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QIGONG FEVER: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. By David A. Palmer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xi, 356pp. (Tables, figures.) US$32.50, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-14066-9.
David Palmer has produced a brilliant piece of scholarship on the qigong movement and a major contribution to our understanding of the politics of science, culture and religion in the People's Republic. In elegant and highly readable prose, Palmer offers the first and only macro-level account of qigong, beginning with its origins as part of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 1950s and following its evolution through the Cultural Revolution, when it was suppressed as "feudal superstition." Most of Palmer's work is, however, focused on the reform era, when qigong was reborn as a new religious movement attracting tens if not hundreds of millions of practitioners before being caught up in the anti-Falun Gong campaign beginning in the summer of 1999. Basing himself on the huge volume of written sources...