Extraordinary Human Body Function

Extraordinary Human Body Function (EHBF; Chinese: 人体特异功能, renti teyi gongneng - "special function of the human body") was the official Chinese government designation for a range of claimed paranormal abilities, including clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis, investigated by state-funded research programs beginning in 1979. The term was a deliberate reframing of what Western researchers called parapsychology: by describing the phenomena as functions of the human body rather than as supernatural or spiritual events, Chinese researchers placed them within the framework of materialist science acceptable under Marxist-Leninist ideology. The EHBF research programs were given state legitimacy primarily through the public endorsement of Qian Xuesen (H.S. Tsien), China's most prominent scientist and the director of its missile and space programs, who argued that EHBF represented a potential scientific revolution deserving serious investigation.¹

Origins: The Tang Yu Incident

In early 1979, a newspaper article published in Sichuan reported that a twelve-year-old boy named Tang Yu could read characters printed on folded pieces of paper by holding the paper against his ear. The story spread nationally and generated an immediate public controversy - skeptics demanded scientific examination, while believers reported similar abilities in children across the country. The phenomenon became known in China as "reading with the ears" and was among the first demonstrations around which the Extraordinary Powers Craze organized.¹

The Chinese Academy of Sciences and other scientific bodies initially treated the claims skeptically. The decisive shift came when Qian Xuesen publicly endorsed scientific investigation of EHBF, arguing that dismissing the claims without investigation was unscientific and that the phenomena, if real, would have profound implications for materialism's understanding of human biological capability. His endorsement gave the research legitimacy that no other living Chinese scientist could have conferred.²

Extraordinary Powers Craze

The Extraordinary Powers Craze of 1979-1985 produced hundreds of reported "gifted children" and adults across China, widespread public demonstrations of claimed EHBF, and significant military and academic research investment. Academic institutions including Peking University and multiple military research institutes established EHBF programs. Practitioners of qigong - traditional Chinese meditative and physical cultivation practices - were examined for correlations between qigong practice and EHBF demonstration, on the theory that qigong trained practitioners in the control of biological "qi" energy potentially underlying EHBF phenomena.¹

The most extensively tested EHBF subject was Zhang Baosheng, a young man from Liaoning province who was brought to Beijing in 1982 for examination at military facilities. Zhang's demonstrations involved the claimed teleportation of small objects - pills, insects, paper notes - into and out of sealed containers. Experiments at the Beijing Institute of Space Medico-Engineering, conducted under controlled conditions intended to prevent sleight-of-hand, reportedly produced results that investigators could not explain by conventional means. Zhang subsequently became associated with military and intelligence research programs, and claimed results from these experiments were among the most operationally significant findings cited by Chinese EHBF researchers.¹

DIA Assessment and Competitive Significance

The American intelligence community's awareness of the Chinese EHBF programs was substantially shaped by Hal Puthoff's 1982 classified report for the Defense Intelligence Agency, formally titled "Psychoenergetics Research in the People's Republic of China." Puthoff, operating as the director of the SRI remote viewing research program and a contractor to the DIA's Psychoenergetics program, compiled an assessment of the Chinese programs from open-source Chinese publications, intelligence assessments, and scientific exchange contacts. The report documented the scale of Chinese EHBF research, identified H.S. Tsien's role as the program's intellectual patron, and described specific experiments - including the Zhang Baosheng teleportation tests - that had attracted military research interest. The report concluded that China had an active, state-funded, military-adjacent program investigating EHBF for potential strategic applications.²

Jack Vorona, the Assistant Director for Scientific and Technical Intelligence at DIA who ran the Psychoenergetics program, received the Puthoff report and used it in DIA's internal justification for continued American research investment. The competitive framing - that if China was investing in EHBF at scale, the United States needed a comparable program regardless of whether the phenomena were real - was the same logic that had justified the Soviet psychoenergetics assessment. DIA officials cited both the Soviet and Chinese programs when defending Psychoenergetics funding through the successive program designations that eventually became STAR GATE.²

Decline

Chinese government support for EHBF research declined in the late 1980s and effectively ended in the early 1990s. The craze produced significant fraud: prominent EHBF practitioners were caught cheating in controlled tests, and several high-profile public demonstrations proved to be staged. The institutional investment in EHBF research had been predicated substantially on Qian Xuesen's personal authority rather than on reproducible experimental results, and as the fraud cases accumulated, the research lost its political protection. The Extraordinary Powers Craze formally ended when the Chinese government ceased official sanction for public EHBF demonstrations and discouraged the institutional research programs.¹