Breathing Spaces

Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China

Nancy N. Chen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231502214
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, based on meditative breathing exercises, has achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Qigong served a critical social organizational function, as practitioners formed new informal networks, sometimes on an international scale, at a time when China was shifting from state-subsidized medical care to for-profit market medicine. The emergence of new psychological states deemed to be deviant led the Chinese state to "medicalize" certain forms while championing scientific versions of qigong. By contrast, qigong continues to be promoted outside China as a traditional healing practice. Breathing Spaces brings to life the narratives of numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats, revealing the varied and often dramatic ways they cope with market reform and social changes in China.

CHAPTER

ONE

INTRODUCTION

A DEEP BREATH of fresh air was always on my mind when I began field research on psychiatric practices and mental health care in Beijing during the winter of 1990. I lived in a high-rise apartment that faced similar gray buildings constructed in the 1950s. The smokestack of the building next door belched coal dust directly into my window, burning my lungs and making me wish for clear blue skies. Each morning I would look onto a solitary figure standing immobile on the opposite balcony. The whirring sound of pigeons circling nearby in the gray haze eerily accompanied this haunting image. I soon realized that this person’s stance was part of a visualization practice in qigong, which required intense focus and simultaneous immersion in and withdrawal from the external world.

The quest for health, vitality, and longevity has been at the center of many spiritual and bodily practices in China for several millennia. Qigong is a form of healing and self-cultivation that reformulated traditional breathing and meditation techniques in the post-Mao reform period. A highly charismatic form of holistic healing, it eventually became regulated and reclaimed as state medicine. For a brief time, however, qigong flourished as a social and individual health pursuit avidly followed even by state officials. While I was conducting my research, the worlds of qigong and spiritual practice dramatically intersected with the worlds of science and bureaucracy in China. The bodily experience of qigong has been described by masters and lay practitioners as a force field or body of energy linked to natural forces. Visualization and imagination were central components in creating this body, which joined the individual senses and intellect to cosmological power. Commitment to daily practice brought agency in healing and new identities that embraced spiritual holism. The experience of practice in natural surroundings also renewed strong emotional links to an environment that could be reimagined to counter socialist urban anomie.

The tales of miraculous healing and other experiences that many practitioners described to me soon came to resonate with Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1929 underground novel. The Master and Margarita takes place in a chaotic early Soviet system at the beginning of the twentieth century where good and evil engage in dialogue. Local citizens encounter mystical characters who test their morality and wreak havoc on those who succumb to greed. The insane asylum figures prominently in the novel as citizens are locked up when they claim to see the mystical figures. The novel’s central characters include a petty bureaucrat, a mystical figure capable of shape shifting into animals and humans, and a young woman. As the lives of these characters become more closely interwoven, Bulgakov’s critique of how socialist Russia had to contend with heterodox spirituality and even the shadow of Christianity emerges as a central motif.

The parallels with the social phenomenon of qigong deviation and political responses to this disorder were remarkable. Several prominent qigong masters claimed to have special mystical powers and attracted a wide following from all backgrounds, from factory workers to elite cadres. Names of ancient deities, Daoist practices of self-cultivation, and fantastic tales of superhuman abilities, which were suppressed as superstitious during the Cultural Revolution, resurfaced in public spaces and households. As the increasing influence of several masters became more apparent, state officials were quick to incarcerate one, declaring her to be a witch who profited from people’s willingness to believe anything she said. Meanwhile, practitioners suffering from uncontrollable movements and visions related to qigong began to fill the psychiatric wards, complaining of losing control of the qi (chi) energy in their bodies. Many patients were brought in by families or work units after refusing food and claiming to be immortal or trying out their newly found healing abilities on others. After seeking help from traditional healers or medical doctors, families brought these patients to the hospital wards as a last resort.

This ethnography documents official and alternative practices of mental health in urban China. The ways in which individuals sought mental order through both orthodox biomedicine and alternative means of healing reveal responses to the tremendous economic and social transformations under market reform. In conversations with masters and lay practitioners of qigong, as well as with scientists and medical doctors, I was impressed with the sincerity with which people in these different realms sought order both personally and professionally. Though it would seem that the social worlds of qigong and a mental ward would be far apart, the intersections actually surfaced in surprising ways. My days began by watching my neighbor standing motionless on the balcony, continued with observing practitioners in the parks hugging trees, and ended with seeing patients in the mental hospital in the throes of uncontrollable qi energy, sometimes choking or bent over in pain. One hospital worker who was an avid follower of a female mystic whose career I will address in this book suddenly broke into uncontrollable sobs when our conversation turned to the fate of her newly imprisoned master. “Is she okay, have you heard from my teacher? She did nothing wrong. She is a true master.” The worker’s tears dried as suddenly as they came. Emotional and often passionate encounters such as these revealed how compelling the practice could become.

Despite the hazards of uncontrollable energy, qigong practice released the mind and body from the pressures of daily life in noninstitutional settings. For devoted practitioners, the exercises were moments of healing and transcendence over social or work obligations. Breathing spaces were carved out of the Chinese urban landscape of gray skyscrapers and busy streets through ecstatic experiences that took pleasure in the powers of healing and mental order.¹ Parks, courtyards, and even streets became spaces where it was all right to cry out or laugh uncontrollably. Mass qigong sessions, where a master would lecture and then heal individuals with internal energy, were strikingly reminiscent of spiritual revivalist movements in other cultural contexts and even political demonstrations of the Cultural Revolution. One master aptly concluded a group session of several hundred people by stating, “Qigong releases the soul of China.” These occasions allowed members of the audience to experience spiritual transformations anonymously under the guidance of charismatic masters. Highly charged emotions were released with accompanying cries and tears of pain or pleasure as individuals were guided through sensory experiences. In the absence of strong religious institutions or emotional revolutionary campaigns after the Maoist era, gatherings of practitioners by the hundreds or thousands offered a social space for emotional and spiritual expression in a context of rapid urbanization and the shift to a market economy. Such gatherings were initially tolerated by the state, because participants emerged from them more productive, recharged, and revitalized.

Two ethnographic settings in China, the urban parks and the mental hospitals, situate the contradictory meanings of deviation and order that were eventually played out in public. My research was located inside Chinese mental hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, and Laiyang (Shandong Province) as well as beyond the asylum in the parks of these cities. Set in a chronological window between the post-Tiananmen policies of 1990 and the revitalization of the Chinese economy in 1992, my examination of mental health care during this period focused on the relations between self-healing and institutional care. Later comparative research in Taiwan, the United States, and on the Internet allowed me to investigate the flows of practice and situated knowledges.

My role as an ethnographer emerged differently in the two research contexts. In the hospital, where the hierarchy of doctors, nurses, hospital staff, patients, and family members was visibly organized, I was introduced as a foreign researcher to all whom I encountered. In the parks, however, I began as an observer on early weekday mornings, from 6:30 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. This was the key time for many city residents to practice calisthenics, mass disco dance, strolling, tai chi, or qigong before going to work. The other major time for practitioners was Sunday mornings, the one free day before the institution of two-day weekends in 1995.

As city parks often drew people from all backgrounds, anyone who wished to participate in qigong could generally join in the morning sessions. Though speaking with strangers in other settings might be unusual, the common interest in qigong made it possible to strike up conversations quickly. In the course of such discussions, many practitioners would ask what form of qigong I practiced. I always responded that though I had studied other forms of martial arts since my teenage years, I did not yet practice or subscribe to any particular style of qigong. I was observing different methods for research. This exchange opened to me a world of practitioners who were eager to tell their stories of the search for healing and masters as well as to share inner experiences, which were ecstatic yet full of fearful apparitions.

The transformations that many people underwent in qigong practice paralleled my own journey as an anthropologist. Arriving in Beijing during the summer of 1985, I first lived and worked in China as an English teacher at the Beijing Institute of Iron and Steel Technology.² Like thousands of other “foreign experts” residing in China during the 1980s, I initially became immersed in Chinese social life and cultural politics through my students and colleagues and eventually through friends off campus. Their frequent stories about life during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and views of Chinese modernization after Mao were interspersed with eager questions about American culture and life abroad. As the child of immigrant parents, raised in the United States, my life experiences were viewed as valuable if not instrumental.³ Deeply moving stories about separation and struggles during the Cultural Revolution as well as about daily life in a new economic order led me to ask how families and different generations reworked their experiences of the past in the present. I had intended to study the role of family support in mental health care programs during graduate school.

The experiences and narratives of otherworldly journeys confronted me with the difficulty of writing an ethnography not only about life in a different country but about the problems of choosing the language with which to depict spiritual, social, and state discourses. Growing up in the southern United States, however, prepared me to examine spiritual aspects of healing in ways I did not expect. Qigong involves intense sensual engagement with the physical world as much as it entails disengagement from the social world where perceptions and the language of the senses are transformed. There is the difficulty of not only of translating Mandarin into English but also of making clear the culturally embedded meanings contained within psychiatric terms or descriptions of spiritual practices. How does one describe the sensations of orienting oneself to the cosmological world while also having a physical body with familial and institutional ties? How does one describe the mind-body experience of having inner and outer worlds collapse, allowing the chaos within oneself and in the social context to be embraced? These were extraordinary experiences of ordinary people: street sweepers, factory workers, bike lot attendants, students, professionals, even bureaucrats, who were playing with the boundaries of mind-body and experiencing other realms of reality where qi energy became the main source of spiritual and physical nourishment.

The role of an anthropologist as outsider to another culture has been effectively problematized by the literature on “halfies” or “native” anthropologists (Narayan 1997; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Altorki and El-Solh 1988). In writing about technologies of the self in craft making, Dorinne Kondo (1991) also addressed her own identity as both insider and outsider in Japanese society. Her vivid account of viewing the reflection of a Japanese woman in a department store window and suddenly realizing that it was actually herself brought to the surface the issue of what it meant to be a sansei, or third-generation Japanese-American ethnographer in Japan. My own location as a second (or 1.5)-generation Chinese American was often folded into the category of the returning overseas Chinese for whom going home had an extensive social meaning. Returning in my case resonated with an additional layer of meaning as I had already lived and worked in China as an English teacher for several years before returning as an anthropologist. I was accepted in my encounters at the hospital, in the parks, and on the street not solely because of perceptions of shared Chineseness but also because of my identity as a research scholar, which had a special significance in both the medical and qigong communities. The confluence of being a Chinese American ethnographer in both contexts led to moments of serendipity in which my difference and sameness mattered greatly.

In what follows, I address four contexts that frame this study of qigong. I begin with the spiritual and medical traditions in China that form the roots of qigong. There are multiple notions of qigong, not only because there are different forms of qi but also because of the contemporary proliferation of the practice. There was an incipient phase of interest in qigong during the early socialist era of the 1950s. This was followed with a quick demise when the Maoist state used antisuperstition campaigns to mobilize against yiquandao (way of basic unity) sects. I then turn to examining qigong from the perspective of medical anthropology and psychiatry. Finally, I address how qigong branched out in the transnational context as an extension of alternative medicine. Alternative medicine tends to be addressed in a celebratory fashion without much regard for historical context. The return of qigong in this context seemed familiar but was quite different during the 1990s.

LOCATING QIGONG

Qigong is a health practice that involves breathing, mental imagery, and sometimes movement. The term “qigong” has been translated in several ways according to notions of qi as air, breath, energy, or primordial life source. According to Liu and Wu’s [1990a–f] multivolume study of qi across eight dynasties, qi—also known as chi or ki—is neither matter nor spirit but the primordial source of all life. Gong refers to the skillful movement, work, or exercise of the qi. It is the root used in words referring to martial arts such as gongfu (kungfu) and further invokes a sense of achievement, service, or ability, used in terms such as gongde (meritorious deeds), gongfu (ability or skill), gongke (homework), and gongming (scholarly honor or rank). The physical manifestation of qi has often been described as warm and located at the center of the body. As a bodily exercise, the practice relies on breathing exercises to attain vast transformations in one’s state of mind and health. As a meditative practice, visualization of energy facilitates the integration of mind, body, and spirit with oneself and one’s environment. Movement, too, is sometimes involved.

In China, qigong is linked to a wide spectrum of practices ranging from self-cultivation, meditation, medical healing, and breathing to martial arts, each with a specific history and genealogy. As there are literally hundreds, even thousands of forms, tracing the lineages of qigong can be an elusive and even Sisyphean task. To help frame the ensuing discussion, I draw on the image of a giant living tree with deep extensive roots and multiple branches. The metaphor comes from my field research in parks, where trees were integral to the daily practice of many practitioners whom I observed and interviewed. Arboreal metaphors were frequently invoked not only at the personal level to describe the experience of related knowledge but also at the transnational level to describe the connectedness between local and overseas Chinese.⁴

Though many masters and texts claim that qigong is over five thousand years old, several scholars and masters consider the term to be of recent vintage, less than a century old by some accounts (Xu 1999). A common origin story told to me by scholars was that qigong was a project sponsored by the Communist Party. The term “qigong” itself was a neologism, nonexistent before the 1950s. The notion of qi and existence of qi cultivation exercises, however, have been documented in numerous medical texts and spiritual practice traditions for several millennia (Englehardt 1989). Traditional Chinese medical, spiritual, and philosophical traditions form the extensive roots of knowledge about qigong, while contemporary extensions of qigong include numerous martial arts forms, spiritual practice spinoffs, and newly regulated scientific qigong. Qigong is different from taijiquan and gongfu in that it is not solely a martial art form. It is also a healing art that can be practiced by masters on patients who are nonpractitioners. Despite the multiple forms and styles of qigong, nearly all practitioners and masters acknowledge its revitalizing effects for the mind, body, and spirit as well as the potential for enhancing potency and longevity. One way to distinguish among the different forms or styles is through movement. Certain forms tend to be introspective and meditative (nei gong) for the practitioner, while other forms tend to focus on external energy and motion (wai gong). Kenneth Cohen, an American qigong master, describes these as “dynamic or active qigong (dong gong) and tranquil or passive qigong (jing gong)” (1997, 4). Another way of categorizing the various forms of qigong differentiates them according to the arenas of spiritual practice, martial arts, and medical healing traditions that incorporate qi cultivation or breathing exercises.

The traditional practices of cultivation perhaps most closely linked to qigong exercise are Daoist forms of breathing and internal transformation. Cultivation, the training of one’s mind and body to refine the self, lies at the heart of most indigenous Chinese body practices. At the heart of Daoism, however, there is also the belief in qi as primordial and preexisting before all other forms of life. It is important to note that Daoist practices are also quite heterogeneous because of the multiple schools that emerged over the centuries (Laughing at the Tao 1995). Different texts, rituals, and movements have been described as Daoist but might actually be related only marginally. Many breathing exercises were secularized and practiced not only by Daoists but by Buddhists and medical practitioners as well. Contemporary qigong practitioners and scholars also invoke Daoist beliefs about cultivation and visualization. At the heart of Daoism, however, was the belief in qi as primordial and preexisting before all other forms of life.

Cultivating qi on an individual basis involves transcending one’s everyday thoughts and perceptions to facilitate opening up to a larger cosmological order via breathing. Daoist cultivation practices have for centuries focused on breathing as a tool for internal alchemical changes in the quest for immortality (Laughing at the Tao 1995; Schipper 1993). A common precept urged practitioners to focus on breathing techniques: “Do not listen with your ears or heart-mind (xin) but with the breath” (Robinet 1997, 35). In two central Daoist texts, the Taipingjing and the Huangtingjing, the process of meditation involves deep visualization of one’s own viscera and breath in order to renew and transform the body. While Daoist body transformations focus primarily on internal alchemy for the ultimate goal of immortality, qigong promotes both internal cultivation and external bodily strength. At the very core of qigong and other cultivation practices, breath and the movement of vital energy through one’s body have been the central principle of connecting body, self, and environment.

In many indigenous cultures and traditional medical systems, the process of breathing and the external environment of air and wind were viewed as a continuum. The movement of air was viewed as a sacred power. The significance of breath for both physical animation and well-being has been noted by scholars and practitioners alike. In his tracing of the elements responsible for life itself—pulse, blood, and respiration—in an...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Fever
• Chapter 3. Riding the Tiger
• Chapter 4. Qigong Deviation or Psychosis
• Chapter 5. Chinese Psychiatry and the Search for Order
• Chapter 6. Mandate of Science
• Chapter 7. Transnational Qigong
• Chapter 8. Suffering and Healing
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index