Customer Reviews

Falun Gong and the Future of China

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As a specialist in reporting on religion for more than 20 years, I'm well aware that the toughest challenge in American news media is discerning the size, shape and scope of emerging religious movements.

New groups emerge on the global stage every year. Discerning even the most basic facts about them is incredibly difficult -- given the nature of religious authority and the lack of methods for fact checking that are commonly used by journalists in realms such as sports, business or government. This challenge is even tougher when movements emerge from countries distant from the U.S. -- in an era when American news companies are slashing travel budgets. The challenge becomes almost impossible when language barriers and powerful government restrictions are added to the mix.

That's why a globally important movement like Falun Gong rises and falls in American consciousness and its story transforms strangely over time -- if we hear anything at all about the movement, that is.

When Falun Gong emerged on the global stage in the 1990s, I was among the first newspaper reporters to write about local groups springing up in public parks. In that phase, as reporters, we enjoyed writing about this emerging story. It featured Chinese-American immigrants, many of them successful and articulate professionals in engineering and other technical fields, who devoted hours to graceful exercises and meditation in beautiful natural settings.

Falun Gong also was an international news story when the movement confronted the Chinese government in Beijing. In recent years, claims have rippled through news media about the imprisonment, torture and even the killing of followers in China. If this story intrigues you, I strongly recommend historian David Ownby's balanced overview of this movement and its impact.

Ownby clearly understands that he's stepping out onto infamously thin ice. His Preface is a cautionary note to all sides related to Falun Gong, arguing that he's trying to take a neutral stance.

Reading his 235-page overview of the movement, as best I can tell, he's done a very good job. And, what's especially important about this book, is that there's little else that's as current and as carefully documented as Ownby's volume. Knowing that many readers will want to take apart this book and "read more," he adds an Appendix on global immigration, notes on his sources, a 14-page bibliography including Web links, plus a full index to the book for quick access and cross referencing details.

Ownby himself praises the other significant choice, at the moment, David Palmer's Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China -- and makes it clear where his own interpretations tend to diverge. I would say that the biggest difference between the books, from the everyday reader's point of view, is that Palmer looks at the larger Qigong movement since the 1940s and explores Falun Gong within that context. Ownby's book is focused entirely on Falun Gong -- both in China and in the Chinese diaspora.

With rising American interest in China -- not only in relation to the 2008 Olympics, but also from every indication that China is becoming one of the next global superpowers -- understanding a catalytic movement like Falun Gong is as important as understanding, say, the role of Protestant culture in the U.S.

This also could be a good choice for small groups, if your group is particularly interested in global culture and international relations.

I am a long-time Falun Gong practitioner who's done his Master's Degree in Religious Studies and read through a large part of related research that's available in English.

First of all, this book is certainly one of the best academic treatises on Falun Gong, along with writings by Barend ter Haar, Benjamin Penny, Noah Porter, and some others. If I were to get just one book on Falun Gong written by a third party, this would probably be it. Nevertheless, the book has its limitations, some of which I'd like to address in this review.

In my view, Ownby writes in an accessible style. But there's a heavy load of "I would have known better" attitude, especially in regards to the pre-crackdown appeal at Zhongnanhai, Beijing. Some of the comments he makes about Li Hongzhi could be regarded as insulting by many practitioners. Ownby seems to take for granted that Li Hongzhi lied about his birthday, or that he did not know how to "play his cards" in April 1999.

Ownby readily admits that he doesn't understand the lectures given in 2000-2002. He fails to note the idea of "Fa-rectification" appearing before 1999 and seems to think of it as a narrative that was made up to save Li Hongzhi's face after the persecution; at least this is my interpretation of what he's saying.

But something he does understand is that a serious researcher on Falun Gong should not try to examine the practice outside its cultural context--a requirement that's been unbelievably hard to grasp for many lesser authors on the subject. A lot of content in Li Hongzhi's books are commentaries on what other qigong masters said and did at the time. From a certain point of view, they reflect the zeitgeist of China in the beginning of the 1990s. These strange days have never been discussed in the West in great detail.

Ever since the end of the 1970s, a scientific debate between the 'naturalist' and 'supernaturalist' paradigms of qigong was ubiquitous in China's top universities, and a veritable corpus of scientific literature resulted. Even Qian Xuesen, "father of China's space program", perceived qigong as a new form of science. It goes without saying that Li Hongzhi does not write "scientific prose" as we've learned to know it, but he makes several references to such experiments. From a hermeneutic viewpoint, Ownby should have tried to understand how a well-educated practitioner, say a university professor -- and they were abundant -- could have started to practice Falun Gong all the while retaining a coherent worldview.

Suppression of supernaturalist qigong at the end of the decade could be examined as a violent termination of a debate never resolved; even in the years preceding the crackdown, the Chinese state had decided to withdraw its support from such qigong practices as they became "too popular" and seemingly threatened the Communist Party's monopoly over ultimate meanings.

Lamentably, it seems that Ownby does not take qigong very seriously, and this underlying attitude is thinly masked in his book. Agreed, he does not explicitly launch an attack against qigong's attempted introduction into the scientific realm, but it is clear that he sees it as just another form of Chinese popular religion, the implication being something like "these Chinese are pretty naïve to believe in that, but it's still understandable, because they have such a long history of similar folk religions".

He seems to insinuate that the hundreds of millions of people who practiced qigong were more or less relying on ordinary calisthenics and meditation to improve their health--something safe and easily contained within the prevailing scientific paradigm. The fundamental challenge that qigong poses to Western reason is not taken seriously at all. Everything else follows along this basic assumption. Qigong is too outlandish, it just cannot be true--therefore, for the sake of coherence, Ownby chooses to interpret all of his material from that perspective, even though he remains fairly deferential.

Of course, if supernaturalism in qigong would have been taken seriously at all, the book might have dabbled too deep into the area of metaphysics. That was evidently not Ownby's intention. He struggles to keep an "objective" distance, which may seem good for the average reader at this time, but, depending on how things ultimately turn out for Falun Gong, could appear supercilious in future analyses of the book.

What was presented in the book's narrative of the history of qigong or Falun Gong was nothing new to me, being already rather well-read on the subject. Some interesting sources, some names I hadn't heard of before, a relatively good chronology of how things happened. Other than that, the book did not impress me, and, honestly speaking, it was a bit disappointing, for I had expected a real masterpiece from Ownby. It may be the most comprehensive scholarly account on Falun Gong so far, and I don't know if we're going to get anything better in the near future, but it's still a far cry from being the definitive account on this unprecedented phenomenon and the reasons leading up to its persecution. Nevertheless, with warts and all, the book is infinitely better than anything written by Maria Hsia Chang.

Four stars.

The one other reviewer (to date) of this book may well be correct in rating 5 stars from an academic viewpoint. But for the casual reader this is definitely not the book to buy.

I am fairly well read, and a college graduate with a few minor writing credits to my name. Nonetheless, I found the language pretentious. For example, the author refers to coining a "neologos", a word which doesn't even appear in my dictionary but - as far as I could determine from the context - probably translates to "coin a phrase". So why not just say that?

To make matters worse, sentences are often long and complex, making points difficult to follow. Unless you have a serious academic interest in Falun Gong, you're probably not going to want to work that hard. I began to lose interest before reaching the end of Chapter 1, skimmed a few subsections in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, then finally gave up altogether. It is rare for me not to finish a book once I've started it.

I should have taken warning by the fact that this title was not available in any public library in Ohio (I try to preview books by unfamiliar authors before I buy them). But I really am interested in the topic, so decided to risk it. However, for me at least, purchasing this book was a mistake. I would only recommend it to someone who is writing a research paper. Other readers will probably be disappointed.

A more accessible book on Falun Gong is "Falun Gong: The End of Days", by Maria Hsia Chang. Though not perfect (and somewhat trivialized by the author of this particular title), it offers less history and more about the actual beliefs of Falun Gong.