Party-sanctioned newspapers began reporting additional stories about children with EHBF. Each case, readers learned, was being authenticated by local science commissions at an official Party Commune branch. From Beijing to Heilongjiang to Jiangsu province, stories of anomalous mental phenomena began to unfold like falling dominoes, featuring children who could read with their fingers, hands, and feet. By September, China’s top science periodical, Nature Journal (Ziran Zazhi), published a lengthy article based on the observations of one of its in-house science writers. In controlled environments, the abilities were authenticated and new forms of eyeless sight were confirmed by Party officials. Interest grew.
Four months later, in February 1980, scientists from more than twenty colleges and research institutes gathered in Shanghai to test the extraordinary children as part of the government-sanctioned conference titled “First Science Symposium of the Extraordinary Function of the Human Body.” Fourteen of the children were determined to possess EHBF, meaning that they displayed mental and physical powers that science could not explain. What was particularly interesting to CIA and DIA was how the Chinese framed their research. By calling the subject matter Extraordinary Human Body Function, the Chinese were assigning these remarkable powers to human biology. In the West, this notion fell under the rubric of human potential—the idea that untapped resources exist inside all people. This belief system had been growing in American counterculture since the early 1960s with programs like EST (Erhard Seminars Training) and had come to include countless other programs ranging from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to information-coded biofeedback. In Communist China, all science programs were de facto government research programs; there was no science separate from the state. Now, motivated in part by this perceived threat from the Chinese, the U.S. military’s interest in human potential as a means of gaining superiority over the enemy was stimulated. If China was advancing human potential, so must the United States.
“The discovery of this new power could shatter modern science,” said Dong Taihue of the Department of Optical Engineering at Zhejiang University. EHBF could pave the way for a revolution in scientific thought. “We are facing a challenge to orthodox scientific theories,” declared the professor. “Further research of this power could result in tremendous breakthroughs in physiology, physics and biological physics—a whole new branch of science could just be waiting to be discovered.”
As more than a dozen new research institutes were set up across China, research into anomalous mental phenomena in the People’s Republic was now an officially sanctioned, large-scale pursuit at the national laboratory level. EHBF was listed in the Chinese Encyclopedic Almanac, in the science and technology section. The craze gained further momentum as even more dramatic powers emerged, now including psychokinesis. A young girl could move an object across a desk using only her mind. Another could cause a flower bud inside a sealed jar to blossom in a matter of seconds. A boy could snap tree branches from a distance of several feet. Children with EHBF were tested in psychokinesis experiments. They could “turn the hands of watches, bend metal, break matches and cause spontaneous combustion of flammable materials at the wave of a hand,” wrote an analyst with DIA. When it was reported that several of the children were endowed with a mysterious seventh sense whereby they could see through lead containers, the Chinese air force became involved. Yu Ruihua, a young girl from rural Cangxian County, was tested by a special physics research team with the Institute of High-Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. The academicians reported that she was able to see through a lead container, the kind used by the military to store radioactive materials, and could read what was written on a sheet of paper inside.
Chinese air force scientist Luo Dongsu made a bold assertion: “Brain wave analysis of exceptional vision (eyeless sight) suggests that the children possessed a unique, still unknown radiation.” Their minds could produce “rays similar to microwaves,” he proposed, ones that were “a staggering ten million times stronger than the most powerful radar equipment in present use.” As had transpired in the Soviet Union and America, when Chinese scientists began looking for the source of the mystery force powering EHBF, they looked first at electromagnetic waves.
But Chinese scientists also had an alternative idea about what could account for this mysterious power. Intelligence analysts found their first clue in the words of the keynote speaker from the First Science Symposium in Beijing, a martial arts master named Qu Hanrog. The source of his power, he said, was qi, which translates as “vital energy” or “life force.” Qi was ancient, as old as the I Ching, or Book of Changes. For thousands of years the effects of qi had been studied, honed, and modified though an ancient martial arts practice called qigong, “mastery of vital energy.” Qu Hanrog told the members of the First Science Symposium that through qigong he had cured himself of paraplegia and could now walk again. Through qigong, Hanrog said, he developed EHBF, including ESP.
To understand qigong, the CIA examined its history. The practice had been in existence in China, in various forms, for thousands of years. In ancient texts, qigong masters were said to possess supernatural, warrior-monk powers including invisibility and invincibility. Stories of qigong masters appeared across the historical record up to modern times. In 1948, shortly before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, modern qigong was born. That year a small group of communists gathered in the mountains of Hebei province to perform breathing exercises under the direction of a qigong practitioner named Liu Guizhen. Their goal was to rid themselves of physical sickness and ill thoughts. When powerful Communist Party leaders learned of these gymnastic-like exercises and the health benefits they provided, they summoned Liu to their seaside enclave at Beidaihe to learn more. He explained that only two years previously he had been so riddled with sickness—including tuberculosis, gastric ulcers, and anxiety—he weighed less than eighty pounds and was on the brink of death. His doctor told him he had only a few months to live. So he took up qigong. Through a series of silent mantras and breathing exercises, and by focusing his mental awareness on his navel, his brain activity slowed and his inner organs regained strength. After 102 days of these exercises, Liu regained his health and returned to work. Communist Party officials saw promise in this remarkable story and asked Liu Guizhen to teach them how to master qigong. Decades of war had decimated the early-twentieth-century Chinese health system. By 1949, when the Communist Party took power, “it was faced with the pitiful state of the nation’s health system,” explains David A. Palmer, the West’s leading expert on qigong in China. “There were only 12,000 scientifically-trained doctors—one doctor for every 26,000 people—almost all of whom were concentrated in the cities.” Communist Party officials saw qigong as a potential solution to the nation’s health care crisis. Officials could use the benefits of ancient medicine in statecraft.
The leaders liked what they saw. Qigong was medicine for the masses. Through a series of simple gymnastics, breathing exercises, and mantras that required as little as thirty minutes a day, Party leaders found themselves cured of all kinds of personal ailments, including ulcers and insomnia. This idea of simple, nonscience-based medicine for the masses was in keeping with Marxist thought. Qigong could be performed anywhere, anytime, without medical equipment or drugs. What had been a long-standing, esoteric tradition passed down from master to student for millennia could now be propagated for the masses while being controlled by Communist Party directives.
A plan was put into action. With Liu Guizhen at the helm, the Party sought to remove all elements of superstition from the ancient practice to make it more Marxist and modern. For example, the ancient qigong exercise called the Claw of the Golden Dragon in Meditation was rewritten as “I practice sitting in meditation for better health.” Qigong clinics sanctioned by the Party open up across China, based in state-run institutions and hospitals. From 1954 to 1959 the movement expanded rapidly. Chairman Mao Zedong personally named Liu Guizhen an Advanc
ed Worker, an important title in Marxist nomenclature, and assigned him the role of qigong master to top Party officials. In 1957, Liu’s Qigong Therapy Practice was published and would sell more than two million copies.
By 1958, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party had decided to transform the nation from an economy based on agriculture to an industrialized socialist model by initiating an engineering program called the Great Leap Forward. In an attempt to show that manpower, not machines, could foster industrialization, Mao announced a plan to increase steel production by 100 percent in one year. All across China, farmers, professors, factory workers, and just about everyone else was ordered to stop doing what they were doing and start forging steel in makeshift backyard furnaces. This was an impossible order, and where iron ore was unavailable, people melted down any objects they could get their hands on, including pots and bicycles. This effort failed, and China began its descent into what would be one of the worst recorded famines in history.
As people starved, and died, qigong rose in Party favor. Communist officials stated that qigong was the ideal Chinese medicine for the proletariat, as opposed to Western-style medical science that catered to the bourgeoisie. Qigong became an integral part of the nation’s health policy and expanded exponentially. At the Great Leap Forward for the Cause of Health conference in Beijing in 1959, China’s health minister singled out qigong for praise, citing its contributions to disease prevention. By 1960, a national qigong training course was organized. By the following year there were eighty-six qigong facilities in Shanghai alone.
By 1962, after the Great Leap Forward had proved to be disastrous and had been repealed, qigong began to be demonized. A new mantra was put in place. It was “unbecoming” for a Party official to promote qigong, communist officials said. Afraid of persecution, citizens stopped practicing it. In 1964 a Party edict called qigong “a rotten relic of feudalism” and “the rubbish of history.” In 1965 the Party’s New Physical Education magazine declared qigong quackery and a “poisonous weed.” The nation’s leading qigong master, Liu Guizhen, was labeled a class enemy and singled out for attack. He was fired from his hospital position, expelled from the Party, and sent to a reeducation camp at the notorious Shanhaiguan farm. His new job was cleaning the city’s public toilets.
In May of 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, unleashing a new form of terror on China’s citizenry. Weakened by the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward and in an effort to regain power, Mao called upon the youth of the nation to revive the revolutionary spirit by purging “impure” elements of Chinese society. Schools were shut down, and student paramilitary groups known as the Red Guards were created to harass the elderly and intellectuals. Gangs of children roamed the streets in search of enemy offenders. Placards were placed around offenders’ necks, dunce caps put on their heads, and people were paraded into public squares to be humiliated and beaten. Red Guards destroyed libraries and museums. Communist leaders who challenged Mao were removed from power and imprisoned. Items associated with wealth—high-heeled shoes, furs, silk gowns—were confiscated and burned in bonfires in the streets. Hospitals and courts closed down. Chaos ensued, and the economy plummeted. By 1969 the country was in shambles. The Red Guards fought among themselves and executions became widespread. It was entropy manifest. Raw struggle.
What puzzled analysts at CIA was that the years from 1962 to 1978 were a dead zone for qigong in China. Not a word about qigong appeared in print. Then came the single article about Tang Yu, in 1979. It appeared as if emerging out of a vacuum. That the article triggered such intense interest across China was remarkable in the eyes of CIA and DIA. There had to be something else going on, someone responsible for the sudden adulation of a practice that had been forbidden for fifteen years. When CIA analysts dug deep, what they discovered was astonishing. The man at the center of it all—from qigong to the concept of Extraordinary Human Body Function—was Qian Xuesen, formerly one of the most valuable members of the U.S. military science intelligentsia, now a sworn enemy of the United States.
Qian Xuesen (pronounced Chen Who-sen), or H. S. Tsien as he was known in America, was an American rocket pioneer. Born in China in 1911, he left for the United States in 1935, age twenty-four, on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship. He first attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied electrical engineering, then transferred to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to study under Theodore von Kármán, the world-famous aerospace engineer. Starting in the late 1930s Tsien worked on early American rocket designs and in 1938 cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, America’s first experimental rocket laboratory. So brilliant was Tsien that von Kármán declared him an “undisputed genius.”
During World War II, Tsien was granted the U.S.’s highest security clearance in order to work on the Manhattan Project, where he helped build the world’s first atomic bomb. Commissioned as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force, he applied to become an American citizen, but his paperwork languished during the war. After the Nazis surrendered, Tsien traveled to occupied Germany, where he interrogated Wernher von Braun, the world’s first famous rocket scientist. In 1949, still waiting for his U.S. citizenship to be granted, Tsien was made the first director of what was officially called the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech, which today is NASA’s leading center for robotic exploration of the solar system. Then, on October 1, 1949, owing to faraway events entirely beyond his control, H. S. Tsien’s life changed course forever.
When Mao Zedong officially proclaimed the existence of the People’s Republic of China in the fall of 1949, China and the United States became enemies. The loss of China to communism was a severe blow to America, and H. S. Tsien’s life would never be the same. Eight months later, on June 6, 1950, the FBI knocked on his door. It was the McCarthy era, and he was still a Chinese national, since his U.S. citizenship had not yet been granted. The Bureau’s representatives demanded that he answer questions about possible communist ties. Tsien was insulted: how could these FBI bureaucrats not realize who he was in the context of U.S. national security and the kind of security clearances he held? The FBI’s response was to revoke his coveted clearances and place him under house arrest. After five humiliating years of quasi detention, Tsien was returned to China as part of a Korean prisoner-of-war exchange. He spent the rest of his life avenging his treatment by the United States.
The story of H. S. Tsien exemplifies the curious flexibility of personal conviction. Tsien was betrayed by the United States, the country whose ideals he believed in and which he’d served during the war. America was the land he called home. And yet by the time he arrived in China, in October 1955, his belief system and his loyalties had been transposed 180 degrees, as though flipped by a switch. He remained a committed communist for the rest of his life and would earn the rare distinction of becoming a science adviser to Chairman Mao.
Science was to be H. S. Tsien’s weapon of revenge against the United States. Almost single-handedly he revolutionized China’s technological capabilities from bare bones to cutting-edge. He created and developed the Chinese rocket program, its satellite program, and its manned space program. His work on China’s atomic bomb project allowed that nation to produce nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Further, he was deeply committed to the science behind anomalous mental phenomena, including extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and teleportation. His story has been remarkably underreported to date.
When Tsien returned to China in October 1955, China’s industrial development was primitive, with barely the technology to build a decent automobile. The most common forms of travel were bicycle and rickshaw. And so, even before Tsien arrived in Beijing, he’d been cast as a hero. His return, brokered between Communist Party officials and the U.S. State Department, was seen as a victory for the Chinese. In Beijing, the scientific elite was in awe of him, and it was firmly believed that Tsien would pull China from the technological dark ages into the mo
dern world. Lavish banquets commemorating his homecoming were thrown at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing University. Within a few months of his arrival, the government created the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing and installed him as director. At the time there was but one telephone. Technicians used hand-crank calculators. But Tsien was off and running, deeply invested in continuing his lifework, only now in service of Communist China.
In Tsien’s first year back in China, as part of the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao instituted an unusual policy called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” Intellectuals were encouraged to criticize the Communist Party, to “say whatever they want and say it in full,” according to a statement by the Chairman. The policy actually was a plot to root out dissent, and as a result hundreds of thousands of critics were punished, tortured, or killed. Having witnessed McCarthyism, Tsien kept his head down, remained silent, and did not make waves. He traded in his Western clothes for the standard gray uniform of the Party. He denounced colleagues and promoted Communist Party doctrine.
There were benefits for steadfast loyalty, and Tsien earned such rewards. He was moved into a guarded compound in the Haidian District of Beijing and promoted to director of the Fifth Academy, where he led China’s top-secret missile program. On November 5, 1960, the Chinese version of the Soviet R-2 rocket was launched, and a huge celebration was given in his honor. It was a turning point in China’s history: a modern rocket had flown. Tsien was now put in charge of the Party’s ambitious plan to build China’s first generation of land-based ballistic missiles, the Dongfeng (East Wind). He developed China’s satellite program, consulted on China’s first nuclear program, and in February 1964 became Chairman Mao’s private science tutor. On October 27, 1966, China became the first nation to deploy a missile with a live atomic warhead in its nose cone, an act internationally condemned as reckless. “The man believed responsible for the first test of its kind was trained, nurtured, encouraged, lionized, paid, and trusted for fifteen years in the United States,” noted a New York Times reporter.