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Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. David Palmer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 356 pp.
Qigong is a set of breathing techniques, exercises, and physical disciplines with a fascinating recent history in China and abroad. Invented and systematized as a form of breath training only in 1949, and abandoned by most of its adherents by the late 1990s, the story of this technique of the body reveals much about the political culture of the People's Republic, especially during the reform period.
The development and vicissitudes of the practice of Qigong in China are parallel with those of traditional medicine, the Falungong movement, Chairman Mao revivalism, and a number of other popular and elite "fevers" that have gripped Chinese imaginations, especially during the reform period since the late 1970s. In this study of "the qigong sector," David Palmer shows definitively how such fevers should be studied. His meticulously researched and thoughtfully analyzed history demonstrates the intimate connections of apparently apolitical ideologies and experiences to the broadest struggles within the national government. He shows how the great 20th-century swing from Utopian socialism to the values of the free market made itself felt in the aspirations, beliefs, and miseries of millions of ordinary Chinese,...