# Circulating Qi: "Vital Energy" in China and the United States, 1900 to the Present

> **NIH NIH G13** · VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $43,760

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMARY
I am writing a book that traces global circulations of qi over the past one hundred years and
explores how this globalized qi manifests in contemporary clinical encounters.
My research follows local reworkings of qi as it traveled with Chinese medicine around the
world in the twentieth century, from the doctor’s offices of modernizing cities in turn-of-the-
century China, through the laboratories of Japanese, Korean, and French researchers, to the
expressions of California New Age gurus, and finally to chronic pain and detox clinics
positioned in the American heartland today. While these circulations are global, multi-
directional, and multi-sited, my two main points of interest are the People’s Republic of China
and the United States. As a scholar of Chinese medical history who has lived and worked in
China on and off since the mid-1980s, I want to understand how qi has changed in China as the
result of debates that have often been arranged around the fraught poles of modern science and
ancient heritage. At the same time, as an American raised in Woodstock, New York who has
lived for fifteen years in Nashville, Tennessee, I strongly sense that qi has become a part of
American culture. This project seeks to trace how this adaptation happened and what it means.
Several excellent studies have explored the global circulations and transformations of Chinese
medicine. By using qi as a focus, my project offers a compelling way to 1) connect historical
processes with contemporary issues; 2) encompass TCM’s meaning through theoretical debates,
laboratory experiments, and clinical encounters; and 3) examine how Chinese medicine is
experienced by diverse local communities.
The resulting monograph, which I will write to be accessible to both academic and non-
academic audiences, will illuminate how a transformed ancient concept remains available for
patients and practitioners to make sense of their everyday human experiences of suffering and
healing. Through historically grounded explorations, the project highlights the tensions non-
biomedical modalities face in a biomedically defined world. My study hopes to reveal how a
globalized qi, far from being a mere “putative” energy on the fringes of an instrument-defined
reality, may instead offer a vehicle through which patients and practitioners forge connections
to the world, to their own bodies, and to each other.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10115264
- **Project number:** 1G13LM013557-01
- **Recipient organization:** VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Ruth rogaski
- **Activity code:** G13 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $43,760
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-01 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10115264

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10115264, Circulating Qi: "Vital Energy" in China and the United States, 1900 to the Present (1G13LM013557-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10115264. Licensed CC0.

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