Internet-based Promotion of Qigong

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Re: Internet-based Promotion of Qigong

Postby voidisyinyang on Wed Jul 11, 2018 10:19 pm

Yeung wrote:I missed the oral presentation of this paper, and please noted that this is a study in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China. Falungong is very active there politically but not as a kind of health exercise. One study shows that Falungong practitioners practice one hour of exercise and an additional hour of meditation listening to the recording of the speeches of the founder.


Professor David Palmer is at University of Hong Kong.

“Modernity and Millenialism in China: Qigong and the Birth of Falun Gong”, Asian Anthropology 2 (2003), pp. 79-110.

https://sociology.hku.hk/people/david-palmer/

His 2007 book, "Qigong Fever" - would be required background reading for this thread....

In fact, while I was doing my PhD research in the late 1990s, the whole qigong movement was becoming more and more religious, year after year. At the end, the Falun Gong 法輪功 issue really woke everyone up to the fact that religiosity was there under the surface in China and nobody had been paying attention to it. Everyone was shocked and surprised when Falun Gong erupted. This was really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the different kinds of religiosity that were starting to bubble under the surface in China.


https://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/a ... -a-palmer/

a whole wave of new religious movements appeared in the Republican period. These groups tried to reorganise China’s religious traditions, to find their points of compatibility and resistance in relation to the transformations of modernity, and they tried to combine and synthesize China’s various religious traditions. Prasenjit Duara called these ‘redemptive societies’ and previously they had been looked at as secret societies or sectarian movements, but their place in the overall religious landscape had not really been considered. It turns out that during the Republican period, they were really the largest organised religious groups in China. Examples would be the Universal Morality Society 萬國道德會, the School of the Tao 道院 or Fellowship of Goodness 同善社, or Yiguandao 一貫道.

These groups had tens of millions of adherents and when the PRC was established in 1949, one of the first mass campaigns the party launched was to eradicate those movements, which shows their size and influence on Chinese society at the time. That’s an aspect of the history of twentieth century China that had been completely ignored in the past by scholars of modern religion or of modern China in general.


So not necessarily "cults" - but more like China's attempt to Westernize...and the reaction to it.

And since then Westerners can not really objectively "comment" on China's Westernization!

now it seems that Chinese society has become much more differentiated and the situation has become far more complex. In a sense, this fragmentation is completely normal. China is a huge country and it was incredible how, in the Maoist and early post-Mao period everyone was on the same page in some sense, with an incredibly high level of integration. Everyone was caught in the same process. I think a holistic view of contemporary China is becoming more and more difficult nowadays.


So it seems that qigong would be found less in "sports" context than in the Daoist context now:

Qigong has gone bust, as you said, but it is still going on albeit less visibly and it is becoming more explicitly associated with Daoism.
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Re: Internet-based Promotion of Qigong

Postby voidisyinyang on Wed Jul 11, 2018 10:54 pm

http://www.mmg.mpg.de/index.php?id=1097

Fascinating lecture by David Palmer on qigong -
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Re: Internet-based Promotion of Qigong

Postby Yeung on Thu Jul 12, 2018 2:29 pm

I have a lot of problems with the Western Daoists because it is very difficult to identity the backgrounds of these practitioners, as most New Age people are into everything. I think David Palmer did not go into the details of what exactly are practiced and worshiped. It is natural that without resources from wealthy baby boomers, small group dynamic become popular.

In any case, the idea of becoming god is popular in any culture.
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