Falun Gong and the Future of China

by David Ownby

Book Overview

In 1999, 10,000 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. This book explains what Falun Gong is and where it came from.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195329058
• ISBN13: 9780195329056
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The best scholarly account on Falun Gong -- so far

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 ma

An Important Overview by a Balanced Historian, Examining The Movement's Impact on China -- and the W

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