Over the decades, jurors at the impressive Crown Court in Winchester, Hampshire, have heard all sorts of extraordinary stories.
Few stories are as strange as the complicated tale of Hongchi Xiao, a Chinese-born banker turned “master” of alternative medicine who, by his own admission, learned a long-forgotten method of self-healing called paida lajin from kung fu masters and hermits and spread the message around the world, attracting millions of followers.
His disciples see him as a guru, a revolutionary; his critics believe him to be a dangerous fraud who reveled in the praise and power that paida lajin, “clapping therapy,” brought him.
Xiao was born in China, the son of a “Western doctor” and an electrical engineer. He studied finance in Beijing and the US, and worked in banking in New York and Hong Kong. He also claims to have helped design the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
At about the age of 40, he decided he wanted to do something more meaningful with his life than making money, and began a ‘quest’ to learn from masters of ancient Chinese medicine.
He says he traveled for up to seven years, learning techniques from kung fu masters, hermits, farmers and fishermen in what he calls the “distant” mountains of China, and encountered paida lajin, which he believes is a form of self-healing, a “precious gift” given to humans by God but abandoned in favor of modern “Western” medicine with its “toxic” side effects. “We are our own best doctor” is a basic tenet.
The technique, which he says can be mastered in just a few minutes, consists of two elements. Paid involves repeatedly striking parts of the body with hands or paddles to allow a ‘smooth flow of energy’ in the meridians (energy channels in the body), while Lajin is the stretching of the limbs and joints to promote energy flow.
Xiao claims that practicing paida lajin improves performance qi (vital life energy) and blood flow, thereby strengthening the self-healing capacity.
In 2010 he gave his first workshop in Beijing and promoted the technique on websites, FacebookYouTube videos and in booksHe established contacts with alternative healers and conventional churches of many denominations in Asia and later the world. His followers helped spread the word by posting testimonials explaining how paida lajin had helped their ailments, ranging from aches and pains to skin conditions and impotence.
Xiao began offering residential workshops in New York, California, and European cities, teaching paida lajin and engaging participants in fasting and “Zen jogging.” Skeptics suspect that big money was being made, but on the witness stand in Winchester he cut a modest figure, repeatedly insisting that he was not in it for worldly riches but to help people around the world heal themselves.
His claims about the technique became more dramatic. He said it could help cancer patients and was better than CPR for heart attacks. There were stories of people in wheelchairs suddenly walking, of athletes setting dramatic personal records. It was used on the elderly, babies, even pets.
In 2016, Xiao claimed that paida lajin had spread to more than 50 countries, with “tens of millions” of people practicing it. He said the technique’s “effective rate” was over 80%.
He was critical of the pharmaceutical industry, claiming that it was trying to suppress therapies like his because they were a threat to their businesses. He wrote: “Thankfully, this is the age of the Internet. What used to be easily ignored or denied by experts can now be verified by thousands and millions of people.”
Perhaps his most controversial claim was that paida lajin could help people with diabetes. In April 2015, a six-year-old boy with type 1 diabetes became fatally ill at one of his Sydney workshops after his parents stopped giving him insulin.
After that tragedy he was initially able to travel the world again, arriving in Wiltshire in October 2016 to lead a workshop co-organised by a leader of the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies.
There, 71-year-old British woman Danielle Carr-Gomm, who also had type 1 diabetes and had first met Xiao at a workshop in Bulgaria, died after stopping her insulin and fasting.
After Carr-Gomm’s death, Xiao was arrested. He was flown to Australia, convicted of the manslaughter of the six-year-old in Sydney in 2019, and jailed. The judge in Australia concluded that Xiao had told the boy’s mother to stop injecting him. He was then returned to the UK to stand trial for Carr-Gomm’s death.
He remains defiant, describing himself as a political prisoner and pointing out that Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have been behind bars. The problem, he argues, is that while paida lajin does work, it is “completely outside the imagination of the media and the pundits”.