A Brief History of Qigong

So last week while looking into Falun Gong I kept running up against two rather strange walls. The First was why the CCP would allow something like Falun Gong to exist in the first place, let alone grow as large as it did. And second was the concept of Qigong. While I have had a general understanding of what Qigong is for a while now and I was aware that Falun Gong is an off branch of Qigong which combined elements of Buddhism and Taoism with the practice of Qigong, I wasn't entirely sure how it fit into Chinese history as a whole.

So what did I do? Well I went to the library of course!

I which my life was as cool as this show

So what is Qigong? Well that's a pretty complicated answer, but in short Qigong is based on Chinese folk traditions based on breath, movement, posture, and control (kind like yoga but different). The tradition as a whole collection of various practices stretches back about 4000 years. However, in the 1940s and 50s the CCP began to combine various elements of the tradition based on the health, wellness, and scientific benefits of the traditions. Why?

Well the things was Mao (and many other communist leaders) acknowledged that although Chinese history was filled with feudalism and imperialist oppression it was also filled with beneficial practices, ideas, and medicinal techniques which should be researched, understood, and utilized by the new republic.

One of the ideas which was examined and valued was the traditions that would become Qigong due to traditional claims of health benefits surrounding the practices. Qigong progressively had it the philosophical and religious aspects of it were removed and over the course of the next decades Qigong was modified, streamlined, and changed even further by the huge social changes that tore through China.

While this could seem like this wasn't as interesting project as my previous research topics, I was really excited to go into this particularly because I felt lost in my work with Falun Gong. So this topic rose out of my need to answer the question where on earth did Falun Gong come from/gain that support to become as widespread as it did. Which, considering the fact that Qigong is practiced by millions of people to this day, now makes a lot more sense to me. Additionally it makes sense that the CCP would crackdown on Falun Gong because, unlike Qigong, it was in no way regulated or controlled by the party meaning that it subverted much of the party's main stream views of religion.

In terms of lingering questions I'd be curious to learn more about the traditions that Qigong is based in addition to Qigong itself. Especially the religious aspects although modern Qigong used to based on Qi, the party is currently criticizing it for that and the practice is beginning to refocus on the health and medicine aspects of it, I'm curious in seeing what the non-party version of the story is.

Well that's all from me today!
Peace and Love
Jacob

Sources:

Chang, Maria Hsia. 2004. Falun gong : The end of days. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

Howell, Jude. 2004. Governance in china. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Ownby, David,. 2008. Falun gong and the future of china. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Palmer, David A. Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

The Ides of March

Welcome to March! The most beautiful and terrible of all months for a whole host of reasons which can sometimes (as our tyrannical friend Caesar found) be political. To be more direct on Tuesday twenty people were killed in a riot in north-western city of Kashgar in Xinjiang province in China.

Courtesy of the BBC

Wait what? Well for those of you who don't know Tibet is not the only region which China has colonized. The Xinjiang autonomous region of China was reconquered in 1949 and half of its population are Uighurs. China has always been a large ethnically diverse country (there are over nine different versions of spoken Chinese after all) and its various governments have used various policies to deal with this issue. The current policy under the PRC has been to create a large overwhelming ethnic majority of Han Chinese (which has recently absorbed groups like the Cantonese) and spread that group throughout China (and while I support the building of China's high speed rail network on environmental grounds, this policy is one of the reasons its being built in the first place) in order to create a false (or perhaps real) sense of cultural, ethnic, and national hegemony allowing for easier governance. 

However, in many cases the exact opposite is happening. Groups like the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Cantonese are beginning to question these policies claiming that they are active forms of discrimination that decrease likelihood of employment as well as a form of destructive cultural erosion. However, The CCP doesn't really take all that well to criticism so the complaints, through normal channels, go unheeded. Resulting in: 

2008 Lhasa unrest

2009 Xinjiang unrest 

Which forces the CCP to do the only thing it knows how to do:

Since the 2008/2009 urrest in both Tibet and Xinjiang China has increasingly tightened security. And with China's parliament meeting frighteningly close to the anniversary of the Lhasa riots this coming week, certain members of the government are calling for even tighter control. With officials like the party's secretary to Tibet, Chen Quanguo, calling for tight monitoring of  "Mobile phones, the internet and other measures for the management of new media need to be fully implemented to maintain the public's interests and national security."

Which raises a rather interesting issue that I'll let Princess Leia voice:

Preach Friend, Preach!

It'll be interesting (and probably horrifying considering the PRC track record on these things) to see what unfolds in the next few weeks. Are the fears of the CCP unfounded? Or are things going to exploded and if so what will that explosion mean. 

I guess will just have to wait and see (but I'm beginning to think there more to that geomancer's story then ever before)

Till next time 

Jacob 

Articles: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17195886 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17211909

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17216650