I am a long-time Falun Gong practitioner who's done his Master's Degree in Religious Studies and read through a large part of related research that's available in English.
First of all, this book is certainly one of the best academic treatises on Falun Gong, along with writings by Barend ter Haar, Benjamin Penny, Noah Porter, and some others. If I were to get just one book on Falun Gong written by a third party, this would probably be it. Nevertheless, the book has its limitations, some of which I'd like to address in this review.
In my view, Ownby writes in an accessible style. But there's a heavy load of "I would have known better" attitude, especially in regards to the pre-crackdown appeal at Zhongnanhai, Beijing. Some of the comments he makes about Li Hongzhi could be regarded as insulting by many practitioners. Ownby seems to take for granted that Li Hongzhi lied about his birthday, or that he did not know how to "play his cards" in April 1999.
Ownby readily admits that he doesn't understand the lectures given in 2000-2002. He fails to note the idea of "Fa-rectification" appearing before 1999 and seems to think of it as a narrative that was made up to save Li Hongzhi's face after the persecution; at least this is my interpretation of what he's saying.
But something he does understand is that a serious researcher on Falun Gong should not try to examine the practice outside its cultural context--a requirement that's been unbelievably hard to grasp for many lesser authors on the subject. A lot of content in Li Hongzhi's books are commentaries on what other qigong masters said and did at the time. From a certain point of view, they reflect the zeitgeist of China in the beginning of the 1990s. These strange days have never been discussed in the West in great detail.
Ever since the end of the 1970s, a scientific debate between the 'naturalist' and 'supernaturalist' paradigms of qigong was ubiquitous in China's top universities, and a veritable corpus of scientific literature resulted. Even Qian Xuesen, "father of China's space program", perceived qigong as a new form of science. It goes without saying that Li Hongzhi does not write "scientific prose" as we've learned to know it, but he makes several references to such experiments. From a hermeneutic viewpoint, Ownby should have tried to understand how a well-educated practitioner, say a university professor -- and they were abundant -- could have started to practice Falun Gong all the while retaining a coherent worldview.
Suppression of supernaturalist qigong at the end of the decade could be examined as a violent termination of a debate never resolved; even in the years preceding the crackdown, the Chinese state had decided to withdraw its support from such qigong practices as they became "too popular" and seemingly threatened the Communist Party's monopoly over ultimate meanings.
Lamentably, it seems that Ownby does not take qigong very seriously, and this underlying attitude is thinly masked in his book. Agreed, he does not explicitly launch an attack against qigong's attempted introduction into the scientific realm, but it is clear that he sees it as just another form of Chinese popular religion, the implication being something like "these Chinese are pretty naïve to believe in that, but it's still understandable, because they have such a long history of similar folk religions".
He seems to insinuate that the hundreds of millions of people who practiced qigong were more or less relying on ordinary calisthenics and meditation to improve their health--something safe and easily contained within the prevailing scientific paradigm. The fundamental challenge that qigong poses to Western reason is not taken seriously at all. Everything else follows along this basic assumption. Qigong is too outlandish, it just cannot be true--therefore, for the sake of coherence, Ownby chooses to interpret all of his material from that perspective, even though he remains fairly deferential.
Of course, if supernaturalism in qigong would have been taken seriously at all, the book might have dabbled too deep into the area of metaphysics. That was evidently not Ownby's intention. He struggles to keep an "objective" distance, which may seem good for the average reader at this time, but, depending on how things ultimately turn out for Falun Gong, could appear supercilious in future analyses of the book.
What was presented in the book's narrative of the history of qigong or Falun Gong was nothing new to me, being already rather well-read on the subject. Some interesting sources, some names I hadn't heard of before, a relatively good chronology of how things happened. Other than that, the book did not impress me, and, honestly speaking, it was a bit disappointing, for I had expected a real masterpiece from Ownby. It may be the most comprehensive scholarly account on Falun Gong so far, and I don't know if we're going to get anything better in the near future, but it's still a far cry from being the definitive account on this unprecedented phenomenon and the reasons leading up to its persecution. Nevertheless, with warts and all, the book is infinitely better than anything written by Maria Hsia Chang.
Four stars.
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Poorly printed.
Purchased for a college class. Did not open until late in the semester when it cam up on the syllabus. Printing errors rendered it illegible. Amazon would not accept return after 30 days.
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Purchased for a college class. Did not open until late in the semester when it cam up on the syllabus. Printing errors rendered it illegible. Amazon would not accept return after 30 days.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2008
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Deno
this is just a description and history of Falun Gong ...
Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2016