Life
Liu Guizhen learned breathing and meditation practices locally, used them on his own illness, and in the early 1950s developed a therapeutic programme from them which he taught at a sanatorium in Tangshan, in Hebei. The state approved; clinics opened; a textbook followed. The name the programme travelled under was qigong.
The relabelling was the achievement. Practices arriving wrapped in Taoist and Buddhist language had no future in a state clinic in the new republic; the same practices described as breath therapy had one. What he did was separate technique from cosmology, submit it to clinical framing, and make it Chinese rather than religious — one of the most successful rebrandings in the history of any traditional practice.
Mo Pai keeps the older word, nei kung, and the difference is not pedantry: qigong as constructed promises health and implies that nothing dramatic will happen, which is precisely the promise Mo Pai does not make. See how "qigong" was invented.
