Qigong fever (qigong re)

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Qigong fever (qigong re) is the name historians give to the wave of mass enthusiasm for qigong — the cultivation of qi, or vital breath-energy, through posture, movement, and meditation — that swept the People’s Republic of China from the late 1970s through the 1990s. At its height tens of millions practiced in city parks at dawn, followed masters by radio and cassette, and filled stadiums to receive healing energy transmitted from a stage. A regimen of breath and body that had spent the previous decade outlawed as feudal superstition became, within a few years, a national passion, a state-funded research frontier, and the largest organized lay activity in the country outside the Party itself.

The practices were old; the movement was not. Breathing and gymnastic disciplines run back through Daoist and Buddhist self-cultivation — daoyin, the “guiding and pulling” of breath and limb attested in the Han-era exercise chart recovered from the Mawangdui tombs, and the long inner-alchemical line treated under Daoist internal alchemy. But the term qigong itself, in its modern sense as the name of a single unified field of body-cultivation, was assembled only in the 1950s. The cadre Liu Guizhen, having (by his own account) cured himself of ulcers and tuberculosis through a family method called neiyang gong, “inner-nurturing exercise,” worked with Hebei health officials to strip the practice of its religious framing and rename it under two ancient characters: qi, breath or vital energy, and gong, disciplined effort. His Qigong Liaofa Shijian (Practice of Qigong Therapy, 1957) is generally identified as the first publicly published modern qigong book, and around it the young state built a sanatorium system — the Tangshan clinic where Liu trained, the Beidaihe Qigong Sanatorium founded in 1956 — that recast a scatter of older methods as standardized, secular therapy fit for socialist medicine. This first peak framed qigong as therapeutic, scientific, and politically safe. It was a deliberate medicalizing recoinage, not an unbroken transmission.

That settlement did not hold. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) qigong was again denounced as feudal superstition; the clinics were closed, the sanatoria dispersed, and Liu Guizhen himself persecuted. What returned after Mao was something larger and stranger than the clinic procedure. In the relative opening of the reform era — the same thaw that reopened temples treated under Chinese popular religion — qigong came back not as a medical specialty but as a popular religion of the body, carried by figures who styled themselves grandmasters and drew followings in the millions. By the late 1980s the standard scholarly estimate, drawn from David Palmer’s history of the movement, runs to between sixty and two hundred million practitioners across more than two thousand organizations. The numbers are soft — many are self-reported by groups with an interest in inflation — but even their floor describes one of the largest popular phenomena of late-twentieth-century urban China.

The spark: reading with the ear

The fever did not begin in a laboratory. It began with a press sensation. In the post-Mao thaw, a schoolboy in Sichuan named Tang Yu was reported to read concealed Chinese characters with his ear; the originating anecdote had him correctly naming a brand of cigarettes hidden in a companion’s pocket. On 11 March 1979 the Sichuan Daily, an official Party newspaper, ran the account of a child who could read with his ears, and a rash of “ear-reading children” reports followed across the country. The Shanghai journal Ziran zazhi (Nature Journal) became the key venue publishing such reports through 1979 and 1980, and a new term entered general use: renti teyi gongneng, “Extraordinary Human Functions” — the umbrella for clairvoyance, distance diagnosis, telekinesis, and the rest of the claimed paranormal repertoire. Out of the ear-reading child grew the whole edifice of fever-era qigong: a claim not merely that breath-work healed, but that the cultivated body could project a force across space and act on matter at a distance.

That claim had a name of its own — wai qi, “external qi,” and fa qi, “qi emission” — and a vocabulary borrowed wholesale from physics. Daoist and medical literature had long spoken of directing and circulating qi within the body. The systematic insistence that external qi was a measurable physical emission — detectable by infrared, magnetic, or radiation instruments, able to move objects and alter substances from afar — was a reframing of the 1980s, an old substrate re-narrated in the idiom of the modernizing state. The anthropologist Nancy Chen, whose fieldwork among practitioners, healers, and psychiatric patients forms one of the foundational studies of the movement, characterizes qigong in this systematized form as a modern construct: an ancient grammar set to a new, instrumented music.

Is it science

Part of what gave the fever its peculiar charge was a question the era took with the highest seriousness: whether qigong was science. The question was not posed at the margins. It was posed at the summit of the Chinese scientific establishment, by the most prestigious scientist the country possessed. Qian Xuesen — Caltech-trained, a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the architect of China’s missile and space programs — became from the early 1980s the movement’s most powerful patron. He filed Extraordinary Human Functions, qigong, and traditional medicine together under a new disciplinary banner he called renti kexue, “somatic science” or human-body science, with qigong at its core, and argued that the three together would precipitate a scientific revolution, a second Renaissance comparable in scale to the discovery of a new domain of nature. His prestige was a shield. It made the field respectable; it made open criticism, for much of the decade, professionally dangerous.

Institutions followed the patronage. The state-run China Qigong Science Research Society was established in 1985 to regulate masters and organizations; the China Somatic Science Society was founded in 1987 with Qian as honorary chairman and the general Zhang Zhenhuan at its head, roughly half its members professional scientists; a Chinese Journal of Somatic Science began in 1990. The movement’s strongest internal case rested on laboratory experiments claiming to detect the physical effects of emitted qi — the flagship collaboration between the nuclear physicist Lu Zuyin and the master Yan Xin, whose reported results had external qi, sometimes purportedly emitted from thousands of kilometers away, altering the molecular structure of water, the conformation of DNA, and the gamma-ray count of a radioactive source. For a time qigong sat, oddly, inside both the laboratory and the marketplace of charisma — defended as a national treasure and a frontier of human potential at once, the object of stadium devotion and of peer-reviewed ambition in the same season.

Skeptics countered throughout, and from within the establishment. The Marxist theoretician Yu Guangyuan, a senior architect of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and a veteran opponent of Lysenkoism, became the field’s most prominent intellectual critic, though he complained for years that materialist articles were rejected or ignored while the patrons held the field. The Chinese Academy of Sciences physicist He Zuoxiu was its leading scientific debunker. And the professional skeptic Sima Nan, disillusioned after years inside the human-body-science apparatus, spent the 1990s on stage and on national television reproducing the masters’ signature feats — fire-swallowing, spoon-bending, brick-breaking — to demonstrate that they were conjuring; he was beaten for it. Reviewers outside China reached the methodological verdict that the external-qi experiments rested on small samples and weak protocols and had never been replicated under controlled conditions accepted by mainstream physics or biology. The dispute over qi’s reality as such was overtaken by events before either side could compel the other; on the narrower question of whether the leading grandmasters performed genuine psychokinesis, the documented record turned decisively.

The grandmasters and the documented record

The fever produced a crowded field of charismatic masters, and a smaller set of specific, testable claims that were checked and found to be conjuring. The most celebrated psychokinetic was Zhang Baosheng, a former mine laborer “discovered” around 1979 as able to read with his nose and to move objects into and out of sealed containers. The military promoted him; he entered the 507 Institute, the Space Medico-Engineering Research Institute, and was dubbed a national-treasure qigong master, performing for senior officials and acquiring wealth and an entourage. His signature feat was moving medicine pills out of a sealed glass bottle. At a 1988 test before officials and scientists — reported in detail by Wu Xiaoping in the Skeptical Inquirer, with an introductory note by the magician James Randi — the conditions were never under the committee’s control; Zhang left the room repeatedly, sample weights showed substitution, the sealed points on the bottles were found broken, and a secretly marked envelope prepared by He Zuoxiu was caught being swapped, the substitution observed by the conjuror Ti Yueli. The strongest single demonstration of the movement’s strongest psychokinetic resolved into sleight of hand. Believers afterward held that Randi’s presence had canceled the powers — a claim made by believers, not a fact the record establishes.

Yan Xin, trained in martial arts and medicine in Sichuan, became the movement’s greatest mass communicator. From 1987 he pioneered the daigong baogao, the “power-emission lecture,” in which a master “transmitted” qi to a stadium audience — by one count over two hundred such events in a single year, drawing crowds of up to twenty thousand and inducing collective trance, spontaneous movement, and reported spontaneous healings. Skeptics held the lecture effects to be mass suggestion. Zhang Xiangyu, founder of “Qigong of the Great Nature,” drew millions of pilgrims to Beijing in 1990, claimed communication with extraterrestrials, and was arrested and convicted of fraud. Zhang Hongbao’s Zhonggong became, by the early 1990s, one of the largest social organizations in China outside the Party, with a commercial empire and claims of tens of millions of adherents. The proponents held — and some still hold — that external qi is a real, measurable agent and that the extraordinary functions are genuine latent human capacities awaiting validation. The skeptics held that the demonstrations were conjuring and suggestion, the experiments unreplicated, and the field a pseudoscience shielded by political power. Both cases are reported at their strongest; the exposed conjuring is treated as the established historical fact it is, while the deeper question of qi — the substrate that runs back through Daoism, the Tao Te Ching, and the inner-alchemical pursuit of immortality — is not settled by the documented record.

The turn against the fever

The same conditions that let the masters flourish eventually alarmed the state that had encouraged them. Some movements grew into large organizations with their own cosmologies and their own discipline over members’ lives — closer in form to the lay salvationist associations, the “redemptive societies,” that had flourished in Republican China than to a clinic or a sport — and the authorities came to read mass enthusiasm outside the Party’s frame as a danger rather than a resource. The Party’s propaganda apparatus had been internally split for two decades, oscillating between promotion and restraint, an early-1980s line of “no promotion, no public criticism” effectively leaving the field to grow unchecked.

The break came at the decade’s end. On 11 April 1999 He Zuoxiu published an article criticizing the practice of qigong by the young in a Tianjin educational magazine; protests over the article led to arrests, and on 25 April 1999 an estimated ten to thirty thousand practitioners of one of these networks gathered silently around the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in central Beijing — a demonstration the leadership reportedly judged the most serious since 1989, according to the analysis of the U.S. Congressional Research Service. The network was outlawed that July; an “anti-cult” law followed in October. In the aftermath the state imposed stricter controls on the remaining qigong groups, banned the largest organizations, and effectively dismantled the somatic-science research program. The wider boom was reined in around the same turn.

Whether qigong fever is best understood as folk healing, as a religious revival under a secular name, or as a brief science of the body that failed to deliver remains contested, and the framing chosen tends to decide the verdict in advance. What is not in dispute is the shape of the episode: a society sorting out what to keep from its past, and what to trust in a new science, poured both questions into the body — into breath, posture, and the warmth of a hand held a few inches from the skin. The parks emptied of the largest crowds; the practice did not vanish, but the fever, as a national event, passed.

Sources and scholarship

The scholarly literature on this episode is recent and almost entirely in copyright; there is no significant public-domain primary corpus specific to the movement, since nearly all of its texts postdate 1950. The pre-modern substrate on which it drew is hosted elsewhere — the classical Daoist canon under the Daozang, and Legge’s translations of the foundational Daoist texts in the Library.

• David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007). The first serious English-language history of the movement, and the source of the standard 60-to-200-million estimate and the “political pillars” analysis of its patronage. Publisher page: cup.columbia.edu/book/qigong-fever/9780231140669.
• Nancy N. Chen, Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (Columbia University Press, 2003). An anthropological study of practitioners, healers, and the “qigong deviation” psychiatric category, tracing how the state medicalized some forms while championing scientific ones. Publisher page: cup.columbia.edu/book/breathing-spaces/9780231128049.
• Utiraruto Otehode and Benjamin Penny, “Qigong Therapy in 1950s China,” East Asian History no. 40 (2016): 69–83. Open-access scholarship on Liu Guizhen, the neiyang gong cure, and the 1950s standardization of the term: eastasianhistory.org/40/Otehode-and-Penny; with its companion, “Activist Practitioners in the Qigong Boom of the 1980s,” eastasianhistory.org/41/otehode-penny.
• Wu Xiaoping, “Report of a Chinese Psychic’s Pill-Bottle Demonstration,” Skeptical Inquirer (Winter 1989). The primary skeptical account of the 1988 Zhang Baosheng test, with a note by James Randi: cdn.centerforinquiry.org/…/1989/…/p61.pdf.
• Donald Mainfort, “Sima Nan: Fighting Qigong Pseudoscience in China,” Skeptical Inquirer (1999). A profile of the debunker who reproduced the masters’ feats as conjuring: skepticalinquirer.org/…/sima-nan-fighting-qigong-pseudoscience-in-china.
• Kevin Chen, “An Analytic Review of Studies on Measuring Effects of External Qi in China,” Journal of Scientific Exploration / related survey (2002). A methodological assessment of the external-qi experimental literature, noting small samples and weak protocols.
• Thomas Lum, “China and ‘Falun Gong,’” Congressional Research Service report RS20333. A neutral documentary account of the April 1999 silent demonstration and the subsequent ban: everycrsreport.com/reports/RS20333.html.

The Western analogue most often invoked for a claimed, instrument-measurable healing force later resolved into suggestion and stagecraft is mesmerism — a parallel of debate-shape, not of doctrine; the two traditions share neither lineage nor cosmology. Adjacent self-cultivation currents are treated under meditation, Buddhism, the Quanzhen monastic order, and Confucian moral discipline.

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