If you want a peek into the future of China through this book, you likely will be disappointed. China's future is barely discussed, and Ownby does not discuss much of the political, economic, or religious currents and undercurrents that will shape the country's future. However, if you are interested in an objective account and contextualized understanding of Falun Gong's rise and fall in China, this is by far the best scholarly book to read.

The rapid rise of the spiritual movement Falun Gong in the 1990s was unnoticed or neglected by most China observers and scholars until April 25, 1999, when some 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners suddenly gathered to surround the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing in a silent demonstration. What did they want? Why did they demonstrate in such a manner? Who are they who dared to challenge the Chinese authorities? By that time, a decade of political calm had followed the 1989 Tian'anmen Square incident, when the Chinese party-state crushed a student-led pro-democracy movement. If it was surprising to see the April 1999 demonstration by an enigmatic group, it was nothing but startling to watch the ferocious clampdown on Falun Gong by the Chinese authorities. Why did the Chinese party-state react so strongly to such a seemingly benign and peaceful spiritual movement? Utterly unprepared, many journalists and pundits scrambled to make sense of the apparent paranoia of the Chinese government and the unbelievable defiance of dogged practitioners carrying out demonstrations in Tian'anmen Square and other places both inside and outside of China. Struggles between the Chinese government and Falun Gong have continued, although western media fatigue has long since set in, and scholarly studies have lagged behind.

This meticulously researched book by an historian and Sinologist sheds much light on the rise and fall of Falun Gong in China. An expert on folk-religious and secret societies in imperial China, Ownby argues that Falun Gong is a new form of traditional religious society, akin to the numerous popular religious movements that sprang up immediately following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, even he found no lineage or organizational connections linking Falun Gong to past groups. Interestingly, Falun Gong leaders and practitioners continue to refuse the “religious” label. Following decades of elitist and secularist efforts to modernize China, Falun Gong has adopted modernist and postmodernist science discourses. The hybridism of certain Chinese mystical traditions and some postmodernist sentiment seems to have met the spiritual need of many people in post-Mao China, filling the spiritual vacuum created by the failure of the Maoist revolution and communist ideology.

Following a brief introduction, chapter two offers a modern history of Chinese popular religion, which the author calls “redemptive societies,” that serves as the historical context for the rise of Falun Gong. Chapter three traces the invention and evolution of qigong (a kind of physical and meditative exercise) before and after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which serves as the contemporary context for the launching of Falun Gong. This chapter also profiles a few qigong superstars and their brands of qigong in the 1980s and 1990s. In comparison to these stars, Li Hongzhi, who launched Falun Gong in 1992, was a late-comer to the qigong milieu. Chapter four constructs a sketchy, blurred biography of Li Hongzhi, and offers a careful reading of Li's teachings without defending or criticizing. Ownby only tries to capture Li's main ideas and understand their allure to Falun Gong followers. Chapter five presents the results of field-work on and survey data collected from Falun Gong followers in North America after the Chinese crackdown in 1999. Ownby finds that the vast majority of Falun Gong practitioners in North America are recent immigrants from China who are well educated and better off financially; only about 10 percent of the followers are Caucasian. According to Ownby, the attraction of Falun Gong includes the perceived charisma of the master, the grounding of the master's teachings in moral practice, and the value of corporal exercises for physical healing. Chapter six chronicles the conflict between the Chinese party-state and Falun Gong before and after 1999, including the continual struggles of Falun Gong activists in North America, Europe, and Australia.

Ownby explains and defends his detached, neutral position in the opening pages, and throughout the text. The arguments are very much nuanced, but at times the jargoned discussion seems to speak only to a small circle of Sinologists. An example is the label “redemptive societies,” which is used to describe Chinese religious groups of the early twentieth century and Falun Gong alike. However, as far as I know, this enigmatic label is “popular” only within a certain circle of Sinologists. Neither the religious groups themselves nor mainstream Chinese scholars have adopted it. As a matter of fact, the term is hardly translatable into Chinese or understandable in Chinese. Adopting such jargon helps little in theorizing and perhaps reinforces and exacerbates the stereotype of the inscrutable Chinese culture and society.