Qigong Fever

"When I was in China in the 1990s, and further back in the 1980s, there was a movement called Qigong. Qigong is a neologism created by the Communists in the 1950s to describe energetic spiritual practices that might be analogous to yoga in the Indian tradition. So methods of physical cultivation that also have a spiritual component, similar to meditation I would say. But the Communists also noticed that it had healing properties, and so they made it part of the traditional Chinese medical systems. Chinese hospitals used to offer acupuncture, herbal medicine, cupping and qigong. There are still a couple of hospitals that offer it today. It was forbidden in the latter part of the Mao era as what the Communists called “feudal superstition,” especially during the Cultural Revolution . But after Mao died it came back in a strange way. It jumped from hospitals and clinics into the public sphere. People practised qigong in parks, and it became a form of challenge to the government, because it was very personal and physical, but performed publicly and in a large group. As the ’80s and ’90s progressed, grandmasters began to appear who not only taught qigong but had their own schools, with moralistic tracts and booklets, a kind of “popular fundamentalism”. People were searching for a new creed after communism had been discredited and replaced by economic growth at all costs, but with no other underlying moral system. The old imperial system was gone, traditions were gone, but nothing replaced them except economic growth. So people found their answers in qigong. The five accepted religions also came back after the Cultural Revolution, but were tightly circumscribed. They were not allowed to proselytise, they couldn’t go out into parks and spread information tracts. Yet qigong was officially registered as a martial arts form, so people could freely hang banners from the trees in the parks, hand out materials, and attract mass followings. During the 80s and 90s tens of millions of people followed different qigong masters. We often think of historical epochs as marking absolute cut-off points, but they don’t. The same people who grew up in the Mao era were now going through the traumatic economic changes of the post-Mao era. This was the beginning of the reform of state owned enterprises, in which steel works, coal mines and so on were being closed, so people had a lot of time on their hands, often retired at age 40 or 50. They had nothing to do, so they joined these groups and found a deeper meaning in qigong, which also promised health benefits. Palmer lays it out really well, with many colourful anecdotes. Palmer has a good term for Falun Gong: “militant qigong”. In the final part of the last chapter of his book, he describes Falun Gong’s rise as the most organised but also militant of these groups. The government was coming under a lot of pressure because qigong was growing so quickly. It was obvious they were quasi-religious but were completely unregulated and growing quickly. Many hard-core atheists were demanding that officials take action. Sensing that the tide was turning, a reported 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners made the ill-fated, suicidal decision in 1999 to demand their right to organize. They carried out a sit-down strike right in front of the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing, just to the west of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. I was there, and 10,000 is a suspiciously round number, but I think it’s safe to say that thousands of people showed up. In any case, the leadership freaked out. Jiang Zemin, who was the head of the Party at the time, set up an office called Office 610 – named after the date it was set up, June 10th – to eradicate Falun Gong, and even today you still find office 610s in local government offices around China. Many of them have a broader mandate now, which is to go after any kind of religious activity that the government doesn’t like, any kind of so-called cult. The government justified its crackdown by labelling Falun Gong a doomsday cult, similar to the Branch Davidians in the United States in the 1950s, or the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan who perpetrated the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in the 1990s. But Falun Gong was different because there was no attack. They didn’t do anything. The government claimed it was a suicide cult, but I find that very hard to believe because at the end of the day they could only come up with two or three cases of people committing suicide, out of what they said were 100 million followers. They also said its practitioners refused medical care, but the state was itself at fault for making that care too expensive. Also, one should keep in mind that many religions around the world, such as Christian Scientists in the United States, sometimes reject medical care. So it didn’t seem like a cult, but it was banned and there was a huge crackdown. Thousands of people were sent to labour camps, and scores died from police brutality. It remains the biggest crackdown since the June 4 1989 Tiananmen massacre . Falun Gong is still is a very active opposition group to the Chinese government, but that marked the end of that phase of religious revival in China. That was a different era, when some things in China were up for grabs. The state was discredited post-Tiananmen, without as tight a grip on things as they do today. So a movement like qigong could rise up, even a group like Falun Gong. Can you imagine anybody doing a sit-down strike in front of Zhongnanhai today? If you went with ten people and sat down, you would be out of there within five minutes, in the back of a police car. What we are seeing now is a much more controlled kind of religious revival."