New book on Qi Gong (Qigong) and medicine in ancient China

Book on Qi Gong and Chinese medicine in antiquity.

Introduction

According to David Palmer (2007), the modern notion of Qigong should be associated with an "invented tradition" that emerged as a result of the strategy developed by the Chinese Communist government in order to reformulate and institutionalize with a "scientific" character traditional practices that it considered anchored in feudalism and superstition.

The first written appearance of the term Qigong corresponds to a Taoist text from the Tang dynasty (618–910 AD) and it does so under the meaning of "breathing techniques". The expression will not appear in writing again, and under the same meaning, until the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD), and will remain a marginal word until 1949, when a group of Members of the Chinese Communist Party, in the mountains south of Hebei, decided to appropriate this term to designate a set of physical exercises for health that they had created, based on the modification of practices from a traditional school of therapeutic practices known as Nei Yang Gong.

It can be said that from the reappearance of this term in 1949 to the present, the word Qigong has become popularized and has been degrading to the point of designating not only an immensely heterogeneous array of more than 5,000 practices based on breathing, meditation, visualization, physical activity or divinatory and magical arts, but also to designate any "invented" activity that is performed slowly and coordinated with breathing.