Spend enough time in the world of martial arts and you’ll eventually come across a reference to something called “kong jing,” meaning “empty force,” or its common Western name, “non-contact knockouts.”
From time to time, people will appear who claim to be able to move or knock people out without touching them. They do this by using high-level qigong (chi gong) skills with which they can manipulate other people’s qi. Moving around and knocking other people out is for show or demo, but the point of this art is to be able to stop a hostile attacker without touching them, ideally while they’re still far away and can’t hurt you.
A simple search on YouTube will reveal many demonstrations of this “skill”.
Most of the demonstrations are pretty similar: the teacher does some exercises to charge his qi, and one or more of his students come over for the demonstration, and he uses his qi and intention to get his student moving, and often! Even knocking the student down a few feet!
One thing you will notice is that all of these demonstrations almost always take place with students from that particular school. In the rare cases where other people have been used, be they bystanders in the audience or challengers from another school, it tends not to work. Again, you can see most of this on YouTube, including a fairly well-known clip where a guy who knocks out without touching challenged an MMA fighter, and the MMA fighter pretty much beat him up because none of his kong techniques jing or empty force worked.
Ironically, it is It is possible to affect people without touching them, make them move, and even knock them out, but it has nothing to do with kong jing, qigong, or empty force, and everything to do with the power of suggestion. Mentalists and hypnotists can demonstrate the same ability without attributing it to “qi power”.
Some students may also be convinced that their instructor has mystical power. Sometimes you will see demonstrations where the teacher defends himself against multiple students at once using kong jing. For whatever reason, these students have been so convinced that their teacher can really do this thing that works for them. But it’s just the power of suggestion, or maybe mass hypnosis, and it has nothing to do with qigong.
Therefore, the only “real” non-contact knockouts are based on the belief of the students or audience members. In other words, it’s not going to work on an attacker who’s actually trying to hurt you and doesn’t care about your qigong powers, and because of that, it’s not really useful in any possible martial applications.
Not to mention that there are several people (for example, James Randi) who offer large sums of money (up to $1,000,000) to anyone who can do this in a controlled environment. It may not surprise you that no one has succeeded yet.