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.