Tracing the origins of Qigong fever: Mao Zedong, Jiang Weiqiao, quiet sitting, and the jingluo system, 1914-1958.

This paper traces the origins of qigong fever by locating Mao Zedong's early practice of quiet sitting in 1916 within an intellectual lineage linking Jiang Weiqiao, Yang Changji, and Mao's classmates. Deeply rooted in the Neo-Confucian tradition of self-cultivation and the circulation of jingluo, Jiang's quiet sitting method was reinterpreted through Japanese hygienic languages during the Republican period, and later reframed in terms of Pavlovian neurophysiology in Maoist China. In 1954, Jiang's claim that his long-term qigong practice had verified the existence of jingluo coincided with Mao's renewed support for Chinese medicine. By legitimising the existence of jingluo through qigong practice, the circulatory jingluo system was codified into national Chinese medicine textbooks as the discipline's core theoretical foundation, thereby laying the institutional and epistemic groundwork for the post-Mao qigong fever.