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Information Fantasies - Journal #96

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The photo above was taken in 1993 at a gathering of qigong practitioners in west suburban Beijing. Since the late 1970s, a “qigong fever” had swept across post-Mao China, attracting more than sixty million regular practitioners. This “qigong fever” involved many high-level Party officials and research institutes and universities across the country, as well as leading scientists, such as Qian Xuesen, a most renowned and politically influential scientist, whose name is associated with China’s missile and space projects. In the photo, each of the practitioners, obviously in a meditative trance, was wearing a cooking pot on their head. Dubbed “information pots,” they were expected to receive information from outer space so that a “resonance between heaven and mankind” (天人感应) could be formed. A cosmological view that was formed and developed around the last three centuries BC, when a unified and centralized political order arose for the first time in the history of China, “resonance betwee

e - flux Journal Subscribe Information Fantasies Xiao Liu Crowd assembles wearing so-called “information pots” fashioned from household pots and pans. Issue # 96 January 2019 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ Notes 1 See Nathan Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55, no. 1 (June 1995): 5–37; John Hay, “The Human Body as a Microcosmic Source of Macrocosmic Values in Calligraphy,” in Theories of the Arts in China , eds. Susan Bush and Christian F. Murck (Princeton University Press, 1983): 74–102; and Robin D. S. Yates, “Body, Space, Time, and B

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