A Teacher From the Qigong Boom

Li Hongzhi introduced Falun Gong publicly on 13 May 1992 in Changchun, in China's Jilin province, at a moment when qigong, a broad family of Chinese exercise and cultivation systems combining movement, breathing and meditative practice, had become a mass phenomenon in China with tens of millions of practitioners across hundreds of competing schools.

David Ownby's scholarly account situates Li's teaching squarely within that qigong milieu while noting what distinguished it: Falun Gong combined the physical exercises common to the genre with an explicit moral cosmology, drawing selectively on Buddhist and Daoist concepts, and Li presented the moral cultivation of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance as inseparable from and more important than the physical exercises themselves. The teaching spread rapidly through the 1990s by word of mouth and through Li's lectures and published books, reaching an estimated tens of millions of practitioners in China by government and independent estimates alike before the 1999 ban.