Mystics, Ghosts and Faith Healers : FORCES OF CHINA’S PAST RE-EMERGE IN A NEW OCCULT CRAZE

THE QIGONG MEETING STARTS IN FIVE MINUTES,” MY friend, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, told me over the phone. “Do you want to go?” * It was August, 1988, and Beijing felt like a sprawling, polluted steam bath. The air was so sultry that even the thought of moving made me sweat. But that was not why I hesitated. * I was busy, busier than I had been since arriving in China three years earlier. Political and social tensions long simmering under the surface were suddenly beginning to boil over, and I was trying to get it all into newsprint. The steepest inflation under communist rule had sparked panic buying around the country and sent Deng Xiaoping into a helter-skelter retreat from reform policies; information trickling out of the annual summit-by-the-seaside of senior leaders pointed to a severe schism and a possible showdown; popular discontent over corruption and official malfeasance was more pronounced than ever before. These were, in hindsight, harbingers of the dramatic, tragic events soon to come. * Running off to hear a lecture about an arcane Chinese healing art seemed frivolous under the circumstances, but I needed a break. I told my friend Li Yi (not her real name) that I’d pick her up. *The Chinese press just then was full of enthusiastic paeans to qigong (pronounced CHEE-goong), and I had also heard firsthand testimony about its miraculous curative powers. It did sound intriguing, but as Li Yi outlined competing theories on how to project and manipulate qi --variably translated as “breath,” “energy,” or “vital life force”--my mind wandered back to the pile of dispatches on my desk. When she told me the presentation might last as long as four or even five hours, I almost turned around. *The hall, which held about 1,500, was an all-purpose auditorium for movies, political harangues and other forms of entertainment. When we stepped through the swinging doors, 20 minutes late, I was dumbstruck by the silence. Never had I seen a Chinese audience so utterly rapt. I counted four empty seats, two of them ours. On the stage, a young man in his mid-30s gave instructions in a measured, reassuring voice on the best way to sit and breathe in order to receive his qi . “His name is Zhang Hongbao,” whispered Li Yi. I took my position along with everyone else.

Surrounding me, judging by their dress and manner, was a representative cross section of urban China, as typical of Beijing’s workers, students, soldiers, teachers and clerks as any group could be.

By way of introduction--to what, I wasn’t sure--Master Zhang lectured on self-cultivation, interpersonal relations and a properly ordered society. “Each of you has tremendous power, and I can help you unleash it,” he said with icy calm. After listening for nearly two hours to his insights and exhortations, I had the vague feeling that something crucial was missing from the broad sweep of his comments. Then it struck me: Not once had he even paid lip service to the Communist Party or socialism, a daring omission in a public speech on life’s guiding principles.

Finally, I sensed, the main event was at hand. But Master Zhang’s announcement that we were about to hear his recorded voice struck me as a bit cheap: At 10 yuan a head--three days’ wages for most of those present--I expected a live performance. Before I could register my indignation to Li Yi, however, the gates to bedlam suddenly swung open.

I had, by that time, traveled, studied and lived in China on and off for more than a decade, but nothing in my experience had prepared me for what I witnessed. The auditorium reverberated with loud animal-like noises that made the hair on my arms stand on end--no words, just open-throated growls, hissing and maniacal, inhuman laughter. Within minutes, a middle-aged man, who seemed to look without seeing, began prancing down the aisle doing plies and pirouettes, grinning theatrically. His behavior was so at odds with the restraint common to most Chinese that I assumed that he was either disturbed or part of the show. But then, like kernels over an open fire, other people began to explode.

The young woman directly in front of me began to shake so violently that her wooden seat came unhinged and slammed into my knees. A People’s Liberation Army soldier in uniform to my right shot out of his chair, stretched his arms toward the ceiling and sobbed hysterically, pausing only to gulp for air. There were about a dozen people in motion when a rotund, 50-year-old woman, whose likeness inhabits every neighborhood committee in the capital, stood up near the stage and let loose with a gut-wrenching, primal scream that raced in an interminable crescendo back through years, maybe decades of suppressed frustration.

As she squatted like a weightlifter to push the last bit of breath from her lungs, the already crumbling dam burst: The hall was engulfed in a deafening chorus of moaning, screaming, laughing and crying as hundreds of men and women of all ages collapsed into convulsions, beat their breasts so hard that their lips quivered, prostrated in Buddhist prayer and communicated in improvised sign language with invisible interlocutors. Everyone seemed oblivious to everyone else. I gripped my armrests until my knuckles turned white and waited for the storm to pass.

When the tape ended about 40 minutes later, Master Zhang, who had been patrolling the aisles examining his handiwork, resumed the stage. The mayhem slowly subsided. “Please return to your seats. Don’t worry about the people who are still moving; they will stop by themselves,” he said soothingly as he unfolded and read a note passed to him by an assistant. He paused, surveying the group. “Some comrades have requested that we play the tape again, but I’m afraid that many of you could not stand to hear it twice.” Looking around, I had no doubt that he was right.

For the next part of the program, half-a-dozen invalids were wheeled onstage to demonstrate qigong’s curative powers. After their ailments were identified, a group of Master Zhang’s disciples, including two women, set to work projecting qi through their outstretched palms like so many faith healers laying on hands. Some of the ostensibly paralyzed limbs recovered; other remained motionless. One crumpled old man in pajamas, who apparently hadn’t walked in months, shuffled a few tiny steps to thunderous applause, stopped and then fell over like a tree.

As we emerged into the early evening light, I knew that I had stumbled onto something of sociological importance. But I did not yet realize that the public infatuation with qigong had become a movement, a 10,000-fold magnification of what I had just seen. Nor did I understand that it was part of a wave of deeply rooted nativism surging across China, a wave that fueled the demonstrations and riots of spring, 1989, every bit as much as the yearning for democracy.

When the government, justifiably concerned about qigong’s political overtones, clamped down a month later, hundreds of self-styled masters slipped into the shadows, and millions--more than 50 million, according to a 1990 internal Communist Party report--of followers began to practice their censured art behind closed doors.

I left China at the end of June, 1989, wondering how this extraordinary phenomenon, which I had by then investigated in some depth, might develop. I recently returned to find out. Qigong , I discovered, may be out of sight, but it certainly isn’t out of mind.

CHINESE POLITICAL CULTURE ABHORS A VACUUM. WHEN THE CENTER IS weakened by unbridled corruption, regionalism and above all the erosion of moral authority, charismatic leaders claiming paranormal powers and predicting the birth of an enlightened age sprout from the fertile soil of China’s past like toadstools after a heavy spring rain.

But they appear only upon demand, at that moment when a thoroughly disillusioned people begin to withdraw the Mandate of Heaven from those in power and instinctively seek a replacement. At first, the spontaneous groups that emerge during periods of imperial decay tend to focus on health and spiritualism. But eventually, religious movements become political, healing arts become martial arts, and open associations become secret societies bent on establishing a new order.

Such, in any case, is the end-of-dynasty syndrome that has unfailingly punctuated 2,000 years of Chinese history and fueled rebellions--most unsuccessful, all debilitating--from the Red Eyebrows of the 1st Century to the White Lotus of the 19th. China, as one scholar has observed, is never at rest. It is either in the process of coalescing or unraveling, either subjugating localities and unifying authority, or fragmenting under the strain of the centrifugal forces constantly tugging at the social fabric. Only briefly does it hover at the apex of stability before the cycle begins anew.

At least that’s the way it used to be. The Middle Kingdom’s entry, at gunpoint, into the world community, and the communist revolution that followed, may have broken the old pattern forever. Democracy, many argue, is about to burst through China’s half-opened door.

Perhaps. But is it not also possible that the powerful ghosts of China’s past are again reaching out to claim the future? That an indigenous movement--as hostile to liberal democracy as to communism because both, as Zhang Hongbao told me with chilling contempt, are “foreign imports”--is instinctively yearning for a native son untainted by non-Chinese influences to assume the throne of heaven?

“My heart’s beating so fast, I’m even more excited than when I saw Chairman Mao in the Cultural Revolution,” gushed an eager disciple upon meeting the qi -besotted protagonist of “The Great Qigong Masters,” a wildly popular novel published in 1989.

Here lies at least one impulse behind the powerful but little-noticed resurgence of secret societies during the last decade, documented with great alarm in several classified reports issued by the Ministry of Public Security. And surely this is why Mao Tse-tung, whose violent whimsy and economic fantasies killed millions, is newly cherished in the popular Chinese imagination. Even during the Beijing demonstrations of May, 1989, I saw grim-faced industrial workers parading behind Mao’s portrait. In their nativist zeal, they had stripped the chairman of his communism and recast him as an emperor, a home-grown symbol of authority and cohesion. Mao’s death left a void that Deng Xiaoping could never fill and a legacy of disaster that Deng could never repair, even if he hadn’t laid siege to his own capital.

The current regime has brutally proven its resilience, but signs of its fragility abound. That underground brotherhoods, economic and criminal “gangs,” religious activity--all of them both symptom and cause of the regime’s evaporating strength--are flourishing cannot be denied. But whether they are relatively harmless reincarnations of once-potent forces or whether they pose a serious challenge to both communism and democracy remains to be seen.

“THE COSMIC TRUTHS QIGONG REVEALS WILL OVERTURN ALL EXISTING scientific and philosophical systems . . . and usher in the greatest revolution mankind has ever known,” writes the author of “The Great Qigong Masters.” Like the dizzying hodgepodge of geomancy, astral travel, ancient Taoism, ESP and other assorted cliches of Eastern and Western pop-mysticism in the novel itself, Ke Yunlu’s millenarian prophecy is certainly sensational. But in the midst of China’s biggest outbreak of superstition and occult religion since 1949, his words resonate for millions of readers.

Woven into the novel’s fantastic tales are descriptions of real events and penetrating insights into the subversive mass appeal of qigong . “Are there any other speakers in the whole of China who could attract such a wide range of people?” the hero muses to himself while watching a rival master cast a hypnotic spell over a crowd of 10,000. (Certainly not Deng Xiaoping, we read between the lines.)

Sure there are such speakers, and almost all of them are qigong masters. But none can whip an audience into a qi -intoxicated frenzy as quickly, or enjoys as big a post-communist cult of personality as the 38-year-old man upon whom the central character of Ke’s novel is directly based: Yan Xin.

By 1987 Yan Xin was a household name. As early as 1987, stories of his ability to cure the incurable, see through walls and project both his qi and himself over huge distances were eagerly exchanged throughout the land. But when two prominent national newspapers and China Central Television reported in mid-1988 that Yan’s powers had been scientifically verified under supposedly rigorous laboratory conditions at Qinghua University (China’s MIT), Yan’s fame--and, according to many who know him, his ambitions--soared to new heights. With the blessing of state-sponsored qigong associations, he traveled the land like a living Buddha, received by rhapsodic crowds wherever he set foot.

Yan’s supposedly paranormal abilities were later discredited in new experiments, but he turned what should have been a setback to his advantage. “The inability of physics or chemistry to detect and measure my powers is in itself proof that qigong is beyond the grasp of Western science,” he countered. The fact that such specious reasoning actually enhanced his credibility, even among educated Chinese with scientific backgrounds, reflects one of qigong’s most important appeals: After a century of humiliating evidence of China’s military, economic and even intellectual inadequacy in the face of the West, here, at long last, was an antidote that was irreducibly, reassuringly Chinese.

The Communist Party has railed against “feudal superstition” for 40 years, yet it tolerated the passion for qigong sweeping the country. Up to a point. When Yan Xin packed the 15,000-seat Beijing’s Worker’s Stadium three nights running in September, 1988, flaunting his popularity right under the leadership’s collective nose, a crackdown soon followed. An internal circular banned large meetings and all media coverage, banished Yan Xin and several other cult leaders from the capital and called for closer scrutiny of official qigong associations. “Some senior leaders are afraid that it will develop into a new religion,” noted my friend Li Yi, whose father is a retired Central Committee member.

Yan Xin fled China in early 1990 and settled later that year in the United States, where he has been touring North American universities, lecturing to Chinese audiences, and waiting--a would-be emperor in exile.

During the past two years the suppression has continued. In 1990, Zhang Xiangyu, one of “four great masters,” was arrested in Beijing on charges of defrauding the public. A barely literate middle-aged woman from remote Qinghai Province, Zhang claims to have had a vision in 1984 in which a trio of Buddhist and folk deities anointed her a daughter of the Jade Emperor and instructed her in “the language of the universe.” She moved to the capital in 1987 at the behest of the Beijing Academy of Qigong Science and Research and set up her own “institute.” By late 1988, after she had collected nearly a million dollars and half as many followers through her “treatments,” she began to make apocalyptic predictions.

When a massive hepatitis epidemic struck Shanghai that year, she said: “God is beginning to choose the good from the bad.” And her 1990 earthquake forecast sparked a minor panic in Beijing despite televised reassurances by city officials.

Still in jail, Zhang Xiangyu got off easy--at least easier than another self-styled cult leader named Li Lianting from Shandong province. “In the name of curing diseases and explaining scripture,” reads his indictment, Li formed “a reactionary secret society, advocated dynastic changes and viciously attacked the leaders of the (Communist) Party.” Though his “secret society” only had 130 members, he was executed by the state with a bullet to the back of the head.

Li was a typical “dirt emperor,” the Chinese term for local potentates and aspiring monarchs who sometimes form shadow cabinets in anticipation of their accession to the throne. In another recent Shandong case, one that has not been publicized, a peasant-turned-entrepreneur named Lin Yishi used his profits to establish a private fiefdom in the region of Yimeng Mountain. It was only when an inducted member of the sect, who happened to be a local public-security official, was killed after being caught in flagrante delicto with Lin’s favorite concubine, that Lin and his 10,000 followers were exposed. Lin escaped.

And yet--arrests, executions and a media barrage equating qigong with superstition notwithstanding--the government’s repression has been halfhearted because the leadership fears a backlash, on the one hand, and to a great extent believes in qigong’s powers, on the other.

A 70-year-old retired senior People’s Liberation Army officer, who spoke to me in his well-appointed apartment on condition of anonymity, epitomizes official ambivalence. A learned man, he practices qigong as a form of mind-body exercise and is on the board of several qigong associations. But he loathes men such as Yan Xin. “Three years ago, Yan sat where you are now,” he said, eyes bright with anger. “ ‘You are a man, not a god,’ I told him.” Like many other qigong advocates opposed to cults of personality, this retired official’s aim is to reconcile this most ancient of Chinese meditation techniques with modern science. It remains an elusive goal.

Though some have been shut down, hundreds of more-or-less authorized qigong associations and clinics still operate throughout China. Some treat patients, some conduct research, and others are institutional facades for personality cults. Outright charlatans aside, there is wide agreement, even among Communist Party officials, that qigong works. Indeed, like the well-funded study of the paranormal in the former Soviet Union, qigong is the object of intense scrutiny by Chinese organizations ranging from the State Ministry of Security and the People’s Liberation Army to the Academy of Science. Another of the “four great masters” has been designated a “state treasure” because of his involvement with rocket and missile science.

A 1987 incident involving Yan Xin illustrates how seriously qigong is taken at the top. It was mid-May, and the most devastating forest fire in China’s modern history had been burning out of control for two weeks. By the time Yan Xin received a telegram from the Shenyang Military District Command in northeast China, which was in charge of the 30,000 firefighters on the scene, the blaze had claimed hundreds of lives and millions of acres. “You are very learned in the technique of extinguishing fires through qigong ,” read the telegram. “Could you please share your expertise and give us assistance?”

Yan, who to this day takes credit for putting out the fire, agreed to help, but only after extracting several concessions, including the release of detained qigong colleagues in the region.

There’s another reason the government doesn’t crack down harder. Many aging rulers--including Long March veterans Bo Yibo, Ye Jianying (who died in 1987), Chen Yun and, some say, Deng himself--have received treatment from personal qigong physicians widely credited with having helped China’s gerontocracy to defy the actuarial tables.

Still, one might expect senior leaders to crush qigong as a social movement, even as they continue to enjoy its supposed medical benefits. (These are the same men, after all, who preach frugality while living like kings and loudly condemn the bourgeois West while quietly sending their children to Cornell and Princeton.) But they don’t, not just because they lack the means or the will to hit harder but because the people might hit back. China’s ruling elite recognizes the volatile overlap between nativism and nationalism, the latter being the last ideological crutch they have to lean on. Launching a concerted attack on qigong would only further undercut their already ravaged credibility. It would serve to remind a latently hostile population that loyalty to regime is not the same as love of country. Also, it would awaken an nativist, rather than nationalist, allegiance to qigong, harking back to a time when China was the only civilization on earth.

THE CHARACTER QI HAS BEEN accumulating meaning, and an enormous cosmological and medical literature, since the 5th or 4th Century BC. Analogous to the Greek pneuma , or ether , it was seen by Chinese ancients as the primordial “stuff” of which the universe is made, a seamless web of matter and energy. In the West, such prescientific notions were displaced by an intellectual revolution that drew a line between physics and metaphysics. In China they continue to coexist uneasily alongside the imported worldview of modern science.

Qi is also thought to be the force that animates the body, the “breath” of life, as it were. Holistic Chinese medicine has long held that qi , straddling mind and body, can be manipulated within oneself to improve health through forms of meditation-exercise variously called “repairing the body,” “adjusting one’s soul” and “sitting and forgetting.”

While no doubt rooted in this long tradition, the term qigong was coined only in 1955 by a minor Communist Party official, Liu Guizhen, who used a breathing exercise he had learned from a peasant to cure himself of a serious illness. The technique had no name, so when Liu set about to write a book, he decided--somewhat unpoetically--to call his rediscovered art “ qigong ,” or “ qi ability.”

His book caught the attention of Hebei provincial leaders and, eventually, the president of the republic, Liu Shaoqi, who invited China’s first qigong master to take up residence in Beijing. Qigong remained old wine in a new bottle, however, until the late ‘70s, when the aging Liu made a startling announcement: Qi , he said, could be projected out of the body and into others. Having opened Pandora’s box, he died.

This was something new, “a break with a 2,000-year-old tradition,” in the words of one Chinese scholar, a specialist in the history of qi -related exercises. Under other circumstances, Liu’s dubious claim might have disappeared into a void of skepticism; but instead it spread wildly across the parched landscape of China’s psychic discontent.

Today the term covers a bewildering array of activity. At one extreme, licensed doctors in state-run hospitals matter-of-factly treat patients with ailments ranging from kidney stones to cancer by exuding an ostensibly curative energy through the palms of their hands. Critics charge that qi emissions have never been convincingly measured by scientific instruments, and experiments suggest that any beneficial effects result largely from the power of suggestion.

At the other extreme are street performers who inveigle gullible audiences with a mixture of sleight of hand, rudimentary mass psychology and breath-control skills (such as swallowing billiard balls and needles, and guiding live snakes through the nostril and out the mouth). No illusions of grandeur here, just hardscrabble con-artists and acrobats out to make a yuan.

In between, however, is the galaxy of messianic figures--some claiming a couple of dozen followers, others a couple of million--who have sprung up from China’s ancient dust to give voice to inchoate, half-intuited yearnings for change.

After the crackdown on organized qigong began in late 1989, mass meetings became smaller and less frequent and moved to more remote locales. And yet qigong , in all its forms, still permeates the atmosphere. As the sun rises every morning, urban parks across China fill with mainly older men and women seeking to invigorate their limbs and enhance their longevity through a form of “soft qigong “ similar to tai chi exercises. But others, pushed into secrecy, are leading double lives.

Zhou Ping (a pseudonym), 42, is a model employee of a state-run office in Beijing. A Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, he never finished high school and spent eight years in rural exile “learning from the peasants.”

In the mid-’80s he joined thousands of young Chinese who have rediscovered nearly forgotten classics of Chinese philosophy and mysticism that had been kept alive, in part, by vigorous communist denunciation. These include the I Ching, or Book of Changes, that so fascinated Carl Jung; ancient manuals on what we might today call self-actualization, and the twin pillars of Taoism, Lao-tse and Chuang-tse, whose ideas have been crucial elements of heterodox belief systems for the past 2,000 years.

Then, in early 1991, Zhou heard about a qigong master in southern China who was reputed to be a living Buddha, so he contrived a leave of absence and went to Hunan. He came back six weeks later as a formally inducted member of the living Buddha’s secret sect. For the sake of appearances, he resumed his former life, but inside he had become an apostle.

During my recent foray through China, qigong popped up everywhere I went. During an overnight train ride from Beijing into central China, for example, I struck up conversations with two men, each traveling alone. One was a middle-aged hydroelectric engineer, the other a graduate student who had just secured a visa to join his wife at the University of Virginia. I spoke to each of them separately for a couple of hours, listening for the most part to their grim catalogues of complaint and despair.

Then I settled into a seat across from them to read. I had deliberately not mentioned qigong to determine whether they would react when I pulled out a book about Yan Xin. They both exclaimed in enthusiastic unison. Though not necessarily followers, they were both “believers.”

Qigong has also turned up in another place: mental institutions. Since 1989--since, in other words, the beginning of the government repression--thousands of patients, according to published statistics, have been admitted, most of them forcibly, into mental hospitals throughout China after being diagnosed as having a disease called “ qigong deviation.” The term itself didn’t exist before 1989. Some patients are already borderline schizophrenics before qigong “pushes them over the edge,” said one doctor working in the Qigong Overdoer’s Corrective Clinic in Beijing.

Some “overdoers” do have schizophrenia’s severe symptoms: speaking in tongues, hallucinations, self-absorbed and repetitive body motions, and paranoia. But many qigong patients complain that they are being punished for what they say. It is not uncommon, for example, for those “possessed” by qigong to “channel” political figures such as Mao Tse-tung, and to express extremely subversive ideas about communism and the current regime while in trance-like states. The treatment resembles the deprogramming of cult members in the United States or the imprisonment in the former Soviet Union of “deviants” who have expressed politically unpalatable points of view. Qigong “deviation” would appear to be, at least in part, a social pathology--like anorexia--reflecting personal and collective anxieties.

AS 1992 BEGAN, OF THE SO-called “four great masters,” one was abroad, one in jail, and one ensconced in a secret military installation. That left Zhang Hongbao, whose dramatic demonstration had first set me on the qigong trail.

Zhang, I had heard, went to Sichuan province in 1990 to join forces with the Yi Guan Dao, a tightly knit secret society that flourished during the ‘30s and ‘40s. It was widely assumed until recently that the Communist Party--fearing the Yi Guan Dao as a potential source of opposition--had succeeded in wiping it out during a 1950s extermination campaign, spearheaded by Mao, in which hundreds of the sect’s leaders were executed. But an internal police report reveals that the secret society, newly linked with its Mason-like counterpart in Taiwan, has made a big comeback.

Master Zhang, it turns out, has gone nativist and established himself as a “dirt emperor” near Qingcheng Shan in central Sichuan. An internal report by the Ministry of Health describes a “master worship” ritual, as witnessed by an undercover investigator, in which disciples were initiated and paid homage: Disciples formed a line leading to Zhang, seated on a raised dais. One by one, they knelt before him. Zhang slowly nodded his head--once for every 200 yuan paid in advance--and the supplicant then kowtowed as many times, pushing forehead to floor. “I have given you the power of my qi ,” Zhang then intoned. About 450 people were inducted over the course of six hours during that one night.

Neither of two sources familiar with this case knew the size of Zhang’s following, nor could they confirm links with the Yi Guan Dao. But they had other indications of his influence.

In January, 1991, the top administrator in the Beijing Bureau of Traditional Medicine, An Baohua, ordered the closing of Zhang Hongbao’s office in the capital for various code violations. Several days later, An was jumped outside his home by two hooded men armed with metal pipes and beaten within an inch of his life. About that time, the same thing happened to An’s counterpart in the city of Chengdu in Sichuan after he, too, had shut down one of Zhang’s operations. The connection is circumstantial, but other evidence, according to the sources, indicates that both attacks were acts of retribution.

What is more remarkable than the fact that Zhang presides over a mountain stronghold, or that he may have put out a contract on two senior Chinese officials, is that the government has failed to bring him to heel. “It’s all there in police and Ministry of Health reports,” one of the two sources says in frustration, “and yet he continues to operate with impunity.”

That’s exactly the way Zhang planned it.

“Some of my colleagues who have had problems do not understand the Communist Party the way I do,” he told me in 1988, explaining that he had made it a matter of policy to cultivate his relationship with power. He spoke openly of his own political ambitions and the plan he had devised to fill them. “I face three obstacles in my work,” he continued. “The first is Western-trained Chinese intellectuals, who are suspicious of qigong . The second is the media, which must be won over. The third is the Communist Party itself.” His basic strategy was to organize the kind of lecture-demonstration I had witnessed for key organizations; major universities and research institutes; newspapers and television stations, and various government and party organs--to conquer doubts and win converts.

For the time being, at least, his hard work has paid off.