Falun Gong and science: origins, pseudoscience and China's scientific establishment

Falun Gong and science: origins, pseudoscience and China's scientific establishment

It seems that any farmer’s market or large social gathering will somewhere boast a small stand with a few pamphlets, fronted by gentle people with smiling faces, espousing the health benefits of Falun Gong or Falun Dafa as it is also known. Practitioners are ready to regale those with an ear to listen personal testimonies of how a set of five meditational exercises were able to transform their lives from being stressful and conflict-ridden to being healthful, peaceful and enriched. The media and the Falun Gong media machine have ensured that most are familiar (and outraged) by China’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, and yet these same people so passionately opposed to the movement’s suppression, remain unaware of what ideologies lie behind this movement; of what makes Falun Gong tick. For example, most remain ignorant of the problematic discourse that exists between Falun Gong and the scientific community; ironic given that the movement is so heavily reliant on the science of telecommunications to spread its word. This chapter scrutinizes the uneasy relationship between Falun Gong and science by examining the emergence of Falun Gong from the larger qigong movement in the 1990s. Qigong itself was a formulated tradition that appeared just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The relationship between qigong and science is considered, with the latter being both friend and foe to the movement at different times. The nature of this association has to some extent influenced the relationship between science and Falun Gong. The chapter concludes with an examination of the ideologies of Falun Gong in relation to the contemporary scientific worldview as expressed by its charismatic founder, Li Hongzhi.

c. 2011 Brill.