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Qigong in Three Social Worlds: National Treasure, Social Signifier, or Breathing Exercise?

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Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Part of the book series: Health, Technology and Society ((HTE))

Abstract

Chinese qigong practices provide an interesting case in point of the varying and often incommensurate production of alternative health modalities in the social worlds of practitioners, scholars, and medical scientists. Drawing on publications from each social world, this chapter argues that the term qigong, rather than referring to a set of internally consistent Chinese ‘meditation’ or ‘breathing exercises’, may be more usefully understood as a catch-all term which belies the cultural-nationalist production of such practices during the Chinese qigong movement, emphasises their social and political significance at the expense of their practical value—in particular with regard to the vitalistic notion of qi—and disregards the methodological issues pertaining to studying a perplexing diversity of practice styles, schools, and traditions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Search string: (qigong[Title] OR “qi gong”[Title]) AND (Review[ptyp] AND “2007/03/19”[PDAT]: “2017/03/17”[PDAT]).

  2. 2.

    As Palmer (2007: 194) notes, ‘[i]t was common in qigong circles to speak of over 3000 denominations’, ranging from a ‘handful of disciples’ to ‘tens of millions of followers’. Ji, Wu ,and, Liang here limit themselves to relatively well-established groups with a considerable number of followers.

  3. 3.

    Exhaling turbid qi and inhaling pure qi, not to be confused with tuina, the massage technique.

  4. 4.

    Translated literally, qigong refers to the ‘mastery’ or ‘skill’ (gong 功) of vital energy or ‘breath’ (qi 气). Usage of the term qi varies between ‘cosmological, health-related, martial, literary, sexual, and environmental contexts’ (Frank 1997, in Frank 2000: 13; see also Kubny 1995).

  5. 5.

    Penny and Otehode (2016: 74) and Otehode (2009: 244) also suggest geographical variation in the choice of the term before qigong became widely accepted, including ‘deep breath therapy’ (shen huxifa), ‘light breath therapy’ (qian huxifa), ‘movements for breathing and massage’ (huxi anmo yundong), ‘breathing therapy for nourishing life’ (huxi yangshengfa), and ‘quiet sitting therapy’ (jingzuo liaofa) which in medical journals were presented as ‘medical exercises’ (yiliao tiyu) and ‘preventive therapies’ (yufang liaofa).

  6. 6.

    According to Otehode (2009: 249), Soviet science, in particular Pavlovian physiology, also played a significant role during the 1950s in providing qigong with a theoretical basis acceptable with its status as a ‘national medical heritage’.

  7. 7.

    A PubMed search for ‘qigong’ (search string: “qigong”[MeSH Terms] OR “qigong”[All Fields]) shows that the number of publications referring to qigong has increased from 3 in 1990 to 6 in 2000, 15 in 2005, 23 in 2010, and 45 in 2016.

  8. 8.

    An overview of this material translated to English may be found in the appendix of Winiger (forthcoming).

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  1. Hong Kong Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China

    Fabian Winiger

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  1. Fabian Winiger
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  1. School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

    Caragh Brosnan

  2. School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Pia Vuolanto

  3. Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Jenny-Ann Brodin Danell

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Winiger, F. (2018). Qigong in Three Social Worlds: National Treasure, Social Signifier, or Breathing Exercise?. In: Brosnan, C., Vuolanto, P., Danell, JA. (eds) Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73939-7_4

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