A History for Falun Gong

AbstractThis chapter situates Falun Gong in the history of popular religion in late imperial and modern China, seeking to identify genealogical linkages among the late imperial White Lotus sectarian tradition, the redemptive societies of the Republican period, and the qigong movement (including Falun Gong) of China's reform era. It argues that all such groups should be called “redemptive societies,” which share the following characteristics: leadership by charismatic masters, who teach fundamentalist morality and techniques of corporal transformation and who offer the promise of redemption, in the forms of healing, supernormal powers, and perhaps immortality. Methodologically, this chapter illustrates that fieldwork is crucial if one wishes to go beyond the discourse of orthodoxy and heterodoxy that has been employed by the Chinese state for centuries to label and condemn certain popular religious groups and practices.