Falun gong and the future of china, Ownby, David (associate Professor Of History, Associate Professor Of History, University Of Monreal)

Falun Gong began as a form of qigong, a general name describing physical and mental disciplines based loosely on traditional Chinese medical and spiritual practices. Qigong was invented in the 1950s by members of the Chinese medical establishment who were worried that Chinas traditional healing arts would be lost as China modeled its new socialist health care system on Western biomedicine. In the late 1970s, Chinese scientists discovered that qi possessed genuine scientific qualities, which allowed qigong to become part of Chinas drive for modernization. With the support of Chinas leadership, qigong became hugely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, as charismatic qigong> masters attracted millions of enthusiastic practitioners in what was known as the qigong boom, the first genuine mass movement in the history of the Peoples Republic.

Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi started his own school of qigong in 1992, claiming that the larger movement had become corrupted by money and magic tricks. Li was welcomed into the qigong world and quickly built a nationwide following of several million practitioners, but ran afoul of Chinas authorities and relocated to the United States in 1995. In his absence, followers in China began to organize peaceful protests of perceived media slights of Falun Gong, which increased from the mid-90s onward as Chinas leaders began to realize that they had created, in the qigong boom, a mass movement with religious and nationalistic undertones, a potential threat to their legitimacy and control.