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Falun Gong and the Future of China (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,439
Discovery Miles 24 390
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Falun Gong and the Future of China (Hardcover)
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Total price: R2,459
Discovery Miles: 24 590
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On April 25, 1999, ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered
outside Zhongnanhai, the guarded compound where China's highest
leaders live and work, in a day-long peaceful protest of police
brutality against fellow practitioners in the neighboring city of
Tianjin. Stunned and surprised, China's leaders launched a campaign
of brutal suppression against the group which continues to this
day. This book, written by a leading scholar of the history Chinese
popular religion, is the first to offer a full explanation of what
Falun Gong is and where it came from, placing the group in the
broader context of the modern history of Chinese religion as well
as the particular context of post-Mao China. 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 worried that China's
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
China's drive for modernization. With the support of China's
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 People's Republic.
Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi founded his own school of qigong in
1992, claiming that the larger movement had become corrupted by
money and magic tricks; Li wanted to refocus attention on genuine
"cultivation" and preached a fundamentalist message of morality and
mastery of Li's teachings. Li was welcomed into the qigong world
and quickly built a nationwide following of several million
practitioners, but ran afoul of China's 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 China's
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. Based on
fieldwork among Chinese Falun Gong practitioners in North America
and on extensive readings of Li Hongzhi's writings, this volume
offers a depiction of Falun Gong from the inside, at the same time
offering a narrative depiction of Falun Gong and its origins in the
history of Chinese popular religion.
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