Extraordinary Powers Craze

The Extraordinary Powers Craze was a period of intense state-sponsored and public interest in claimed paranormal abilities in the People's Republic of China, lasting from approximately 1979 to the late 1980s. It was characterized by widespread popular reports of "gifted" children and adults demonstrating Extraordinary Human Body Function (EHBF) - a government-sanctioned term covering clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, and related claimed abilities - and by substantial investment in EHBF research by academic institutions, military agencies, and the Chinese government. The craze ended when fraud among high-profile practitioners became undeniable and official support was withdrawn.¹

Origins

The craze was ignited by a 1979 newspaper article in a Sichuan publication reporting that a twelve-year-old boy, Tang Yu, could read written characters by holding folded paper against his ear. The story was picked up by national media, generating both enthusiasm from believers and demands from skeptics for controlled scientific testing. Within months, similar claims about other children emerged from across China. Parents brought children forward for testing, and popular culture became intensely focused on the question of whether these abilities were genuine.

The critical institutional development was the public endorsement of Qian Xuesen (H.S. Tsien), China's premier scientist and the director of its missile and space programs. Qian argued in articles and public statements that Extraordinary Human Body Function deserved rigorous scientific investigation rather than dismissal, framing it within socialist materialism as a natural phenomenon that existing science could not yet explain. Qian's authority in Chinese scientific and political life was such that his endorsement transformed EHBF from a popular curiosity into a subject of state-sponsored research.¹

Research Programs

At its peak, the Extraordinary Powers Craze involved dozens of research institutes. The Beijing Institute of Space Medico-Engineering, the Chinese National Defense Science and Technology Commission, Peking University, and multiple military hospitals and research centers established EHBF programs. Researchers developed standardized testing protocols for claimed EHBF abilities, particularly focused on:

Ear reading and body reading: the claimed ability to perceive written or visual information by means other than the eyes, including through the ears, feet, or armpit.

Remote viewing equivalents: tests in which subjects attempted to describe distant locations or objects inaccessible to normal perception, directly analogous to the American SRI remote viewing protocol.

Psychokinesis: the claimed ability to move objects, affect sealed containers, or alter physical processes through mental influence alone.

The most extensively tested subject was Zhang Baosheng, whose demonstrations involved the apparent teleportation of small objects - pills, paper notes, insects - into and out of sealed glass vials and other containers. These experiments were conducted at military research facilities in Beijing from 1982 onward, supervised by researchers who attempted to rule out sleight-of-hand. Zhang became the most prominent EHBF practitioner associated with military research interest, and claimed results from his sessions were among the most significant findings that Chinese researchers reported to government officials.¹

Qigong Connection

Qigong practice became intertwined with the Extraordinary Powers Craze on the theory that cultivation of "qi" - the vital energy concept central to traditional Chinese medicine and meditative practice - provided the mechanism underlying EHBF demonstrations. Research programs examined whether trained qigong practitioners showed EHBF abilities more consistently than untrained subjects. The association between qigong and EHBF helped integrate the craze into existing Chinese cultural frameworks for unusual human capabilities, lending it additional institutional legitimacy.²

The qigong dimension also contributed to the craze's eventual collapse: as qigong masters made increasingly extravagant claims about healing and extraordinary powers, the commercial exploitation of claimed abilities became widespread and fraudulent practices accumulated.

American Intelligence Assessment

The American intelligence community's discovery of the scale of Chinese EHBF research was documented in Hal Puthoff's 1982 classified report, "Psychoenergetics Research in the People's Republic of China," prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Psychoenergetics program. The report confirmed that China had a state-funded, military-adjacent EHBF program of significant scale, directly comparable in organizational structure to the Soviet Psychoenergetics programs that had initially motivated American investment in remote viewing research. Defense Intelligence Agency officials, including Jack Vorona, cited the Chinese program as competitive justification for continued American investment.³

Collapse

The craze declined substantially after the mid-1980s and effectively ended by 1989-1990. Multiple high-profile EHBF practitioners were exposed as fraudulent in controlled tests; prominent figures were caught cheating during public demonstrations. The institutional investment had been sustained by Qian Xuesen's personal authority rather than reproducible results, and as the fraud cases accumulated, the research lost its political protection. The Communist Party withdrew official sanction for EHBF research programs, and the craze that had occupied significant state resources and public attention for a decade effectively ended.