Expelling Xieqi , feeling “immune power”: qigong responses to COVID-19 in China and Japan

This article examines qigong practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how instructors in China and Japan devised new techniques and moved instruction into mediated formats. It argues that these responses did not merely adapt qigong to pandemic restrictions, but reconfigured COVID-19 as an object of bodily practice. In the Shanghai case, COVID-19 was reframed through shanghan, xieqi, and zhengqi; in the Japanese case, it was reimagined through kimochi-ii, “immune power,” and the body’s innate healing capacity. Drawing on the concept of affective technologies, the article shows how movements, explanations, sensory cues, imagination, and digital media made these reinterpretations bodily persuasive. The comparison contributes to debates on spiritual responses to COVID-19, digital mediation, and embodied healing.