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Falun Gong and the Future of China (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,068
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Falun Gong and the Future of China (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,088
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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 of this
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 who were
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 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 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 close examinations of Li Hongzhi's writings, this
volume offers an inside look at the movement's history in Chinese
popular religion.
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