On March 11, 1979, a small provincial newspaper called the Sichuan Daily ran a story that would eventually catch the attention of intelligence agencies on the other side of the planet. The report described a twelve-year-old boy named Tang Yu, living in the remote mountain village of Dazu County, who could apparently read written characters with his ears. Not with his eyes. With his ears.
The story sounds almost quaint now, buried in the pages of a regional Chinese paper during a time when the country was still shaking off the dust of the Cultural Revolution. But within months, Tang Yu’s alleged abilities had become a national sensation. More children with similar talents were discovered across the People’s Republic. By early 1980, the phenomenon had reached the pages of China’s prestigious Nature Journal. And by February of that year, the journal sponsored a massive gathering – the First Science Symposium on the Extraordinary Function of the Human Body – drawing participants from more than twenty colleges and research centers.
What followed was one of the strangest, most ambitious, and least discussed government-funded research programs of the twentieth century. And the CIA was watching.
A Nation Hungry for Wonder
To understand why “ear reading” became a national obsession, you have to understand what China looked like in 1979. The Cultural Revolution had ended only three years earlier. Traditional practices – qigong, traditional Chinese medicine, Daoist cultivation methods – had been suppressed, ridiculed, and in some cases violently stamped out for over a decade. Intellectuals had been sent to labor camps. Universities had been shuttered or repurposed.
When the doors finally opened again, there was an almost desperate hunger for meaning, for connection to something deeper than political ideology. Reports of extraordinary human functions – healing abilities, psychic perception, unusual sensory capacities – spread through the population like wildfire. The timing was perfect. People wanted to believe that human potential extended beyond what the materialist worldview of the previous decade had allowed.
Tang Yu’s story was the spark. But the fire had been building for years.
The Boy Who Started It All
The original account, as preserved in declassified CIA documents, reads almost like folklore. Eleven-year-old Tang Yu and his friend Chen Xiaoming were walking home from school when they began play-wrestling. Tang brushed against Chen’s coat pocket and suddenly had a vivid vision of two Chinese characters. He described them aloud. Chen pulled a package of Flying Wild Goose cigarettes from his pocket. The label matched exactly.
Word spread. Within weeks, more than ten other children in the region were discovered to possess similar abilities. They could, researchers claimed, decipher hidden messages not just with their ears but with their fingers, palms, scalps, abdomens, feet, armpits, and even their buttocks. One nine-year-old girl reportedly read messages by touching crumpled paper with the tip of her nose.
Skeptics existed, of course. But the sheer volume of reports, combined with the political climate of openness, meant that dismissing the phenomenon outright was not an option anyone in power wanted to take.
Enter Qian Xuesen
The man who transformed this regional curiosity into a national scientific program was Qian Xuesen – known in the West as Tsien Hsue-shen. If that name rings a bell, it should. Qian was one of the most brilliant aerospace engineers of the twentieth century. He had studied at MIT and Caltech, worked on the Manhattan Project, and co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before returning to China in 1955 under controversial circumstances.
Back in China, Qian became the father of the nation’s missile and space program. China successfully launched twelve satellites and developed an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 10,000 kilometers under his guidance. He was, by any measure, one of the most important scientists in Chinese history.
And he took the psychic children seriously.
Qian’s endorsement gave the research an enormous boost in credibility. When a man who had helped build your nuclear deterrent says that children reading with their ears deserves rigorous investigation, people listen. By 1980, Qian had helped establish formal research groups at the Beijing Teacher Training Institute and other major academic centers. The phenomenon was no longer a folk tale. It was science – or at least, it was being treated as such.
The Three Phases of Chinese Psychic Research
The declassified CIA documents, along with academic papers that eventually made their way into Western parapsychology journals, reveal a program that evolved through distinct phases.
The first phase, from roughly 1979 to 1982, was dominated by children. Hundreds of young people with claimed extraordinary functions of the human body (or EFHB, as the CIA likes their acronyms) were identified throughout the nation. Research groups formed in almost every major city. Studies were conducted in elementary and secondary schools. The Shanghai Science and Education Studio even produced a documentary called “Do You Believe It?” that aired on national television.
The second phase saw a shift from children to adult practitioners, particularly those involved in qigong. This was a natural evolution. Qigong – the ancient Chinese practice of cultivating and directing internal energy – had long been associated with extraordinary abilities in Chinese tradition. If children could spontaneously exhibit these functions, what might trained adults achieve? The research expanded to include psychokinesis, remote healing, and other phenomena that blurred the line between parapsychology and traditional Chinese medicine.
The third phase, beginning in the mid-1980s, moved toward practical and defense applications. The Chinese government, like its American and Soviet counterparts, was interested in whether psychic abilities could be harnessed for intelligence gathering, remote viewing, or other strategic purposes. The research became more secretive, more applied, and more politically sensitive.
The Great Debate
Not everyone in China’s scientific establishment was on board. The program generated fierce controversy that reached the highest levels of government.
On one side stood Qian Xuesen, the physicist who championed EFHB research as a legitimate frontier of science. On the other stood a vice-chairman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who viewed the entire enterprise as pseudoscience embarrassing to the nation’s scientific reputation.
The debate was not merely academic. It touched on fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the limits of materialist science, and the relationship between ancient Chinese wisdom traditions and modern empirical methodology. Could qigong masters really emit measurable external qi? Could children genuinely perceive information through channels other than their normal senses? Or was China’s scientific community chasing phantoms while the rest of the world laughed?
In May 1987, after years of political maneuvering, the Chinese Human-Body Science Association was officially approved – a significant victory for proponents. The organization, later renamed the Chinese Somatic Science Association, gave institutional legitimacy to research that many Western scientists would have dismissed outright.
The CIA Connection
Here is where the story takes a turn that sounds like it belongs in a spy novel.
The CIA was not merely aware of China’s psychic research program. They were actively documenting it. Multiple declassified reports in the CIA Reading Room detail the progress of Chinese EFHB research, the political dynamics surrounding it, and the potential implications for American intelligence.
This should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of Cold War parapsychology. The United States had its own extensive psychic research programs – Project SCANATE, the Stargate Project, various programs at the Stanford Research Institute. The Soviet Union conducted similar research. When China joined the club, it was only natural for American intelligence to pay close attention.
What makes the Chinese program distinctive is its explicit connection to traditional practices. American remote viewing programs drew on Western scientific frameworks – statistics, controlled experiments, double-blind protocols. Chinese researchers, while also employing scientific methodology, grounded their work in a cultural tradition that had been exploring consciousness and extraordinary human capacities for thousands of years. Qigong, Daoist inner alchemy, traditional Chinese medicine – these were not fringe pursuits in Chinese culture. They were their heritage.
What the Research Actually Found
The results, as reported in both Chinese and Western publications, were mixed – which is exactly what you would expect from research into phenomena that challenge fundamental assumptions about how reality works.
Some experiments produced striking positive results. Children who could reliably identify hidden characters under controlled conditions. Qigong practitioners who appeared to influence physical systems at a distance. Cases of remote perception that defied conventional explanation.
Other experiments failed to replicate. Critics pointed to methodological flaws, inadequate controls, and the ever-present possibility of fraud or wishful thinking. The debate within China mirrored the debate within Western parapsychology – a field that has produced statistically significant results for over a century while never quite achieving the level of proof that would silence skeptics entirely.
What the research did establish, beyond reasonable doubt, was that something worth investigating was happening. Whether that “something” represented genuine psychic phenomena, undiscovered physical mechanisms, or something else entirely remained – and remains – an open question.
The Deeper Pattern
Step back from the specifics of Tang Yu and his contemporaries, and a larger pattern emerges. During the Cold War era, three of the world’s most powerful nations – the United States, the Soviet Union, and China – independently launched serious, government-funded research programs into psychic phenomena. These were not the hobbies of eccentric billionaires or the obsessions of new-age cults. They were state-sponsored scientific enterprises backed by significant resources and political will.
Why? Because the evidence, however imperfect, kept pointing in the same direction: human consciousness appears to have capacities that materialist science cannot easily explain. Perception without sensory input. Influence without physical contact. Information transfer across distance without any known mechanism.
The perennial traditions – from Daoist cultivation to Vedantic self-inquiry to the mystical core of every major religion – have always maintained that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is instead fundamental to reality itself. The brain, in this view, is a receiver, a filter, a transducer – not the source of awareness but a tool through which awareness operates within the physical domain.
China’s psychic children research, whatever its flaws, was an attempt to take this ancient understanding seriously within a modern scientific framework. The children may have been the catalyst. But the real question was always bigger: What is consciousness, and what can it do?
The Legacy That Disappeared
By the early 1990s, China’s psychic research program had largely faded from public view. The qigong boom that had sustained public interest throughout the 1980s gave way to skepticism and political caution. The Falun Gong controversy in the late 1990s made any association with qigong-related phenomena politically toxic. Research continued in some quarters, but the golden age of government-sponsored EFHB investigation was over.
The declassified CIA documents sit in the Reading Room now, available to anyone with an internet connection. They read like dispatches from a parallel timeline – one where governments took the expansion of human consciousness seriously enough to fund research, hold symposia, and send reports up the chain of command.
Most people have never heard of Tang Yu or the Extraordinary Human Functions program. The story does not fit neatly into any mainstream narrative. It is too strange for the skeptics, too governmental for the spiritual community, and too Chinese for Western audiences accustomed to thinking of psychic research as an American or European pursuit.
But the documents are there. The experiments were conducted. The questions were asked.
What This Means for You
Reading about government psychic research programs can feel distant – historical curiosities from a different era and a different culture. But the underlying questions are personal and immediate.
What if consciousness really is more than what the brain produces? What if the boundaries of perception are wider than you have been taught? What if the ancient traditions that speak of latent human capacities were pointing at something real?
You do not need to be a twelve-year-old in rural China or a trained qigong master to explore these questions. The exploration begins with simple, direct practices. Sit quietly and notice the quality of your awareness – not what you are thinking about, but the fact that you are aware at all. Pay attention to those moments of intuition that arrive without logical explanation. Notice how your inner state – your assumptions, your emotional tone, your sustained feeling of being – shapes what you experience in the world around you.
The Chinese government spent a decade investigating extraordinary human functions. The CIA documented it. Three world powers poured resources into understanding consciousness during the Cold War.
Maybe they were onto something.
What would happen if you took your own inner life – your awareness, your assumptions, your felt sense of reality – as seriously as those governments took the psychic children of Dazu County?
