far more recent; in the first half of the twentieth century, the term was promoted by Chinese Communist Party cadres within the post-revolution healthcare system as part of a national campaign of resistance against the putative encroachment of Westernising forces into the realm of Chinese medicine. In this initial incarnation, qigong practice was mainly confined to private spaces inhabited by political elites, and it was largely bereft of specifically spiritual connotations, with emphasis instead placed on its purported medical benefits and its canonical position in the emerging field of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Regardless of these ideologically instrumental origins, this grouping together of similar techniques into something resembling a coherent (if still vernacular and pluralistic) school – with a plausible basis in ancient wisdom – facilitated its diffusion through the wider Chinese population, prompting the appearance of an ecosystem of authorities on qigong.
This wave of legitimation was interrupted, however, by the onset of the Cultural Revolution, which saw the Party reverse its previous approving stance and proscribe qigong practices entirely, having identified its reactionary, “feudal” character as counter-revolutionary. When qigong resurfaced in the relatively calmer climate of the post-Mao 1970s, it quickly established itself as a movement with genuine mass appeal, as individuals and groups were frequently seen practicing its exercises in public parks. During this period, attraction to qigong was still not based in religious seeking, contrary to popular portrayals of an explosion of spiritual reawakening in the wake of Mao-era policies on religious practice being relaxed. Although the degree of continuity between the resurgence-era qigong and its earlier, elite-bound incarnation is unclear, both were emphatically secular and grounded in material concerns. Primary motivations for becoming involved in qigong included its reputed health benefits, the opportunities it provided for social engagement, and the possibility of achieving a kind of individual fulfilment within the bounds of a society that had, until recently, strictly advised against privileging self-interest over the communal good. This renewed enthusiasm was accelerated by an announcement from within the Chinese scientific community of supposed empirical evidence for the existence of qi, granting qigong scientific – and therefore political – credibility within mainstream discourse. By the late 1980s, qigong occupied a delicately balanced position within the state’s repertoire of publicly acceptable ideas: though rooted in historical religious traditions, its permissibility depended on the continued endorsement of its rational bona fides by the secular intellectual establishment.
The so-called ‘qigong fever’ period that saw the appearance of so many new social organisations centred around the practice was one of several similarly termed ‘crazes’ that spread during the relative relaxation of the post-Mao period. In his 2008 article Embodying Utopia, David Palmer contends that these phenomena could only have occurred within China and could not have emerged from within overseas Chinese communities, as norms of deep social integration within Mainland Chinese society provided the necessary conditions for large-scale social movements to become amplified through discursive processes and thereby achieve social critical mass. As the decades since have seen Falun Gong experience its own ‘fever’ moment and proliferate globally, it follows that either a) Falun Gong has some inherent particular characteristic that enabled this to take place, or b) some external catalyst or sea change created the necessary conditions for it to accomplish what its disparate qigong forerunners could not. My position is the latter one: as the instigation of the domestic qigong boom was contingent on its surrounding conditions, so too was its own birthing of a new wave of more formally organised qigong schools.
3: Qigong and the State
The fervour of the comparatively open post-Mao era was dampened considerably in the wake of the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. The state’s response to the perceived threat of further uprisings was swift and uncompromising. Social organisations seeking official recognition soon encountered heightened scrutiny and a more onerous registration process. At the time, registration was essential to avoid running afoul of the government – yet no such obstacles existed for those looking to start businesses. Seeing this as an opportunity, the active qigong groups of the early 1990s remained in operation by remaking themselves as moneymaking enterprises. Falun Gong was not among this initial entrepreneurial set, and when it arrived on the scene relatively late, well after then-dominant qigong organisations like Zhonggong had pivoted to commercialisation, it had no apparent aspirations of revenue generation. Li Hongzhi made his entry into the qigong field in 1992 via joining the China Qigong Science Research Society, a state-affiliated body created as a means of exerting political control over the movement, its constituent organisations, and its charismatic figureheads. Over the next few years, he built a significant network of followers within China as he travelled the country delivering lectures and conducting intensive workshop sessions to promote his homegrown variety of qigong practice.
This stage of Falun Gong’s development was centred around direct and first-hand experience; the intimate and intensive events provided communities and individuals from disparate regions of the country with access to a physical nexus of belief. Though the commonplace emphasis on qigong’s health benefits was present at these events – to the extent that many of Li’s lecture audiences watched him perform faith healings on fellow attendees and other apparently supernatural spectacles – Falun Gong set itself apart by offering to teach adherents how to cultivate not only their physical health, but also the depth and strength of their individual morality. These ideas were axiomatically intertwined; Falun Gong’s theory of disease has been described as resembling that of Christian Science, with adherents told that ill health was an outcome of moral deficiency. Its attempts to assert its distinctiveness from other forms of qigong intensified significantly during this early period, and by 1994, one of its core assertions was that qi, the animating and life-sustaining force central to the schools that preceded it, was in fact a base and mundane distraction from the more worthy aspiration of gong, a state of inner power associated with moral superiority, attainable through Falun Gong’s distinct system of practice. This shift in focus to a supposedly more material concern did not signal a full retreat away from the metaphysical; rather, Falun Gong quickly became more overtly religious than its competition, with audiences at mass events held in stadiums describing transcendent experiences and visions of supernatural and divine phenomena.
The organisation’s ranks swelled as word spread of Li’s reputation for manifesting miracles, the simple and accessible nature of Falun Gong’s repertoire of physical exercises compared to many other qigong schools, and – most of all – its reputation of providing free and open access to its teachings and events (though this was not entirely accurate, as classes in some regions charged for admission and attendance, and movement-related materials such as books and tapes were available for purchase, albeit at a low cost). Where others in the field were turning qigong into a business, Falun Gong increasingly bore the trappings of a genuine religion – while also continuing to brand itself as a rational system neatly compatible with the post-Mao epistemological preference for the scientific.
Concurrently with its meteoric rise in popularity and the consolidation of its core principles, Falun Gong refined its internal organisational arrangement and began to carefully manage the external perception of its hierarchy. Publicly, Li portrayed Falun Gong as a spontaneous, leaderless movement, claiming that local and regional centres operated informally. In practice, however, new branches were expected to register with the Falun Dafa Research Society (FDRS) headquarters in Beijing, while larger regional centres were responsible for supervising nearby affiliates. This took place against a backdrop of increased criticism of qigong in both state rhetoric and mass media, stymieing Falun Gong’s attempts to become an officially accredited qigong organisation, and in turn prompting Li to officially dismantle much of the movement’s formal organisational structure, and Falun Gong adherents to translate their deep level of integration into political mobilisation in defence of their belief system. Followers adopted tactics of nonviolent resistance to perceived slights and mischaracterisations, launching a campaign of public protests in spite of intensified prohibitions on political demonstrations in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. In April 1999, these simmering tensions came to a head when around ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered – with Li’s personal blessing, though apparently not his foreknowledge – to stage a protest outside Chinese Communist Party headquarters in response to an unfavourable journal article. Though this rally took place without incident and participants were able to disperse peacefully, the state’s response was one of alarm, prompting a policy reversal: Falun Gong’s political agitations were no longer to be tolerated, and the group was targeted for suppression. By July, eradicating Falun Gong had become state policy: party members who had been practitioners were required to renounce it and prohibited from further involvement in its activities; a substantial editorial condemning the movement was published in the People’s Daily; and arrests and property confiscation took place on a mass scale. An arrest warrant was issued for Li, however, it was not executed, as he had departed China in 1995 – to lead the movement from the United States.
Sources:
- Bokenkamp, S. R., 1999. Early Daoist Scriptures. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Chan, C. S.-C., 2013. Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement. Social Psychology Quarterly, pp. 1-24.
- Junker, A., 2019. Becoming Activists in Global China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Ownby, D., 2008. Falun Gong and the Future of China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Palmer, D. A., 2008. Embodying Utopia: Charisma in the post-Mao Qigong Craze. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, pp. 69-89.
- Penny, B., 2012. The Religion of Falun Gong. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
This series of posts is adapted from a research paper I wrote in 2021 during the final taught semester of my graduate studies.
Leave a Reply