Qigong

Qigong (lit. “breathpractice”) refers to a Chinese system of body cultivation that involves the circulation of somatic energy (qi) by means of breathing techniques, mental concentration, and set sequences of movements. Practitioners expect it to strengthen the body, heal diseases, lift the mind to higher levels of awareness, and possibly even produce extraordinary abilities and powers. Though it is a part of traditional Chinese practices, it became popular in the last decade of the 20th century through the Falun Gong religious organization, which was banned by the government. Qigong was systematized in the 1940s as a cost-effective approach to medical care and health maintenance in communist-controlled areas of northern China; after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the propagation of qigong became part of a government program to modernize traditional Chinese medicine and integrate it into the public health care system. Qigong is thus a recent invention, but it is based on traditional callisthenic, martial, and meditation practices. While these were taught and cultivated in religious (especially Daoist) milieus, qigong was designed as a more “scientific” version of these traditional systems, devoid of their many “superstitious” elements.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, qigong was researched and taught only at selected medical centers. As China was heading toward the Cultural Revolution in 1965, these centers were closed down, and the practice of qigong was banned as a remnant of the old culture that needed to be swept away. However, some individuals continued their practice privately, as did practitioners of the various traditional body cultivation systems from which qigong was derived. Already in the early 1970s, qigong had resurfaced as a grassroots phenomenon being practiced and taught in public parks. With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the beginning of the reform period in 1978, official interest in the practice of qigong revived. A confluence of official patronage, scientific study, and popular demand led to the “qigong craze” of the 1980s and 1990s. Numerous masters emerged and gathered a following for their own qigong systems, which were increasingly enriched with religious content. Resacralized qigong thus became the basis for what were in effect new religious movements that filled the vacuum of social disorientation created by the Communist Party's loss of ideological credibility. A well-known example of this trend was the Falun Gong (lit. “practice of the dharma wheel”) movement, which was banned by the authorities in 1999 as an “evil cult.” While the practice of qigong itself was not prohibited, the Chinese government has since then severely restricted the ability of qigong groups to achieve the mass mobilization potential that they had demonstrated in the 1990s, though banned groups such as the Falun Gong continue to operate outside the People's Republic of China. Qigong itself has proven to be a successful export product and is nowadays [Page 1039]taught in many places worldwide both as a health and as a spiritual regimen, not unlike the global spread of Indian yoga practices.