(shimmering electronic tone)
- Good afternoon.
My name is You-tien Hsing,
I'm a faculty in geography
and Chair of Center for
Chinese Studies here at Cal.
Welcome to Center the for Chinese Studies,
Elvera Kwang Siam Lim Memorial
Lecture in Chinese studies.
This endowed lecture
series was made possible by
a very generous gift to the
Center of Chinese Studies
by Mrs. Lim's family, and
this year we are very honored
to have Professor Ruth Rogaski
to deliver the Lim Memorial Lecture.
Before I introduce Professor
Rogaski, let me tell you
a little bit about Elvera Kwang Siam Lim,
the namesake of this lecture series.
Mrs. Lim was born in
Shantou, Guangdong Province,
southern China, in 1928.
Migrated to Hong Kong later on.
Received a PhD from University
of Hawaii in biology,
and she was teaching in
the biology department
of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
for a long time, and after her retirement,
she decided to move to
Oakland, California,
where she passed away in 2006.
This endowed lecture
series was made possible
through this generous gift
to the Center of Chinese
Studies by her family
to honor her dedication
to scholarly exchange.
With this endowment we
bring one eminent scholar
to Berkeley every year to
present a public lecture
and to meet with our faculty,
with our graduate students,
and generally foster scholarly exchange
among colleagues in
China studies and beyond.
In addition to this lecture
series, Mrs. Lim's family
also established a endowed
graduate fellowship
in her name to reward academic excellence,
that we are very, very grateful for.
Now let me introduce our speaker today.
Professor Ruth Rogaski
is professor of history
at Vanderbilt University.
She's a historian of
Qing and modern China,
and the history of
medicine, urban history,
women's and gender history,
and social culture history
in early modern East Asia.
She's the author of Hygienic Modernity:
Meanings of Health and
Disease in Treaty-Port China,
published in 2004.
This groundbreaking work
was awarded many prestigious prizes
including Fairbank Prize
in East Asian history,
the Levenson Prize in Chinese studies,
the Welch Medal in the
history of medicine,
and was co-recipient
of the Berkshire Prize.
In addition to this important book,
Professor Rogaski has written widely
on topics such as germ warfare,
Chinese orphanages, and
martial arts in history.
She just completed another
book, another monograph,
The Nature of Manchuria, that
examines the intersection
between natural history
and projects of empire
in Northeast Asia from the 17th
century to the present.
Right now she's going to
present her current current,
most recent fresh project,
The Qi in Chinese medicine,
in Chinese science.
So without further ado, let us welcome
Professor Ruth Rogaski.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you so much for that
generous introduction You-tien.
It's a true honor to be invited
to give the Lim lecture.
And first I just wanted
to thank several people
who've made this possible.
First, Elinor Levine at the
Center for Chinese Studies
who handled the logistics
of my visit with great care
and unflagging cheerfulness,
as did Keila Diehl,
who is the managing
editor of Cross-Currents.
And most of all, I wish
thank You-tien of course,
and also of course Professor Wen-hsin Yeh,
for inviting me to
Berkeley again to take part
in the tremendously vibrant
intellectual community here.
And it's due in great part to Wen-hsin's
warm hospitality and adventurous mind
that I always feel welcome
when I come to visit.
And today it's really an
honor to give a lecture
that's been endowed by the
family of Dr. Elvera Lim,
who was as we just heard,
was a scientist herself,
and whose father, at
least I read this online,
whose father was a physician
in Guangdong province
in the early part of the 20th century.
So I hope that Dr. Lim
would have been pleased
that I'm offering a
talk today that engages
in the history of science
and medicine in China.
So today what I'd like
to do is share with you
some of my musings, recent
musings from my work
on the global history
of the concept of qi.
Offering some observations
about how scientists
and physicians in China, and in the west,
around the turn of the 20th
century thought about qi
and about air, and the
relationship between the two.
And I hope that this history
of air-qi connections
might inspire us in the
end to think perhaps
just a little bit differently
about the role of air and qi
in our current environmental crises.
So let me begin with an image of just one
of those current crises,
from Beijing in 2003.
In February of, excuse me, 2013.
In February of 2013, a strange phenomenon
appeared on the campus
of Beijing University.
The air that winter had
been particularly bad,
as you can see here, reaching air quality
index levels of over 700.
And now that's on the
scale where the numbers
between 300 and 500 are already deemed
hazardous to human life.
One morning, Beida's students
awoke to find that all
of the statues of human
forms on the campus
had been outfitted with
white masks, or kou zhao,
those ubiquitous equipments
that Chinese citizens wear
in order to cope with smog, or wu mai.
Cai Yuanpei had a kou zhao,
as did Li Dazhao, and even Cervantes.
I don't have the picture of the
early modern European poet and author.
But they all had kou zhao on.
Now images of this prank
went viral on Weibo sites,
prompting China's netizens
to add their own humorous
captions, as you can imagine,
and use these images as
an opportunity to express
their frustration with
the poor quality of air
in the nation's capital.
As one person opined,
"These status would collapse
"if they had to breathe this
air without those masks."
Now one of these images in
particular caught my attention.
A statue of a male taijiquan practitioner
gracefully executing the single whip pose,
the white of his kou zhao
contrasting beautifully
with the rich bronze of the statue.
Now this statue had been erected
on the Beida campus in 2008
to commemorate Chinese
traditional physical culture
in that Olympic year.
This ironic juxtaposition of
a traditional Chinese exercise
that features deep and
purposeful breathing
being conducted in the midst of a horribly
unbreathable air apocalypse
mirrors other images that
circulated on the Internet
during that first winter
airpocalypse in China in 2013.
Photos not of statues, but of real life
taijiquan and qigong practitioners
attempting to do their qi
work outdoors in dense smog.
Now these images raise
compelling questions.
What is it that we
breathe when we practice
qigong, for example?
If it's qi, then what is qi?
And if it's air, for
that matter, what is air?
And what is the relationship
between qi and air?
So in this talk I'll offer some musings
about the historical
interaction between air and qi,
focusing on the ways that a
physician of Chinese medicine
negotiated between these two concepts
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Instead of offering timeless definitions
of these two concepts, I
would like instead to suggest
how human ways of
interacting with and knowing
these entities changed across time.
My talk will focus on the
following sequence of questions.
How was qi conceptualized
in pre-modern texts
relating to health and the body?
What happened when western
scientific concepts
of air came to China?
What similarities and differences
did Chinese physicians
see between air and qi?
And finally, what are the
implications of this relationship
for our global crisis of air today?
First, let me turn to the
first question, what is qi.
Now even the great early
Chinese philosopher Mencius,
when asked about qi, or his
(speaking foreign language)
said, "It's hard to put into words."
(speaking foreign language)
But we must acknowledge
that qi is a broad concept
with multiple valences of meaning
that have changed across
time and from place to place.
So what I offer here is a very
limited schematic overview
based on the great work
of other scholars such as
Xi-ga-hisa Kore-ahma, Isabelle Robinet,
Rob Campany, Nathan Sivin, Paul Unschuld,
and many many others.
So let me first start by saying that today
in the United States we usually
say that qi is vital energy.
That's the kind of the
standard translation.
And historically I would
agree that qi was thought of
as something that fostered the
unfolding processes of life.
But in traditional
Chinese cosmology qi was
a far broader concept
and it was not limited
to sentient beings.
It was not even limited to organic things.
Qi, if we're going to work
towards a working definition
that we can use as we discuss it,
was the basic physical stuff
of everything in the universe.
Found everywhere in everything,
both animate and inanimate.
Qi is also the characteristic force
within things that propels
change and transformation.
And I like this phrase from
my old teacher Nathan Sivin
who put it this way, qi is
"that which makes things happen in stuff"
and "the stuff in which things happen".
So that's my working definition,
I'll move forward from there.
Now what about qi and air?
Qi is undoubtedly related
to the stuff we breath in,
what we call air.
But it is also much, much more.
Scholars such as Donald Harper have
examined the character for qi,
and discerned that from
early Han Dynasty texts,
what we see here is steam
arising from rice.
Now Harper translates this as vapor.
And we can see within this term of qi,
a sort of misty yet nutritive entity,
obviously related to air.
And yet one of the earliest
texts that seems to reference qi
that we have, it's actually
an excavated object,
a exquisite small jade cylinder,
that has been dated from around 500 B.C.
And archeologists think that it's the cap
to a walking stick, which I
absolutely love this idea.
This jade cylinder has
some remarkable things
engraved on it that
suggest that humans can do
remarkable things with qi.
So if we show the text
here and a translation.
It goes "Swallowing, then it travels;
"traveling, it extends;
extending, it descends;
"descending, it stabilizes;
stabilizing; it solidifies;
"solidifying, it sprouts;
sprouting, it grows;
"growing it returns; returning,
it merges with Heaven."
So you can think about
that lovely inscription.
And say from here that
obviously qi goes far beyond
any one to one correspondence with air
as we understand it today.
Now in ancient texts related to yangsheng,
or the skill set of nurturing life,
qi can be drawn into the human body
through very mundane tasks
such as breathing and eating.
Now the cultivation of qi
through physical exercise
demonstrated by the image on the left,
involves breathing but it also involves
using the mind to circulate
the qi within the body
to lead to excellent
physical health and vigor.
And of course for Daoist
adepts, qi could do even more.
By circulating and
transforming the primordial qi
within the body
through the power of the mind,
adepts could cultivate a
divine embryo within the body
thus eliminate the need
for breathing altogether.
Which could come in handy these days.
And also offering a
vehicle for immortality.
Now in a related but
really quite separate
tradition qi was also
essential concept in Chinese medicine.
It's the substrate that
joins the human body
and the external environment.
Moving through the body along the routes
that we know today is, we would call them
the meridians or the acupuncture channels
familiar to us from Chinese medicine.
Now, in one way of thinking,
this qi moves through the universe
in a very predictable patterns,
through the logic of yin and yang,
and according to the five phases,
earth, wood, water, metal, and fire.
Rubrics that are pegged
to the waning and waxing
of nature's rhythms.
Day and night, birth and death,
and the changing seasons.
Humans, even though we're puny creatures,
are fully capable of
understanding these patterns,
and adjusting our behavior
in order to harmonize internal
qi with the cosmic qi.
But if people are unable to harmonize qi
through proper behavior,
and this happens all the time doesn't it,
then have no fear because
acupuncture and herbs
can be used to restore this harmony.
And this is an important thing to remember
as we move forward.
Now Chinese medicine is not just
a lovely embrace of good qi,
because there is something
called righteous qi,
this is the good qi that we
all think and know and love,
but there is also something
called deviant qi, or xieqi
And this qi
can sneak up on you, it can overtake you,
and it could even kill you.
Deviant qi can arise from
the bodies of the sick,
from corpses, from filth,
from blocked waterways,
even corrupt officials
and corrupt politicians,
can poison the environment
with stinking qi, chouqi.
or huiqi, the qi of filth.
The very land itself can give rise to this
harmful qi.
Especially the lush
landscapes of the homeland
of Dr. Elvera Lim,
the southlands of Guangdong,
Guangxi province, where the
noxious qi of the mountains
and the poisonous fog
of the southern ranges
was in the air.
Now while there were
some collective options
for what could be done in order
to improve the environment,
ultimately the responsibility for fighting
and avoiding xieqi, landed
squarely on the shoulders
of the individual.
Medical texts advise individuals
to moderate behavior,
alter diet, take medicines,
engage in yangsheng
exercises, and if possible
simply avoid those regions
with unhealthful qi,
so don't go to Guangdong, right.
Now the Chinese physician was the person
on the front lines of this struggle
between zhengqi and xieqi,
this invisible struggle of life and death.
Equipped with knowledge
from ancient texts,
with experience in the human condition,
and with their own finely trained senses,
physicians encountered,
understood, and felt qi directly.
And I use this image to convey this idea
that qi could be understood
through the unmediated
human senses through the exquisite
sense of touch and feeling the pulse.
With the knowledge of the revered classics
and with his own intuition,
the physician could
redirect the forces of qi
within the bodies of individual sufferers.
Qi was real because humans knew
it and perceived it directly
through such intimate and
immediate sensorial engagement.
Let us consider then
encounters between qi and air
with the arrival of westerners
in late Imperial China.
And of course we start this
story with the Jesuits.
Jesuit missionaries came
to the imperial court
with very specific ideas about air.
And found confusion and heresy
when they considered the concept of qi.
Their concerns were both
spiritual and scientific.
Now we know through the
wonderful scholarship
of Qiong Zhang at Wake Forest,
that Matteo Ricci considered qi to be
the main obstacle to his religious work.
Because of qi, neo-Confucian elites
rejected the idea of a supernatural world.
Since after death, for example,
the soul's qi simply
dissipated and scattered,
so what was there to save?
Even worse, because qi
connected man with the cosmos,
Ricci and his colleagues
found that Chinese elites,
or most Chinese elites, obviously
there were some converts,
but most Chinese elites felt little need
for the western concept of God.
Ricci actually wrote an
extensive anti-qi polemic
in his master work Tianzhu shi yi,
or The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,
published in 1910.
This was a very long chapter
with a very long chapter title
and I'll just give it to you here.
The chapter title was, A
discussion on spiritual beings
and the soul of man, and
an explanation as to why
the phenomena of the
world cannot be described
as forming an organic unity.
This chapter title says it all.
For Ricci and other Jesuits,
Chinese would not accept
a Christian spirituality
unless they got rid of their idea of qi.
Nor would they accept western science,
or what we could call
western science at that time
if they didn't change
their ideas about qi.
So for the Jesuits qi was
nothing more than air, and
air was one of the classical
four elements, along with
earth, water, and fire.
As the missionaries translated the basics
of Aristotelian natural
philosophy into Chinese,
they co-opted a very familiar character.
It is in Jesuit treatises
that we first get a one to one
correspondence between the character qi
and a specific western concept of air.
As we can see in the last
of the four elements here.
By the 18th century, westerners developed
an extraordinary new way of thinking
about the stuff we breathe.
Joseph Priestly, pictured on the left here
isolated oxygen in 1774.
And this was followed in the 1780s
by the famous experiments
of Antoine Lavoisier,
who is pictured here
with his distracting wife,
but this image actually is very important,
I wanted to share it
with you because his wife
was also the person who kept
all of his laboratory notebooks
and was his right hand assistant.
Right hand man.
So this picture, says a lot
more than meets the eye.
But Lavoisier, in his experiments,
demonstrated that air and even water,
these things were composed
of different types of gases.
So you could even take water
and break it apart into invisible things.
Now these experiments
led to what one scholar
has called the invention
of air in the west.
And this was, this invention of air,
was the fundamental beginnings
of the science of chemistry.
The revolution of modern
laboratory science
began with chemistry and
the revolution of chemistry
began with the west's
exploration of the invisible.
Now if you've heard of
Priestly and Lavoisier
it may be because you've
read a very famous work,
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions,
because the debate between
Priestly and Lavoisier
formed one of his major case studies
about how paradigm shifts works.
But what I'd like to highlight here,
I'm actually drawing on a different work,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
Which hopefully some of you have read
the classic work by Shapin and Schaffer.
And this line of inquiry
focuses on material culture
and the role of things in science.
These great discoveries
revealed that the nature of air
was revealed by manipulating
what we cannot see
by using things that we can see,
or apparatuses of glass,
metal, and rubber.
And if we can draw our eyes away from
the amorous couple and focus instead
on what is on the desk in front,
on the table in front of Lavoisier,
we see these objects.
It's through these objects
Lavoisier and others
went on to theorize that not just air
but the entire world was
made up of combinations
of discrete elements that could
be manifested, transformed,
and controlled through forced
interactions with objects.
These experiments
highlight a basic approach
to comprehending reality
that emerges in modern
Europe at this time.
What the philosopher
of science David Baird
has called thing knowledge.
The idea that both
epistemology and ontology
in the modern world are
determined through instruments.
That apparatus within them themselves
contain and convey knowledge,
and apparatus determines
how existence in defined.
Now these experiments
with gas and apparatus feature centrally
in the introduction of
western science into China
in the mid to late 19th century,
with very important consequences
for the history of qi.
So after the Opium War,
a new wave of Protestant missionaries
sought to bring western science to China.
And there's a whole host of scholarship
on these translations that were done
as collaborations between
Chinese and western,
between Chinese scientists
and western missionaries.
And these texts inevitably
present chemistry,
or the study of change, huaxue,
as the most basic way of
understanding the world.
And in these texts Chinese readers
would learn that the world
is comprised of three types
of matter, solid, liquid, and gas.
And that chemistry, as the
kind of crowning science
that the west had developed,
was the way that the west
mastered matter by separating or fen,
and combining, or he, its
elemental constituents.
And this mastery of matter in these texts
was primarily conveyed
through an introduction
to the invisible world of gas
that was translated of course as qi.
Now these translators
faced some difficult tasks,
including challenges that
trace all the way back
to Matteo Ricci's issues with qi.
The main thing was how to
get your Chinese readers
to distinguish between qi and air.
And we can see this work, this distinction
in
an important, it's not
the earliest example
but it's an important example.
A translation of a text, a British text
called Chemistry and Health in Chinese
but was called the
Chemistry of Common Life
as a British popular primer
of the mid-19th century.
Now this Chemistry of Common Life
begins with a chapter
entitled The Air We Breathe.
And the original text, as you can see
from this preamble
here, informs the reader
of the chemical composition of air,
the height of the atmosphere,
the concept of air pressure,
these sorts of things.
But for the Chinese
translation, Xu and Fryer
prefaced this information with
a definition of air itself,
giving their readers a
name for air that would
distinguish it from other
conceptualizations of qi.
And I translated this
preface into English.
It says, human life can not
exist without breathing,
excuse me, human life can not
exist without breathing in
a certain type of gas, qi,
and this type of gas, qi,
is known as the qi of the void, or kongqi.
In Fryer and Xu's careful
phrasings perhaps we can witness
the birth of air in modern China.
Now another challenge in these texts
is proving that this qi
as gas actually exists.
And this was done by staging interaction
between qi and visible objects.
Qi as gas existed because
it occupied space in a flask
turned upside down in water.
It had weight 'cause it could
displace mercury in a barometer.
Qi as gas was everywhere, but an air pump
could actually render
a sphere void of gas,
thus creating a vacuum,
a place where there is no qi.
Apparatus such as these
from Benjamin Hobson's
very early text Bo wu xin bian,
proved existence of qi as gas
but also could demonstrate
the nature of qi as gas.
Chemistry of course was a
science that specialized
in separating things, breaking them apart.
And many of the images in for example,
Xu Shou's and John Fryer's
main chemistry text
Hauxue jianyuan focused on how
you could separate qi.
And many of these little
images here are actually
part of what accompanies a
very detailed description
of Lavoisier's original experiments
revealing how
oxygen or yangqi, and hydrogen, qingqi,
can be derived from water, for example.
Now if these images, for
me when I looked at this,
it seemed as though
this was like a magic manual.
And the kind of magic that
you could do with qi as gas
required lots of magical implements.
So this was, for me when I read these,
it seems like we're
talking about a magic kit.
And it was only through
manipulation of visible matter
in the form of tubes and ovens and wires
that the wonders of the
invisible, or qi as gas,
could actually be known.
Now while these texts were
at pains to distinguish
between air and qi, they also conveyed
numerous inadvertent points
of similarity between air and qi.
Just as in Chinese medical
thought, this western air
sustained life but it was also
the primary cause of disease.
These texts were filled with descriptions
of what for the west was deemed miasma,
these deadly gases that could arise from
a variety of sources
such as sewers, marshes,
volcanoes, corpses, but
also from the factories
of the newly industrialized urban centers
of Europe and America.
The words the translators
used to convey these forms
of miasma would be very
familiar to Chinese physicians.
Chouqi, huiqi, liqi.
Chinese readers in these texts
however, are assured that
western chemistry had solved the problem.
First, western chemistry
knew that liqi and chouqi
for example were not mysterious influences
but specific harmful compounds,
including hydrogen chloride,
sulfurated hydrogen,
ammonia and phosphorous,
which when inhaled could cause disease.
But chemistry had the
answer to the problem.
By mixing dangerous gases
with other compounds
chemists in the laboratory
would be able to remove the du,
or the poison, from liqi,
thus eliminating the pathogenic miasma
from the environment altogether.
But if that didn't work out
then chemistry also had another,
another technique.
It was around this time
in the mid-19th century
that the Scottish,
the Scottish scientist Stenhouse had
invented a charcoal filter mask
known after the Scottish inventor
as the Stenhouse Respirator.
And this could be used to remove
the noxious aspects of air,
a boon which mid-19th
century western scientists
predicted would save millions
of lives around the world.
Now we can at this moment perhaps see
not only the invention of pollution,
but also the invention
of technological fixes
for this pollution.
Now I'm going to go blank with my screen
because I want you to consider
something very abstract
that has nothing to do with things.
Within these translations
of Chinese science,
excuse me these Chinese
translations of western science,
we also find a great deal of discussion
about the world of
souls, spirits, and God.
Now this may seem a bit,
a bit at odds with their desire to convey
the wonders of science
to 19th century Chinese,
but we have to remember that
even if you crack open
an English or an American
chemistry book from the mid-19th century,
the language, it's full of the
language of natural theology.
This idea that while you
are observing nature,
you're also going to be able
to perceive through nature
the existence of God.
And this kind of language
is woven into Chinese translations.
So we discover that for example,
interplanetary gravitation is very similar
to the principles of Christian fraternity.
Or that the telegraph
works in ways similar
to the Creator's boundless
love for mankind.
This spiritual world
contains similar forces
to what we find in science,
but with one very important caveat
and I just want you to remember this, that
you could not define,
you could not understand,
you could not touch these ideas
of the spirit with apparatus.
And indeed that was what
distinguished the world
of the spirit from the world of science.
The world of the spirit had
to rely, in these texts,
on human feeling, human
perception, human emotion,
and
an enlightened mind,
enlightened by readings
of ancient western
texts, such as the Bible.
So what I'd like to move on to now,
is how a very important person
in the history of Chinese medicine
encountered these ideas
of air and made them
make sense within his own tradition of qi.
I'd like here to turn to
the works of Tang Zonghai,
a physician of Chinese
medicine who is well known
for exploring western science
and who is now considered
one of the founding
fathers of what's called
East-West convergence medicine.
Tang was born in Sichuan,
but frequently went to
places like Shanghai,
where he was exposed to western texts,
western medicine, and western science.
In his magnum opus, the
Convergence of Chinese
and Western Medicine: Essentials
from the Medical Classics,
Tang discussed the basics
of Chinese medicine
in light of his understanding
of western science.
Now Tang's discussion of qi
figures largely in his work.
In one example,
which is really wonderfully analyzed
in the work of Sean Lei,
and I'm borrowing it here,
Tang had looked at western anatomy texts
and discerned that the bladder,
depicted here in a cross
section of the lower abdomen,
actually was the source of qi
that powered the body.
Tang creatively combined his readings
of western anatomy texts
and Chinese medical texts
to discovery that the urinary bladder
was where the heat of fire,
classically associated
with the gate of life,
boiled the water held in the bladder,
giving rise to a steam like qi,
which Tang called qingqi.
Qingqi could just be light qi,
or he could have meant hydrogen,
we're not quite sure
because of this moment,
meanings were in flux.
And this light qi rose from
the body's nether regions
and began its energetic
circulation throughout the body,
powering human existence,
just the way that steam
powers movements in machines.
Now another
formulation I think, another
way of interpreting this
is it's not just a steam engine,
but it actually in Tang's mind
was replicating Lavoisier's experiments
for separating hydrogen
and oxygen from water,
depicted here.
So the analogy can go both ways,
either to anatomy or to chemistry.
Now, other forms of qi as gas
further animated Tang's understanding
of the qi of Chinese medicine.
Tang found an important
east-west convergence
to explain respiration.
He stated, for example, that
the basic Chinese medical fact
that humans through breathing,
was actually the way that humans
received the yang of heaven.
And this yang of heaven
nurtured the body's internal qi.
Now to explain this
process, Tang turned to
oxygen, saying that
yangqi, or the qi that nurtures life,
which is the way that
oxygen is translated,
was actually the same as yang qi,
or the qi of yin yang.
So there's a little play on words here.
You know, the yangqi of
Priestly's experiments
being basically the same as the yangqi,
the qi of heaven, or
the qi of yin and yang.
Now
Tang wasn't entirely comfortable
with this explanation,
he felt that yes western
science perhaps had
with their implements discovered
something about yang qi,
but if Tang was pushed to understand
what exactly was the relationship
between oxygen and yin yang,
he actually finds a very interesting,
extremely interesting convergence.
"Western medicine speaks
of a Lord of Creation
"that benevolently nurtures humanity.
"This so called Lord
of Creation is in fact
"the spirit of Heaven and Earth.
"This is similar to the
basic Chinese principle
"that man is born of Heaven and Earth.
"The idea is more or less the same,
"but he works are slightly different.
"Heaven and Earth are nothing
more than yin and yang,
"which transforms qi to
produce the Five Phases
"and the Six Climatic Influences."
As we've seen, regardless
of the technical nature
of their texts, missionary
translators often emphasized
the central role of the
creator in their work.
Now Tang, inspired by his readings,
discerned through careful
logic and inference
that the starting point for
western science was God.
Tang sees the western Lord of Creation
as a personification of
the patterns of the cosmos,
an invisible force that manifests
in the myriad things of the universe
in the same ways that
yin and yang manifests
in the 10,000 things.
Tang has the freedom here
to toggle back and forth
between God and gas without concern
about how to distinguish
one from the other.
Now ultimately Tang viewed western science
as nothing but an inelegant
empirical hodge podge,
a complex but ultimately
futile manipulation
of tubes, flasks and bunsen burners.
I think that Tang was
very aware of the fact
that his qi was discerned in this manner.
And their qi was discerned in this way.
In the end, according to
Tang, the west's manipulations
only revealed the existence of
certain limited types of qi,
which Chinese medicine
had long ago understood
without the aid of apparatus.
The existence of qi was
readily discernible,
readily knowable, a part
of the physical universe
that could be perceived even
though it was invisible,
through a reading of the classical texts,
and directly perceived by examining nature
through the unmediated human senses.
So in conclusion, I've taken you kind of
through this whirlwind
tour of early modern and
19th century and early 20th
century science and chemistry
and Tang Zonghai's opinions.
But now I'm gonna make a rather
jarring leap to the present.
And to remind us with some regret
that what awaits us outside,
maybe not today, but
what awaits us outside
in many parts of the world
is a jumble of gases that has been
increasingly rendered
unfit to sustain life.
And of course as recent
events have taught us,
these concerns are not limited to China,
but are global concerns that
are experienced close to home,
including in the Bay Area.
This is a recent photograph
of the San Francisco skyline
during the October
northern California fires.
Now during those recent
fires in the north,
the US frequently compared, excuse me,
US media frequently
compared the air quality
of San Francisco to that of Beijing
in order to highlight just
how bad the air had become.
And while commentators in the US media,
and I thought this was really interesting,
I don't know if you picked this up but
listening to these news
reports they'd always say,
well you can't, don't jump to conclusions,
we can't blame it on climate change,
the fact that, you know,
good parts of northern
California are burning.
So even though that seemed to be
outside of the realm of climate change,
it's very clear that scientists
have clearly demonstrated
that urban China's bouts of bad air
are not simply the direct results
of localized factory fumes or car exhaust.
They are instead brought
about by the steady
and ongoing alteration of
global weather patterns.
Warming in the arctic, storms in Siberia,
the stilling of winds over central Asia,
all of these things
linked to global warming.
So we must confront the
fact that air is everywhere.
But increasingly we are left
with no place of refuge,
no matter where we call home.
So how might these considerations
of the history of air and qi connections,
and links between China and the west,
shed light on our current airborne crisis.
I will briefly mention that
I turned to the internet then
to see well what do experts
on taijiquan and qigong
tell us we should worry
about, or how should we
guard our bodies against the current
airpocolypses that we encounter.
What I find is quite interesting.
While contemporary China is
awash in newfound enthusiasm
for traditional qi based techniques,
when it comes to discussing
the state of air,
the state of qi that is not gas,
is rarely discussed.
Instead, the harm to the body is discussed
in very scientific terms
in various qigong websites.
Chemical and physiological terms
that emphasize respiration,
oxygen, particulate matter, harmful gases.
And taiji and qigong practitioners
are simply encouraged to
take it indoors, right.
Just to avoid
the places where this harmful xieqi,
well they don't call it xieqi,
just harmful wu mai emerges.
It seems that the solution is
to focus on individual bodies
in ways that harken
back to some techniques
from traditional Chinese
yangsheng, and medical
ways of dealing with bad qi,
and not to focus on potential
wider social implications.
Now this is perhaps not
surprising given the censorship
and the self-censorship of
the Chinese internet, but
I find that any discussion of qi
within the problem of wu mai
is more or less devolves down
to just some kind of
personal responsibility
for nurturing one's qi no
matter how the world is going.
In Chinese medicine,
now if we turn to a different arena,
I've taken a look at a lot of traditional
Chinese medical journals from the PRC,
and there are a few articles
on the problem of wu mai.
And these too discuss
the problem in terms of
PM 2.5, are you all up on your PM 2.5,
this fine particulate matter
that can lodge in the lungs
and potentially lead to lung cancer.
Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,
but these articles also suggest that
wu mai is nothing new.
Chinese medicine has known
about it for a long time
because it's just like
liqi, or the lin-nan duwu.
Which is a rather fallacious
claim if you think about it
because premodern xiangqi or
liqi was seldom associated
with urban environments but
more with rural environments.
But the articles all suggest
that in spite of the seriousness
of wu mai induced illnesses,
Chinese medicine has a
way of conceptualizing it,
treating it, and even preventing it.
Many hold out the idea that
by strengthening the body's qi
with proper diet and
with Chinese medicines
that resistance to airborne
disease can be achieved.
Now when I see this kind
of conclusion published
in the pages of a Chinese, a TCM journal,
I start to wonder if the
authors of these articles
are stockholders in one of the many
Chinese pharmaceutical companies
that produce anti-smog tea.
Teas that claim to clear the lungs,
or boost the lung qi with
ancient Chinese formulas.
Not only do these teas claim
to lessen the impact of smog-borne toxins,
but they also claim to
protect against toxins,
and that's in this add further down,
toxins that come from second hand smoke,
car exhaust, and even the noxious fumes
from the air conditioners in your offices,
you know all about that.
So there have been frequent crack downs
against this kind of a product,
but these products continue to be
advertised widely on the internet.
And my favorite advertisement is this one.
This is, in my conclusion I'd like to just
take a look at this image,
'cause it's very interesting.
This is an advertisement for qing fei yin,
or lung clearing beverage.
The advertisement features
a threatening gray sky
looming over an equally gray Earth,
so there's your tian and
your di, both in bad shape.
And nothing but darkness on the horizon.
The future does not look good.
The ad features the
Chinese character of mai,
or haze, literally, followed
by the English phrase,
"What's the matter?"
And I think the Chinese phrase
is much more poignant and compelling.
It says,
(speaking foreign language)
"What is the matter with this world?"
The Chinese,
sorry, to the right of this ominous image
we see a lovely natural,
probably recycled,
made from recycled
materials brown paper bag
containing the lung clearing beverage,
and a picture of the
inviting amber brown tea
in a clear glass.
Beautiful green leaves
swirl around the tea
while in the background an image
of a flourishing green tree
with abundant green roots
symbolize the refreshed state
of the lungs after we drink this tea.
The ad copy states, quote,
"Cherish every breath of air we take."
Right down in here, "Purify our
brittle and weakened lungs."
Indeed this seems like a
wonderful bit of advice,
but I can't help,
I can help but observe that
if we had actually cherished
each and every breath that
we take in the first place,
we wouldn't have to
spend up to 1000 renminbi
for a concoction from the Tangren,
of course Tangren Tang's is the best,
and it costs up to a thousand hui
to purify our frail and brittle lungs.
So to conclude, thinking through this
historical relationship
between qi and air,
for me the most interesting
question has been
how air and qi have been perceived,
how their ontologies have been formed,
and how their existences
have been substantiated.
We have seen how Daoist adepts,
practitioners of traditional
health techniques,
physicians of Chinese medicine
all knew and experienced qi
directly as something
simultaneously imminent
of this world and yet at
the same time transcendent,
linking the human body
directly to the cosmos.
And the human mind and the human body
could directly understand
this qi, grasp its nature, and
as it was breathing, being breathed in
it could even, the human mind could even
harness the power of qi within the body.
Air emerged as a thing,
first with the Jesuits
and later with 18th and
19th century scientists.
Qi became gas, defined as real
because it could be rendered apparent
through the interaction with objects.
Laboratory apparatus provided the truth
about the constituent
elements of the universe,
which could be manipulated,
separated, and put to use,
or instrumentalized through chemistry.
At the turn of the
century Chinese physicians
such as Tang Zonghai
provocatively and confidently
questioned the primacy of
these western techniques
of defining and limiting qi.
He claimed that a knowledge
of the natural world
was possible and indeed superior
without machines.
Unperturbed by the role of apparatus
in divining and policing the border
between the physical and the spiritual,
Tang through the vehicle of qi
was able to conceptualize
of oxygen as God.
We seem to live in a world
where Tang Zonghai-like
convergences are no longer viable.
The qi,
let's get to our final picture.
The qi of Chinese medicine has emerged,
particularly in the west,
as a form of energy.
This is how we talk about it,
but the nature of this energy
is obscure and suspect.
And as a matter of fact the US
National Institutes of Health
puts an interesting spin on this.
It defines Chinese medicine
as a form of energy medicine,
acknowledging the centrality of qi,
but then it insists that
this energy is putative.
Or to put it in plain English, not real.
Since it cannot be detected
in scientific apparatus,
it is fundamentally
different from and suspect
compared to veritable forms of energy
such as light and heat.
Perhaps this consideration of the history
of air and qi connection can provide
a genealogy for this crucial division.
It certainly illuminates the particulars
of Chinese medical concepts
in the turn of the century
at a time of great social
and intellectual change.
But I'd like to suggest that
perhaps like all history
unraveling these threads to the past
can illuminate the paths
that brought us to our current state
and offer ways of creating change.
So I began this talk with
a few basic questions.
What is qi?
What is air?
What is the relationship
between qi and air?
My ruminations on the
history of qi and air
have perhaps generated more
questions than I've answered,
and I'm very much looking
forward to Wen-hsin's comments
and to your questions at
the end of our session.
But I'd like to leave you
with these last few questions
that this history has inspired for me.
Not just as a scholar of Chinese history,
but as a person who lives
between the Earth and the Heaven.
When we inhale what are we breathing?
What do we think we are
breathing when we breathe?
And would it make a
difference to this world
to think with every breath that we take,
that what we are doing is far
more than just breathing air.
So thank you very much
for your kind attention.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
It's very interesting.
Thank you Ruth for this most
provocative and inspiring talk.
I don't think I will ever breathe
the same way I did before.
Okay, our respondent today is professor,
our own Professor Yeh Wen-hsin,
Richard and Laurie
Morrison Chair Professor
in History at UC Berkeley.
Professor Yeh is a leading
historian of modern China
and I would just give you
some very selective feel
of her representative works
which include Shanghai Splendor:
Economic Sentiments and the Making
of Modern China, 1843-1949.
And also Provincial
Passages: Culture, Space,
and the Origins of Chinese Communism,
1919-1927.
And also The Alienated Academy:
Culture and Politics in Republican China,
1919-1937.
The list is way too long,
I will stop right here.
Wen-hsin, please.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you You-tien
for that introduction,
which I trust has made it amply clear
to this entire audience
that about the subject
that Ruth just presented,
I know close to nothing.
So I am truly honored
to be asked to function
as a quote unquote "discussant".
And then since I know so very little
about this whole domain of expertise
I thought what I might
do is to share with you
what I hear as the way that
she puts her argument together
and I what I thought her project is.
And then giving you a chance
to dig in to the presentation
and come up with better questions.
So,
I think Ruth made it clear from the outset
that it's this picture
which went around on Weibo
and the Chinese internet.
And this is an intriguing picture.
Namely a bronze statue
and then wearing mask.
Which leads her to ask this question,
what is that qi, right, air
in a qigong practice
and then in the, was qigong that qi
as a different sort of qi.
So the air that people breathe in, right,
but specifically in the context
of the practice of qigong, right.
So that is an important part of it.
So how does she set this up?
Well so, she sets this up
through deep research
into the textual origins,
or the discursive evolution
of the notion of qi in qigong,
or that informed
the practice of qigong,
that there is a deep cosmology
behind this word qi.
And this qi is both
a cause of transformative events
in between Heaven and Earth,
and then also in itself a substance.
This qi is both relational
and then also experiential.
It's relational in the sense that
it comes into being
through the context of human senses
such as sight, hearing,
smell, et cetera, right.
So it's not a thing to itself,
or in itself,
but nonetheless it's both
the foundation of mass
as well as the form that objects take.
So that is only a
convoluted way on my part
making an effort to recapture
what she had expressed
so succinctly, so wonderfully,
about the deep philosophical foundation
of the concept of qi
which informed the practice of qigong.
Now it's a vision of a cosmic order
which then takes us
through this whole question
of where do human being take up position
within this cosmic flow of qi.
In other words, the
relationship between ren
and tian or di.
In other words it's not
a bifurcated relationship
but a three way thing.
So once we get into the ren part,
the human part of this,
Ruth takes us to the subject of medicine.
And to the wellbeing of the physical body.
In other words about the sheng
rather than simply the shen, right.
Not just a notion of this
human form or human body
taking material form as shen,
but more specifically
to the notion of yangsheng,
nourishing the wellbeing of livelihood.
So with that then, once
we put human beings
in the center of this universe
that she's presenting to us,
and with an emphasis on how
it's important to harmonize qi
through the sort of
practice such as qigong,
then to my mind, having my background
at some point in time in neo-Confucianism,
this other thing kicks
in, namely what about li?
What is the relationship between li and qi
when it comes to the,
a vision about the
universe with human beings
being at its center and
attempting to do things,
bringing order to the universe
as well as bringing benefits to the self.
So as we know that in
neo-Confucian philosophy
there have been all kinds
of position being taken
about the relationship between li
or patterns and principles off the
evolution of the yin and
yang as opposed to the qi.
Namely li and qi are they
possibly in opposition
or do they always move in conjunction.
Now we know that we
don't know the answers.
We know that ju-shee and
die-jun do not disagree,
but that's beside the point.
The point here is simply that
for a qigong practitioner
in the late 19th century
or in the 20th century
to practice the qigong
and to think about the qi
there is a probably more than one way
to conceptualize or to think about
what this qi it's supposed to be
in terms of its cosmic nature,
as well as how that human presence
or human existence might take part in it.
So that seems to me to be one part
of a very interesting,
exquisitely done part of her presentation.
And then of course we moved
on to this other part,
here comes the Jesuits.
And after the Jesuits
encounter with a different paradigm
when it comes to science.
So here Ruth tells us that
this sino-western encounter,
it did not happen all of a sudden
out of nowhere just yesterday.
In fact, people had been working on this
for nearly 500 years.
And she also made it clear
that in terms of the dynamics
there had been efforts coming
in from both directions
to look for compatibilities
or intersections.
So there were strategic
decisions being made
in the translation of texts,
trying to render one tradition
intelligible to the other.
And people were also open to
the idea of adopting solutions.
So here then out of this tradition,
out of John Fryer and so forth,
we come to a better understanding
within the Chinese educated context
of this thing called air
or kongqi as such
with its chemical components,
with the kind of things
that could be subjected
to technological solutions should the gas
or should the air turn
out to be poisonous,
so on and so forth.
So happily there were people coming up
with pharmaceutical products, masks,
all kinds of products
and then being consumed
with enthusiasm by a Chinese public.
So far, I mean, as we get to
that part of the presentation
we see a presentation
about the convergence
through translation and how that this
is not a contested process.
Namely it's not about
China against the west
or tradition versus modernity.
Those old binaries can
be safely set aside.
But then beyond that,
she also made it clear
that there are after all
limits about what might be translatable
in terms of these,
the foundational differences
between these two paradigms.
And then also there are
limits of the practicality
of certain kinds of convergence.
So Tang Zonghai appears
to be the one person
in her example who has gone
as far as it possibly could, right,
translating God, Shen,
essentially as the li
of yin and yang, right,
the transformative patterns and principles
when it comes to the qi of yin and yang
rotating with each other.
So God in that sense
may be translated or understood
as the embodiment or as a western way
of embodying the notion of the li.
But nonetheless there appear to be
differences beyond that.
Namely this is a shen
which has to kind of ling,
which then in Confucian or neo-Confucian
moral philosophy and cosmology
does not quite ascribe
to the notion of li in that regard.
But anyway, up to now, right,
we are dealing with issues
in the domains which are normative
as well as technological.
We are reading text books,
we are reading people
who prescribe and make efforts
to come up with solutions.
So up to that point we
are in the 19th century
and then we make a leap and
we get into the 20th century
and we have our wonderful picture here.
And Ruth poses the
question, what is the qi
which now as we know
after the 19th century,
educated Chinese public
would begin to think of it
in terms of chemistry as opposed to the qi
which the qigong it's
supposed to be nurturing,
or introducing into the system as part of
placing the body of the self
to be in tune with the
cosmic flow of things.
So in other words the same qi,
qi in qigong
at this point simultaneously
draws upon the
cosmological and the technological
understandings of the concept of qi.
And coming together in a way that,
well, I think that's in some ways
ultimately Ruth's question.
Does it address problems,
does it provide solutions to issues.
So I think that, so
for me to wrap this up,
my understanding of what
she has accomplished,
I think what the paper has accomplished
extremely well is that by
the end of her presentation
as we look at this picture again,
we understand the depth of significance
when it comes to the word qi,
and the multi-faceted dimensions of it.
So we might initially think
that to put the mask
on the face of Cai
Yuanpei might be something
that we should laugh about,
but by the end of her presentation
I for one find myself thinking
what would be a more interesting response.
Is this something to be laughed at?
Are we looking at the image
of an ultimate paradox
when it comes to the incompatibility
between two foundational
philosophical traditions,
or are we looking at
a very pragmatic effort
to bring the two sides together
without asking too many questions.
What is it, what is it
about this image
to which we might most productively
or interestingly respond?
So that's my response, number one.
And then my response number two
to her overall presentation,
she's using this to try to
open up this whole question
of whether there might be a solution
to the issue of pollution
or climate issues.
Which are of course much
bigger and broader going beyond
instances of qigong practice
and the issue of whether it is possible
or it's not possible for
a qigong practitioner
to be practicing indoor,
closing all windows
so that one could safe guard the quality
of the air that one breathes in, right.
We see the absurdity in fact,
thanks to her presentation.
Or the impossibility
of that sort of a solution.
But nonetheless we are
left with the question
that what are the better solutions.
What is the reward of
a better understanding
of an image like this,
of the making of this conjunction
that is the outcome, a outcome like this.
What is the reward
on our part that we arrive at
a better understanding of the genealogy,
the paradox, and the challenges.
So those are
my efforts, and your turn now.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
Thank you.
- [You-tien] Would you
like to respond first?
- Ah.
- [You-tien] Or are you?
No we opened up the floor.
You don't have to, Wen-hsin says.
- [Wen-hsin] No, up to you, up to you.
- Well I think what I'll do is,
how 'bout we open up the
floor and I can work in.
I'm sure that some of the
questions from the floor will also
have commensurability with Wen-hsin's
really wonderful comments, so.
- [You-tien] I'll let you take questions.
- Okay.
- [Woman] Will you use the microphone?
- [Woman] Before China won
the bid for the Olympics
they had a massive tree planting campaign
and I haven't been following,
has that affected the quality
of air in China, because trees are
pretty wonderful exchanges of oxygen.
- That is true, I'm not sure.
So from a chemist's perspective, right,
which I'm not an atmospheric chemist, but
so that would help with certain gases
but not too much with say
the fine particulate matters,
like PM 2.5, the things that
that the Chinese
physicians are thinking of
that's the du, in the duqi,
it's the stuff that lodges in your body
and I think that's
the trees aren't gonna help you there.
- [Woman] Thank you for your talk.
I want to ask if perhaps
one of the differences
between qi and air might not only be that
air was made visible through apparatus,
but also, which follows from this,
that it can be quantified,
and measured with precise numbers.
Because if you think
about the language of qi
you can always talk about like buqi,
but you can't really say like,
when I see my Chinese doctor,
right, and like oh how is
it today, 70 or 80, right.
- That's right, that's right.
- [Woman] And then with regard
to the 20th century question
one thing that climate sciences
have often struggled with is
although we can with greater precision
or objectivity, measure
certain things like
pollution levels, when
it comes to mobilizing
public opinion, we are very challenged
because climate change happens
in ways that are either
too fast, too slow,
too big, or too small
for us to really render
in a way that humans find
that they can understand.
Whereas if you show pictures
of polar bears dying,
you're like oh God, this is terrible,
okay I'm gonna stop driving my Hummer.
So I wonder if precisely what is
the advantage of air,
it being quantifiable
sometimes works against it in other ways.
- Really interesting,
very productive questions.
I think the,
although I did not address
it in my presentation
the next step is the quantification.
I think for someone like Tang Zonghai,
the text that he was examining,
the Xu Shou and John Fryer text
hadn't quite gotten to the quantification,
but that is sort of the next step.
So the, your question is
what are the implications
of the ability to quantify,
and are there advantages or disadvantages
of thinking about numbers
and translating numbers into social,
into social action.
Because of course we have the numbers,
the air quality index numbers, but once,
so it 700 one day, but the
winds shift and the next day
it's back down to a good
old 105 or something,
which is still bad.
But that quantification
once again is variable.
I think we have to start talking about
time as you mentioned.
I'm suggesting, and this is really kind of
going out on a limb and really kind of
xiang fei fei kind of stuff,
but I think what helps
mobilize is tapping into
religious sentiment.
I mean, I almost hesitate to use the term
religious sentiment, but some
other emotive aspect
is perhaps a missing element
to the question of action.
And perhaps qi.
And so I'm really stating this baldly
in ways that I was skirting
around in the talk,
perhaps qi can open that door.
But thank you.
- [Woman] I wanted to ask
you whether you could say
a little bit more about
how similar or different
this cosmological notion of qi is
from the stoic notion of pneuma.
Because in Greek stoicism
there's this notion of pneuma,
which there are many aspects
of it which are very similar
and I'm sure Matteo Ricci must have known
of this notion of pneuma
so that when you introduce
a more scientific conception of air
how does that clash happen with
that same tradition that...
- Right, that's a extremely good question,
I've been asked it before,
and have probably failed
to adequately respond.
Because my knowledge of
pneuma is relatively limited.
I am thinking, so I
would think directly into
Ricci's writings and I don't
think off hand that he addresses pneuma.
Perhaps because it would
throw a wrench into the gears.
But perhaps I could ask you, pneuma,
is it associated also with
inorganic, non sentient,
non sentient beings?
- [Woman] No, technically not.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
- So this, I would suggest,
thanks for confirming that,
so then I can go on and say that this is
one of the main difference that qi,
while I think in our
contemporary perspective
we call it life force,
but from a Chinese cosmological
and even alchemical,
so one of the things that
I haven't talked about
is like Daoist alchemy.
Qi is in things.
Qi explains how things change.
And those things can be rocks,
they don't have to be sentient, so this,
this was I think one of the
major causes for concern
for Jesuits like Ricci,
who felt it would be
spiritualizing this podium.
- [Woman] Well it's just
that there is a diff, I mean,
a tradition that even runs through
say the German Enlightenment,
when Kant was dying,
the last things he wrote was on
what he called the ether proofs,
which is really also
about this kind of thing,
that's the medium between the human being
and the external world.
And so it seems to me that
there is another tradition
that you can construct so that
it's not just signs versus cosmology.
- Yes, I think that's very well taken,
and in my larger project I do consider
the nature philosophe,
the Romanticists that,
all of these work in,
actually Needham, of
course we have to summon
Joseph Needham, Needham
felt that these guys
were actually inspired by Daoism.
So it does form a very,
difficult matrix to pull apart,
but thank you for your comments.
- [Man] First of all, apologies for the,
the amount of topics
I'm about to touch on.
Comparing, I really liked
the comparison between the,
who was it that had the mask?
Stenhouse Respirator?
- Uh-huh, yeah.
- [Man] And this respirator
in that we're seeing
two similar dysfunctional ways
of addressing a problem.
And that that problem is, I mean,
if we look at it honestly
the problem is capitalism
mixed with industrialism
just carried forward.
And then what we have now is,
are two different ways of addressing that
in terms of politics.
We have this democratic
thing taking place in the US,
which isn't really working,
and the one that's taking place in China
is also not working.
And they're both operating still
with this industrial capitalist
model on the outside.
So that's the science side
in terms of the external.
And then on the internal I
really agree with what you were
saying in terms of qi,
in terms of emotion.
Because one of the goals
of a qigong practitioner
would then be to have a positive,
not just a positive outlook
like happy and go lucky,
but it was always important to them to
integrate somehow with society,
or with nature and
constantly have this balance
of tiandi ren on an individual level,
having that somehow integrate with either
a martial virtue with taijiquan or
with medicine in terms
of treating patients
or treating oneself, and the
relationship between those
and society gets fairly complex
when you have a society such as in China
where the most recent response to
lots of people practicing
qigong together with religion,
right, that went very poorly.
And then here we have
perhaps not enough of a unified sense
of either a religion or a common shared
understanding of life energy
on an individual level
that relates with other
individuals on a community
and then state-nation level
that one might find in China.
So you see how I'm making two
different connections there,
there's more there but
that's what I'm getting
from your talk, it's very interesting.
- Well I'm glad my talk
inspired some of those thoughts.
I think,
I tend to feel, as an
historian I tend to feel
more comfortable following
that thread to the past
in the hopes that will
give occasional epiphanies
of how we got here.
I think it may be the goal
of others such as yourself
and other scholars to move
that discussion forward.
But indeed the question
of there does community,
where does society come into this picture
I've left quite blank.
So I appreciate your comments.
- [Man] Yes, a wonderful talk and a
very inspiring discussion.
So I benefit a lot from both of them.
My question would be about the mapping
of the past and present,
private and public,
kind of the main threads
you organized the talk,
and that stimulates a lot
of discussion already.
I think I can
reorganize your thought
in such a way that you seemed to,
put the tradition of the qi
or medical tradition of qi
on the side of individual self-care.
And you follow the thread and
in today's situation seems,
it seems that people
retreat into that domain
when they try to use or
reactivate the discourse of qi
in dealing with the air pollution.
They also, under the
commercial manipulation,
they kind of retreat to
themselves to seek out a solution.
But I wonder how the
concern of your first book,
Hygienic Modernity can play,
can play into this situation because
that is about, really about,
the use of governmentality.
Is it the retreat of
the individual self-care
simply a protest or a
refreshing of failure
of the public domain and
the irresponsibility nature
of the current government
or is it that
this individualization of self-care
actually still comes hand in hand with
the larger scale of govermentality
in which the government does
do all kind of (mumbles),
quantification, public reminder,
and (mumbles) it's okay
with all kinds of commercial
exploitation of this kind of a desire
to keep oneself healthy.
And this is actually
happening on this very public
larger lesson of scale.
And I wonder,
with the notion of government
(mumbles) can help us
put the two things together
going beyond our simply
speaking or implying about
the failure of the government and
the public being manipulated
by the commercial vendors.
So that is my.
- You know, I might want to take this
in possibly a different direction.
I think the idea of
noting government, the
Foucauldian paradigm of governmentality
and how that would play into this,
particularly in the Chinese context
where the contemporary government
does raise high the banner of science,
and is doing what it ought to do
as a an enlightened modern government
that could take care of
things while people are
subsumed under this umbrella as
objects perhaps more than subjects.
Having already imbibed the discipline
of knowledge in the state.
I think that's,
it's very
intriguing, it's almost
I don't want to use the term
emasculation, but a kind of a
de-energizing of the potential
of non-government led
social change that could be
based on individual experiences
as I'm seeing it.
But I'm gonna leap for a second here
from what you mentioned.
I'm gonna go from Foucault to ju-shee,
and talk about li.
I'm really kind of out on a limb here.
Not having the neo, have been scrambling
for the past several years with
a neo-Confucian background,
but the idea of the li as the patterns
which for example Tang
Zonghai, he never talks,
Tang Zonghai, most medical
texts you're not going to see
discussion of li,
they're just a little too
practical for that, but
thank you for alerting me
to the fact that that's what is behind,
Tang Zonghai is a, he has gin-sure,
he's actually a government official.
So he's well imbued in
these ways of thinking.
You know, the question
of li always relates back
to the question of morality.
And the stance that not
only individuals in pursuit
of moral excellence, but
by extension a government,
would also, so I'm, I'm kind of going back
to more traditional ways of thinking
about the role of government.
So Wen-hsin asked me where's
the li in all of this.
And
I have to say, and it's
perhaps 'cause I'm looking
at these medical texts, I find it absent.
I do think that ling-holn is suggesting
a way that I can bring this
public sphere into the equation,
but I definitely have to
do that work, I think.
I'm not sure where I would,
I will not find it in medical texts,
which is where I've been
positioning my focus.
(muffled speaking)
Within the 20th century,
the first half of the 20th
century these musings.
I think...
A lot of food for thought
there but I appreciate this.
- [Woman] Yeah, just to
follow up on the sociality
of this question, because
at some point in your talk
you actually mentioned
it's very individual.
You know, your yangsheng, you
do these kind of things really
your own body, you also
mentioned this just now.
I'm just wondering, if
we give this qi business
a little bit more of a
dynamic conceptualization
because first of all qi
is also transferable.
And you see this healer,
this master healer of qigong
and this person can exercise in qi, right,
An entire room full of people
could be healed in just one,
you know, I heard about this,
you know I read about this
news, but we don't even know,
and but, you know, people do believe
that one person can
actually help in a group.
Or, you know, you can
transfer your qi to heal.
Or it's transformative
because the person with this,
you know, it's a moral, also
that has some more implication
because one person with
this zhengqi can actually
try to at least morally influence
those people with deviant
qi, right with the xieqi.
So there is that kind of connection
beyond this individualistic
conceptualization of this qi.
So I just wonder whether
that plays any role
in the understanding, you know,
of the cosmology of
our qi analysis.
- Yes, yes.
And I think one of the disjunctures
that you are noticing in this work,
I do turn toward the medical texts
because that's where I
feel more comfortable.
I think I've been trying to make this
a medical history project
and qi keeps flowing out
all over the place, just
going between my fingers
to different areas.
And obviously, I mean,
especially since I invoked
the whole thing with the qi,
with this image, the question
of qigong practitioners.
I think
you know, there's been
some research on this,
especially the 1980s as a
moment of qigong ru, right.
And the participation of scientists
and also the government and the state
in investigating these.
Sorry, that's the universal
symbol for, you know,
sending out your qi,
these kinds of phenomenon,
but as this gentleman suggested, you know,
once we get into the '90s in falun-gong,
we see that this doesn't work out so well.
It can be, obviously
anyone who knows anything
about the history of Daoism
knows that it certainly has been
in the past a basis for
revolution, well for rebellion.
Whether or not it can be
a basis for revolution,
there we go, is another question.
But thank you for invoking that.
- Any other questions?
- There's a guy in the back.
- [Man] Hi, thank you very
much for your talk again,
I learned a lot.
And it's really interesting for me as well
since I've studied atmospheric
chemistry as well here.
So it's really interesting for me as well.
One thing I'm very interested in is your,
how you, you know,
illustrated how Matteo Ricci
when he came, you know, he,
for lack of a more elegant way
to put it, sort of, you know,
hijacked the definition of qi for,
you know, for the purposes
of spreading Christianity
and other things as you talked about.
And I'm wondering now as
science has progressed,
you know like you said
in the 19th century texts
there was always a connection
between chemical concepts
to God, and as we've progressed
through the 20th century
and now the 21st century
and as the west in general
becomes a lot less religious
and science becomes
more and more secularized you know,
when we think of, when we
learn about gases or anything,
any chemical concepts, we
never associate them with God.
And so the definition of
chemical concepts is, you know,
progressed and has moved
on past that association
with the divine and more,
you know, more and more
to a more secular state.
And I'm wondering, you
know, this definition,
the definition of qi,
you know, as it has now
been associated with gas and
other physical observables that,
as opposed to a more
traditional Chinese definition,
are there any, you know,
how, are there any efforts
to decolonize this definition in any way,
and how is that progress.
Is that something that's
seen as a favorable end,
and I guess that's sort
of my question, thanks.
- I'm gonna get your name so
I can quote you on that term,
or that phrase, to
decolonize definitions of qi.
I think that's what I'm calling for.
I have to work harder to find it.
I know it's there, so here's the thing,
another problem with
sources, the internet.
I mean, you can maybe jump on free,
what is it, free cena, you know,
the posts that are put out there,
but then that get taken down?
There's a cache for those
posts so you can see what's,
what is censored.
And I have not yet embarked on the kind of
more field work and ethnography aspect.
As you can see it's
very heavily text based.
I suspect very strongly,
and I was hoping that there would be some,
some leaders of the movement here
at Berkeley in my audience today,
but I suspect very
strongly that there are,
there are such movements.
Thinking of the work of
Mei Zhan at UC Irvine,
who, so she's
looking at younger people
who are great enthusiasts for the I Ching,
for the Book of Changes, for example.
Of younger Chinese physicians
who are going old school,
right, that they're not taking,
they're not gonna take it anymore,
this way of teaching
traditional Chinese medicine
that insists there are these
one to one correspondences
with modern scientific terms.
So there is, yeah there
is such a movement.
I do think it tends to
be among certain younger
urban elites.
And it's out there on the internet
but I just haven't been able to reach it.
But thank you very much.
- So is there any question?
Well, okay thank you very much
Ruth for this wonderful talk.
And thank you Wen-hsin for the discussion,
and thank you for coming and
for your questions, thank you.
(percussive musical interlude)
