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| The True History of Qigong: Ancient Practices, Modern Invention |
How ancient Chinese breathing, meditation and body-cultivation practices became the modern system we now call Qigong
Qigong is commonly described as an ancient Chinese practice thousands of years old.
You can find claims that Qigong is 2,000, 3,000, or even 5,000 years old. Ancient Chinese medical texts, Daoist practices, Buddhist meditation, martial arts exercises and archaeological images are frequently presented as evidence of this enormous antiquity.
There is some truth behind these claims.
But there is also a serious historical problem.
Ancient China certainly had breathing exercises, meditation, therapeutic movement, physical cultivation and methods concerned with what Chinese traditions called qi 氣. Some of these practices are genuinely very old.
What ancient China did not have was a single, clearly defined system encompassing all these practices under the modern category we now call Qigong 氣功.
That distinction is fundamental.
The practices associated with Qigong can be ancient. Qigong as the modern umbrella category is largely a twentieth-century creation.
This does not mean that Qigong is "fake." Nor does it mean that the Chinese government suddenly invented its exercises during the 1950s.
The real history is considerably more interesting.
During the early years of the People's Republic of China, older practices with very different origins were reorganized, renamed, secularized and incorporated into a new therapeutic framework. The word qigong gradually became the umbrella under which many of these practices were placed.
Modern historical research describes this process in considerable detail. The development of qigong therapy 氣功療法 during the 1950s involved medical workers, traditional practitioners, government health institutions and figures such as Liu Guizhen 劉貴珍. It was connected with the broader attempt to reform and integrate China's traditional medical heritage into the medical system of the new state.
Even China's present-day Medical Qigong Association describes the development of Qigong in the People's Republic as beginning in the 1950s and identifies Liu Guizhen's 1955 article as the first academic paper with "Qigong therapy" in its title.
To understand what happened, however, we first have to go further back.
Qigong Before "Qigong"
China possessed a vast collection of body-cultivation traditions long before the twentieth century.
Among them were practices described by terms such as:
導引 — daoyin
Guiding and stretching the body through physical movements.
吐納 — tuna
Breathing practices, literally involving "expelling and receiving" the breath.
養生 — yangsheng
"Nourishing life": a much broader category concerned with maintaining health and cultivating longevity.
行氣 — xingqi
"Circulating" or "moving qi," appearing in different historical contexts.
練氣 — lianqi
Training, refining or cultivating qi.
養氣 — yangqi
Nourishing or cultivating qi.
There were also meditation traditions, quiet-sitting practices, religious cultivation methods, martial exercises and numerous local systems transmitted through families, teachers, temples and other communities.
These traditions did not necessarily share the same theory, objectives or methods.
A Daoist cultivating longevity, a Buddhist engaged in meditation, a martial artist training his body, and someone performing therapeutic exercises could all be doing things that a modern observer might classify as "Qigong."
But that does not mean they themselves were practicing a single discipline called Qigong.
This is where modern descriptions frequently create historical confusion.
If we find a two-thousand-year-old breathing exercise and today classify it as Qigong, we have established the antiquity of the exercise.
We have not necessarily established the antiquity of Qigong as a historical category.
It is similar to taking many older fighting systems and retrospectively calling all of them "mixed martial arts." The individual practices may indeed be old, while the category used to group them together may be modern.
That distinction will become extremely important in the twentieth century.
Did the Word 氣功 Exist Before the 1950s?
Here I need to correct something I wrote in an earlier version of this article.
I previously stated that the term qigong did not exist before the 1950s.
That statement was too absolute.
Further research shows that the characters 氣功 were occasionally used before the establishment of the People's Republic.
Historian Ma Jiren 馬濟人 reported an example in the late-Qing text Yuanhe Pian 元和篇, which contained a chapter entitled Qigong Buji 氣功補輯. According to Ma, the expression was also found in some martial-arts circles, where it could overlap with lianqi 練氣, and in Daoist contexts associated with yangqi 養氣.
There is also a reference to a 1934 publication allegedly containing the expression qigong liaofa 氣功療法 — "Qigong therapy" — although researchers Otehode and Penny report that attempts to locate a surviving copy were unsuccessful.
This evidence changes the question.
The important historical question is no longer:
"When did somebody first put the characters 氣 and 功 together?"
It is:
"When did 氣功 acquire the meaning and function that the word Qigong has today?"
On that question, the historical evidence is much clearer.
The scattered earlier uses were not equivalent to the enormous modern category encompassing breathing exercises, meditation, therapeutic exercises, movement systems and various cultivation practices.
As Otehode and Penny conclude, the term acquired a substantially different meaning when body-cultivation practices began to be organized as medical treatments during the 1950s.
This is also where an interesting martial-arts question appears.
There are indications that 氣功 had specialized uses in martial circles before the People's Republic. Years ago, I encountered Chinese material connecting similar terminology with Chen Fake 陳發科 and the Beijing Taijiquan community, apparently in relation to trained physical or leg power. I have not been able to relocate the original source, so I will not present that particular example as established historical fact.
The broader point, however, is documented: pre-1950 uses of 氣功 existed, including martial uses, but they did not necessarily mean what a person saying "Qigong" in the twenty-first century means.
And this brings us to the crucial period.
The Birth of Modern Qigong
The People's Republic of China was established in 1949.
The new government inherited an enormous country with limited medical resources and several different systems of healing and physical cultivation. At the same time, traditional practices presented an ideological problem.
Some were intertwined with concepts that the new socialist state regarded as religious, feudal or superstitious.
But simply discarding everything associated with China's traditional culture would also mean discarding practices that might have practical therapeutic value.
The solution was not simply preservation.
It was reconstruction.
Traditional practices could be investigated, reorganized and interpreted through the language of medicine, physiology and science while elements considered religious or superstitious could be removed or reinterpreted.
Qigong emerged within this environment.
Otehode and Penny describe the creation of Qigong therapy as part of the construction of a "new medicine" for the new China. Popular body-cultivation techniques, including practices with secular, Daoist and Buddhist backgrounds, became incorporated into the developing national medical system.
This is an important point because it prevents us from making the opposite historical mistake.
The Communist government did not invent the exercises that became Qigong.
Many of those exercises and methods already existed.
What occurred was the creation and institutionalization of a new framework through which older practices could be classified, explained, taught and medically employed.
And one man became particularly important in that process.
Liu Guizhen and the Creation of Qigong Therapy
Liu Guizhen 劉貴珍 is frequently described as the founder of modern medical Qigong.
That description needs some qualification, but his importance is undeniable.
According to Liu's own account, in the late 1940s he suffered from several health problems. He subsequently learned a traditional method called Neiyanggong 內養功 — "Inner Nourishing Practice" — associated with his home region in Hebei.
His experience eventually brought these practices into contact with government medical institutions.
What had previously been a particular method of cultivation now became part of a much larger project: determining how such practices could be systematized and used therapeutically.
The process involved more people than Liu alone.
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| Liu Guizhen and Zhang Tiange. |
One especially interesting figure was Huang Yueting 黃月庭, a member of the medical team involved in the early development of the new therapy.
According to the historical reconstruction by Otehode and Penny, Huang proposed the term qigong. The attraction of qi was partly that the word could operate across different conceptual systems: it could be related to terminology used in modern discussions of respiration while simultaneously retaining associations with traditional Chinese concepts such as yuanqi 元氣.
The name therefore functioned, at least partly, as a bridge between Chinese and Western medical frameworks.
And then we encounter one of the most revealing pieces of evidence in the entire history of Qigong.
They Hadn't Even Decided How to Write "Qigong"
Today 氣功 looks like an ancient, fixed Chinese term.
In the early 1950s, it wasn't.
The official stamp of the Tangshan Qigong Sanatorium initially wrote the name:
氣工
rather than:
氣功
The characters apparently became standardized around 1954–1955. In 1955 Liu Guizhen published an academic article on Qigong therapy using 氣功, and the latter form became established. Otehode and Penny report testimony attributing the decision to Duan Huixuan 段慧軒, head of the Hebei Department of Health.
This tiny orthographic detail is historically extremely important.
It does not prove that the underlying exercises were new.
Quite the opposite: many were clearly older.
But it demonstrates that the category into which those exercises were being placed was still being constructed.
The authorities and practitioners involved were not simply reviving an ancient discipline with an ancient standardized name.
They were deciding what this new therapeutic framework should be called — and even how its name should be written.
That is difficult to reconcile with the common claim that "Qigong," in its present meaning, had existed as one continuous unified discipline for thousands of years.
From Traditional Practice to State Medicine
The development of Qigong in the 1950s did not occur in isolation. It was part of a much larger debate over the future of Chinese medicine in the newly established People's Republic.
At the First National Conference on Public Health in 1950, the government called for the "uniting" 團結 and "reforming" 改造 of Chinese and Western medicine. The relationship between the two was politically complicated and changed considerably during the first half of the decade.
By 1954, government policy had shifted strongly toward preserving and developing what was described as the:
祖國醫學遺產 — "the Motherland's medical heritage."
Traditional medical knowledge, folk remedies and body-cultivation practices were increasingly collected, investigated and incorporated into state institutions.
This provided exactly the environment in which Qigong therapy could develop.
Older practices were not simply reproduced unchanged. They were selected, reorganized and reinterpreted so that they could function within the medical and ideological framework of the new state.
Otehode and Penny describe this process very clearly: secular cultivation practices as well as methods originating in Daoist and Buddhist contexts were incorporated into the new medical system, while concepts regarded as "feudal," "superstitious," or "religious" were removed or replaced with explanations presented as scientific and medical.
This is one of the keys to understanding modern Qigong.
It was simultaneously an act of preservation and transformation.
Older practices survived.
But they did not necessarily survive unchanged.
Tangshan: Where Qigong Became an Institution
The next major development occurred in Tangshan, Hebei.
With support from the Hebei Department of Health and the Tangshan city government, Liu Guizhen established the Tangshan Qigong Sanatorium 唐山市氣功療養所 in 1954.
This was historically significant because Qigong was no longer merely a method practiced privately between teachers and students.
It now had an institution.
The sanatorium treated patients, trained medical personnel and communicated information about Qigong to other medical institutions. Doctors trained there subsequently introduced Qigong therapy into their own clinics.
In September 1954, the Tangshan City Health Bureau invited doctors trained in Western medicine to study Qigong therapy. Another three-month training course followed in 1955.
The process accelerated.
In December 1955, the Tangshan group received official recognition from the Ministry of Health for its work on Qigong therapy and its contribution to developing China's medical heritage.
From 1956 onward, papers about Qigong therapy appeared in Chinese medical journals, while national and local health authorities organized Qigong seminars and training.
In other words, during a remarkably short period, Qigong went from an emerging term applied to particular cultivation practices to an increasingly recognizable medical category supported by institutions, publications and government agencies.
This is much stronger historical evidence than simply arguing about whether an ancient text contains something that resembles a modern Qigong exercise.
We can actually watch the modern category being institutionalized.
A Man Who Practiced Before Qigong Had Its Modern Meaning
One particularly revealing figure was Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873–1958).
Jiang was already well known for his Yinshizi Jingzuo Fa 因是子靜坐法, a work on quiet-sitting practice published in the early twentieth century.
His practices therefore clearly preceded the medical Qigong movement of the 1950s.
Yet when the new terminology became widespread, Jiang reportedly commented:
"The name qigong therapy is not appropriate..."
He nevertheless accepted the terminology because it had become popular.
This is an extraordinarily useful historical example.
Here we have someone who practiced and wrote about related cultivation methods before the modern Qigong category became established, witnessing his kind of practice being absorbed into the new terminology.
It demonstrates why we have to distinguish between the history of a practice and the history of the category subsequently used to describe it.
Jiang's quiet-sitting practice did not suddenly come into existence during the 1950s.
The new thing was increasingly calling practices of this kind Qigong.
Creating an Ancient History for a Modern Category
Once Qigong had entered the state medical system, another problem appeared.
If Qigong was part of China's traditional medical heritage, where was its history?
The answer was found by connecting the newly organized category to much older Chinese practices.
Ancient texts certainly contained descriptions of breathing, movement and cultivation.
The Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經, for example, contains references to practices associated with daoyin 導引 and other forms of bodily cultivation.
But there is an important detail:
The Huangdi Neijing does not call these practices Qigong.
This distinction was gradually blurred.
Because ancient Chinese texts contained practices resembling methods now incorporated into Qigong therapy, those texts could be presented as evidence for the antiquity of Qigong itself.
The reasoning effectively became:
Ancient Chinese people practiced breathing and cultivation exercises.
Modern Qigong contains breathing and cultivation exercises.
Therefore ancient Chinese people practiced Qigong.
The first two statements may be correct.
The third does not automatically follow.
Otehode and Penny document how Qigong therapy was connected with the Huangdi Neijing during this period, thereby giving the newly organized medical category a history extending back more than two thousand years. They specifically note that the Huangdi Neijing never mentions Qigong by name, although it describes cultivation practices later interpreted as similar to Qigong therapy.
This is an excellent example of what historians call retrospective categorization.
And it still happens today.
An ancient illustration of daoyin becomes "ancient Qigong."
An old Daoist breathing practice becomes "Daoist Qigong."
A Buddhist meditation practice becomes "Buddhist Qigong."
A martial cultivation exercise becomes "martial Qigong."
Sometimes these modern classifications are useful. They allow us to discuss related practices using terminology contemporary readers understand.
The problem begins when the modern classification is projected backward and treated as the name and conceptual system used by the historical practitioners themselves.
Similarity of practice does not prove continuity of category.
What Happened to the Religious Elements?
There was another complication.
Some of the practices being incorporated into Qigong had connections with Daoism and Buddhism.
That created difficulties in a Marxist-Leninist state officially critical of religion and what it categorized as superstition.
One solution was reinterpretation.
According to Otehode and Penny, some proponents argued that these cultivation practices had originally been created by ordinary working people and had subsequently been appropriated by Buddhism and Daoism and covered with superstition and mystery. Other authors simply minimized or obscured their religious connections.
This allowed the techniques to be retained while changing their explanation.
A practice could lose its explicitly religious cosmology and reappear as a therapeutic exercise.
Meditation could become psychological regulation.
Breathing could become respiratory training.
Traditional cultivation concepts could be given physiological interpretations.
And Qigong could consequently be presented not as religious cultivation but as part of Chinese medical science.
Again, we should be careful about what this means.
It would be inaccurate to say:
"Qigong was originally a religion."
There was no single original Qigong tradition from which everything descended.
It would be equally inaccurate to say:
"Qigong has nothing to do with Daoism or Buddhism."
Some of the practices eventually placed under the Qigong umbrella clearly came from, or had developed within, religious and cultivation traditions.
The modern category brought together material with different histories.
That heterogeneity is precisely what makes the history of Qigong so interesting.
Making Qigong Scientific
Removing religious terminology solved only part of the problem.
The new therapy also needed a modern scientific explanation.
During the 1950s, Soviet science had enormous influence in the People's Republic, and one figure was particularly important:
Ivan Pavlov.
Pavlov's theories of conditioned reflexes and cortical excitation and inhibition were influential in Chinese medicine and psychology during this period.
In 1953, China's Ministry of Health and Chinese Academy of Sciences sponsored an intensive workshop devoted to Pavlovian theory for specialists in physiology, psychology and clinical medicine.
Qigong researchers began interpreting their practices through this framework.
Breathing, relaxation and mental concentration could be described in terms of effects upon the cerebral cortex and nervous system. Qigong's reported effects on conditions such as neurasthenia could consequently be given explanations derived from Pavlovian physiology.
This supplied the developing therapy with something politically and intellectually valuable:
a scientific vocabulary.
But here another distinction is necessary.
A practice being explained using scientific terminology is not the same thing as that explanation being scientifically demonstrated.
The fact that Qigong was described using Pavlovian physiology tells us something extremely important about the history of Qigong.
It does not, by itself, tell us whether those particular physiological explanations were correct.
That question belongs to experimental science.
This distinction becomes especially important later, because during the Qigong boom of the 1980s and 1990s increasingly extraordinary claims would also be presented using scientific language.
We should therefore separate:
scientific terminology
from
scientific evidence.
They are not the same thing.
By the End of the 1950s, Qigong Had Become Something New
The speed of the transformation was remarkable.
In 1956, the first national training course in Qigong therapy was established.
Medical workers were trained and returned to their home institutions, where some established additional Qigong facilities.
The Shanghai Qigong Sanatorium appeared in 1957.
In March 1959, the Beidaihe Qigong Sanatorium began publishing a journal simply titled Qigong 氣功.
That same year, the Beidaihe National Qigong Experience Exchange Meeting 北戴河全國氣功經驗交流會 brought together representatives from dozens of medical institutions as well as Chinese medical doctors and representatives of Buddhist, Daoist and martial traditions.
According to contemporary figures reported by Otehode and Penny, participating institutions accounted for hundreds of people engaged in Qigong work and more than two thousand beds allocated to Qigong treatment.
Whatever Qigong had meant in occasional earlier usage, by the end of the 1950s the word was operating on a completely different scale.
There were now:
medical institutions, training programs, academic publications, government recognition, conferences, therapeutic protocols and an expanding network of practices gathered under the name Qigong.
That is why simply finding an earlier occurrence of the characters 氣功 does not overturn the argument that modern Qigong was substantially constructed during the 1950s.
The word existed earlier.
Some of the practices were vastly older.
But the modern category, institutional structure and increasingly standardized meaning were new.
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| The Beidaihe National Qigong Experience Exchange Meeting. Courtesy of Zhang Tiange, who is on the far righ |
Then the Cultural Revolution Changed Everything
If Qigong were simply an ideological invention created by the Communist Party and continuously promoted thereafter, we would expect its development to continue uninterrupted.
It did not.
During the Cultural Revolution, Qigong itself became vulnerable to accusations of being feudal, capitalist and revisionist.
Institutions that had been promoted during the previous decade came under attack.
The Tangshan Qigong Sanatorium was closed in 1969. Qigong personnel were subjected to political persecution, and Qigong books were reportedly destroyed at Beidaihe.
For more than a decade, institutional Qigong largely disappeared from the medical system.
This is another reason we should avoid the simplistic formulation:
"The Communist Party invented Qigong."
The historical relationship was much more complicated.
State institutions played a major role in constructing, medicalizing, standardizing and promoting modern Qigong during the 1950s.
Then another political movement within the same state suppressed it.
And after the Cultural Revolution, Qigong would return again—under very different circumstances.
That second emergence would produce something the pioneers of medical Qigong in the 1950s probably could not have anticipated:
Qigong Fever — 氣功熱
By the 1980s, Qigong was about to escape the boundaries of hospitals and sanatoriums and become a nationwide social phenomenon.
And that is where the history becomes stranger still.
The Return of Qigong
The end of the Cultural Revolution created a very different environment in China.
Qigong, which had been marginalized during the Cultural Revolution, began to reappear. But what emerged during the late 1970s and especially the 1980s was no longer confined to the relatively controlled medical institutions of the 1950s.
It became a mass social phenomenon.
Historians Utiraruto Otehode and Benjamin Penny describe the period from the early 1980s to the end of the 1990s as a nationwide Qigong craze. Practices that had previously involved relatively small numbers of people spread through parks, workplaces, associations and teaching organizations. Some newly popular systems claimed enormous numbers of practitioners.
This period became known as:
氣功熱 — Qigong Re
literally, "Qigong Fever."
The expression is appropriate.
Qigong was no longer simply a therapeutic technique.
It became health practice, physical culture, popular science, spiritual cultivation, social organization and, in some cases, a vehicle for extraordinary claims about hidden human abilities.
This transformation is crucial to understanding what much of the world now associates with the word "Qigong."
From Hospitals to Public Parks
The Qigong of the 1950s had largely been developed within medical institutions.
The Qigong boom of the 1980s was different.
Teachers began promoting particular systems directly to the public. Large numbers of people gathered in parks and other public spaces to practice together.
Some systems spread extraordinarily quickly.
One important example was Soaring Crane Qigong 鶴翔樁氣功, developed by Zhao Jinxiang 趙金香 and publicly promoted beginning around 1980.
According to the movement's own publications, it grew from a handful of people practicing with Zhao in public parks to nearly ten million practitioners within four years.
Otehode and Penny caution that this figure was probably exaggerated. Nevertheless, they conclude that Soaring Crane and other Qigong systems achieved levels of mass participation that had not existed previously.
This is another significant historical transformation.
Qigong had first provided a modern medical category capable of absorbing older practices.
Now that category provided something else:
a framework within which entirely new systems could also be created.
A Qigong system no longer needed to be an ancient practice transmitted unchanged from antiquity.
Teachers could combine exercises, theories and cultivation methods, give the resulting system a name, and introduce it to the public as a particular school of Qigong.
This makes statements such as "Qigong is 5,000 years old" increasingly problematic.
Which Qigong?
Some component practices may have ancient precedents.
Some systems are considerably younger.
And some were created within living memory.
When Qigong Met the Paranormal
Something else happened during this period.
Qigong became increasingly associated with claims of extraordinary human abilities.
These were often discussed under expressions such as:
特異功能 — teyi gongneng
"special" or "extraordinary abilities."
Claims included unusual perception, telepathy, psychokinesis and other phenomena apparently beyond conventional physiological explanation.
Qigong also became associated with:
外氣 — waiqi
"external qi."
Instead of qi referring only to processes occurring within the practitioner's own body, some Qigong masters claimed that they could project or emit qi outside the body and affect other people or physical objects.
This represents an important conceptual expansion.
The medical Qigong of the 1950s had already attempted to reinterpret older cultivation practices using the scientific vocabulary available at the time.
During Qigong Fever, however, increasingly extraordinary phenomena were themselves presented as potential subjects of scientific investigation.
And remarkably, some scientists supported that investigation.
Qigong and "Human Body Science"
One of the most influential supporters of research into extraordinary human abilities was Qian Xuesen 錢學森 (1911–2009), one of the most important scientists in the development of China's missile and space programs.
His involvement gave the subject considerable prestige.
The idea emerged that phenomena associated with Qigong and extraordinary abilities might represent an undiscovered field of science sometimes discussed as:
人體科學 — renti kexue
"Human Body Science."
This is important because the Qigong boom cannot adequately be explained simply as a return to traditional superstition.
Many participants believed they were doing precisely the opposite.
They believed Qigong might represent a new scientific frontier.
The reasoning was seductive.
Perhaps ancient Chinese cultivation traditions had discovered physiological capacities that modern science did not yet understand.
Perhaps qi was a real physical phenomenon waiting to be measured.
Perhaps extraordinary human abilities represented undiscovered capacities of the nervous system.
Perhaps Chinese traditional knowledge could lead to scientific discoveries that Western science had overlooked.
In the social and intellectual atmosphere of post-Mao China, these possibilities attracted practitioners, journalists, officials and some scientists.
The language surrounding Qigong therefore became an unusual mixture of:
traditional Chinese concepts,
modern medical terminology,
physics,
biology,
psychology,
and claims about extraordinary human abilities.
This combination gave Qigong a powerful new identity.
It could be presented simultaneously as ancient Chinese wisdom and the science of the future.
Scientific Language Is Not Scientific Evidence
Here we encounter the same problem that appeared during the medicalization of Qigong in the 1950s, but on a much larger scale.
Scientific terminology does not automatically make a claim scientific.
Calling qi "bioenergy," "information," "electromagnetic energy," or a "quantum" phenomenon does not demonstrate that any of these descriptions are correct.
A scientific claim requires more than scientific vocabulary.
It requires measurable hypotheses, appropriate controls, reproducible observations and the possibility of being proven wrong.
This distinction becomes essential when examining Qigong research from the period.
Some experiments were presented as evidence for extraordinary effects. But extraordinary experimental results are particularly vulnerable to inadequate controls, experimenter expectations, methodological errors and deliberate deception.
This does not mean that every Qigong experiment was fraudulent.
Nor does it mean that every physiological effect associated with Qigong practice is imaginary.
It means something much simpler:
Every claim has to be evaluated according to the evidence supporting that particular claim.
Breathing exercises may affect respiration.
Slow movement may affect balance and coordination.
Meditation may affect attention or psychological state.
None of these observations would demonstrate that a practitioner can project a previously unknown physical energy across a room.
Those are different claims requiring different evidence.
The Rise of the Qigong Master
Qigong Fever also transformed the social position of the teacher.
Some Qigong teachers became national celebrities.
Rather than teaching small groups of students, charismatic masters could lecture to enormous audiences, publish books, establish organizations and attract followers throughout China.
Some claimed abilities extending far beyond teaching physical exercises.
Healing illnesses from a distance, transmitting qi to thousands of people simultaneously, influencing physical matter and possessing extraordinary perceptual abilities became part of the claims surrounding portions of the Qigong movement.
Again, we should avoid making the opposite mistake.
Not every Qigong teacher made such claims.
Millions of people practiced Qigong simply for exercise, relaxation, health, social activity or personal cultivation.
The history of fraudulent or paranormal Qigong should therefore not be used to characterize every person practicing Qigong.
But extraordinary claims became prominent enough that they became inseparable from the history of Qigong Fever.
And they eventually produced a skeptical reaction.
Enter Sima Nan
This is where Sima Nan 司馬南 becomes relevant to the story.
Sima Nan is often remembered simply as a famous Chinese critic of Qigong.
His relationship with the movement was considerably more interesting than that description suggests.
According to a 1999 account based on interviews with him, Sima had been exposed to practices described as Qigong within his own family and began studying Qigong himself during the 1970s.
After moving to Beijing in the early 1980s, he encountered the growing world of Qigong masters and extraordinary-ability claims.
Initially, he was a believer rather than a debunker.
He read literature on Human Body Science and became involved with an organization devoted to investigating extraordinary human abilities. He later described spending years around prominent Qigong masters before becoming increasingly suspicious of what he was seeing.
Around 1990 his position changed dramatically.
Sima concluded that many demonstrations presented as Qigong powers could be reproduced through ordinary deception.
And he decided to demonstrate the problem publicly.
Reproducing "Qigong Powers"
Sima's method was clever.
Rather than merely declaring that extraordinary Qigong demonstrations were fraudulent, he reproduced some of them himself.
At a symposium in 1990, according to his later account, Sima presented himself as someone capable of extraordinary Qigong abilities.
He performed feats including breaking materials against his body, apparently perceiving concealed information and apparently changing the taste of water using "external qi."
Observers accepted the demonstrations as evidence of unusual abilities.
Sima then explained that they had been produced through ordinary methods rather than paranormal powers.
The point was larger than Qigong.
An impressive demonstration is not necessarily a controlled experiment.
Intelligent and scientifically educated observers can still be deceived when they do not know the method behind a trick.
This is particularly relevant to martial arts.
Breaking objects, resisting blows, apparently moving people without touching them and other dramatic demonstrations can appear inexplicable when the observer does not understand the mechanics, preparation, cooperation or deception involved.
The proper response is neither automatic belief nor automatic dismissal.
It is:
control the conditions and test the claim.
Sima Nan Is a Source, Not the Final Authority
There is an important distinction we should make here, particularly because an earlier version of this article drew substantially from Chinese skeptical material associated with Sima Nan.
Sima Nan is valuable for understanding the skeptical reaction to Qigong Fever and for documenting his own experiences within that environment.
But his statements should not automatically be treated as neutral historical fact simply because they agree with a skeptical interpretation.
The same evidentiary standard must apply to everyone.
A Qigong master's extraordinary claim requires evidence.
So does a critic's historical claim.
For that reason, in this revised article I have compared the broader historical argument with independent scholarship rather than relying solely on Sima Nan.
And that comparison produces an interesting result.
The central historical argument survives remarkably well.
Modern academic historians independently describe Qigong as a category substantially constructed and institutionalized in the 1950s, followed by suppression during the Cultural Revolution and an extraordinary transformation into mass Qigong culture during the post-Mao period.
The details sometimes require correction.
The overall historical transformation is real.
Ancient, Modern — or Both?
We can now return to the question with which this article began:
How old is Qigong?
The answer depends entirely on what we mean.
If by Qigong we mean every Chinese breathing, movement, meditation and cultivation practice that modern writers now place under that label, then some of its historical roots are extremely old.
Recent historical scholarship, for example, places Chinese dynamic practices involving daoyin 導引 and xingqi 行氣 as far back as the Warring States period.
But those ancient practitioners did not necessarily understand themselves as members of a unified tradition called Qigong.
If by Qigong we mean the modern umbrella category that gathers numerous older practices into a supposedly coherent field, its history is much younger.
Its decisive formation occurred during the twentieth century and particularly in the 1950s People's Republic of China.
And if we mean many of the individual systems practiced under the Qigong label today, some are younger still.
This gives us a seemingly contradictory but historically defensible conclusion:
Qigong is both ancient and modern.
Its component practices can have ancient histories.
Qigong as the category through which we now understand many of those practices is largely modern.
Was Qigong Invented by the Communist Party?
This question now deserves a direct answer.
Not in the simple sense.
The Chinese Communist Party did not invent daoyin, breathing exercises, meditation, yangsheng, martial cultivation or the many other older practices subsequently incorporated into Qigong.
Those histories extend far beyond the People's Republic.
But institutions of the new state played an important role in selecting, reorganizing, medicalizing, secularizing, standardizing and promoting practices under the modern category of Qigong during the 1950s.
That distinction matters.
Saying:
"The Communist Party invented Qigong"
is too crude.
Saying:
"Qigong has existed as one continuous system for thousands of years"
is also historically misleading.
Reality lies between those two slogans.
And it is considerably more interesting than either of them.
Does Any of This Mean Qigong Does Not Work?
No.
Nor does the history prove that it works.
That is a separate question.
The historical age of a practice tells us almost nothing by itself about its physiological effectiveness.
Something does not work because it is ancient.
Something does not fail because it is modern.
A breathing exercise, movement sequence, meditation method or therapeutic intervention must be evaluated according to what it claims to accomplish and what evidence supports that claim.
This means that we should not ask:
"Does Qigong work?"
That category is simply too broad.
A better question is:
"Does this particular practice produce this particular claimed effect?"
That is a question we can investigate scientifically.
And it will be the subject of separate articles on The Martial Custodian.
Why This History Matters
There is a larger lesson here than simply determining the birthday of Qigong.
Martial arts history repeatedly suffers from the same problem.
We find something old that resembles something modern and assume direct continuity between them.
An ancient drawing resembles a martial posture.
An old breathing exercise resembles modern Qigong.
An ancient weapon technique resembles something practiced today.
The resemblance may be historically significant.
But resemblance alone does not establish continuous transmission.
Nor does a modern name automatically describe how people centuries ago understood what they were doing.
History requires us to distinguish between:
the age of a practice,
the age of a name,
and
the age of the category through which we interpret the practice.
In the case of Qigong, those three histories are not necessarily the same.
That is perhaps the most important conclusion of all.
Qigong has an ancient prehistory, but a modern history.
Understanding that does not diminish Chinese tradition.
It allows us to see its development more clearly.
The old practices remain old.
The twentieth-century innovations remain innovations.
And we no longer need to turn either one into mythology in order to appreciate them.
Note on the Revision: An earlier version of this article stated that the term qigong 氣功 did not exist before the 1950s. Further research showed that this statement was too categorical. Rare earlier uses of the term are documented. What developed during the 1950s was the modern meaning, institutional framework and broad umbrella category associated with Qigong. I have corrected the article accordingly.
Otehode, Utiraruto & Benjamin Penny. “Qigong Therapy in 1950s China.” East Asian History 40 (2016).
Read the article — Australian National University
Download the full PDF
Otehode, Utiraruto & Benjamin Penny. “Activist Practitioners in the Qigong Boom of the 1980s.” East Asian History 41.
Read the article — Australian National University
Gao, Shanshan. “Tracing the origins of Qigong fever: Mao Zedong, Jiang Weiqiao, quiet sitting, and the jingluo system, 1914–1958.” Medical History (2026).
Read the open-access Cambridge article
Ownby, David. “The Creation and Evolution of Qigong.” In Falun Gong and the Future of China. Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 45–78.
The Creation and Evolution of Qigong — Oxford Academic
Ownby, David. Falun Gong and the Future of China. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Book page — Oxford Academic
Mainfort, Donald. “Sima Nan: Fighting Qigong Pseudoscience in China.” Skeptical Briefs, 1999.
Sima Nan: Fighting Qigong Pseudoscience in China