Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China

This book is a social history of the qigong craze which swept urban socialist China in the post-Mao era, leading to the emergence of Falun Gong and its subsequent repression. How could a system of body, breath and mental training exercises, initially promoted by senior Communist Party leaders as a uniquely Chinese healing tradition and as the harbinger of a future scientific revolution, become an outlet for a mass expression of religiosity which was then ruthlessly crushed by the Chinese state?