A Church That Would Not Die

China's Christians re-emerge as Peking changes policy

In 1966 Red Guards burned Bibles in the streets of Shanghai for several afternoons. When boredom set in, the surviving stock was sent off to a pulping plant. In Xiamen (Amoy), a similar burning took place but with a sinister twist: Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. workers were forced to kneel by the books until their cheeks and hands blistered from the fire. All over China, church buildings were pillaged, closed down or turned into warehouses. Chinese Christians were often tortured or killed if they did not repudiate their beliefs. At the height of the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution, the last eight Western Christian workers in China, Roman Catholic nuns from a school for diplomats' children in Peking, were hounded across the border into Hong Kong by jeering Red Guards. Their crude expulsion seemed to symbolize Communist China's last judgment on four centuries of Western missionary endeavor.

That was 13 years ago. Since then, the death of Mao Tse-tung and a political convulsion have brought to power a more outward looking regime led by Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping. Last week China seemed intent on showing the rest of the world a newer, more tolerant face toward Christianity--and other religions as well. As official Chinese delegates to the Third Assembly of the World Conference on Religion and Peace in Princeton, N.J., eight Chinese religious leaders arrived in the U.S. for the ten-day meeting. The group included Buddhists, Muslims and Christians, among them Anglican Bishop Ding Guangxun (K.H. Ting), 64, who 13 years ago was removed from his house and lost his job as president of Nanjing Theological Seminary after the place was abruptly shut down. It was only the second time in three decades that any Chinese Christian leaders had been permitted to visit the U.S.

Bishop Ding's arrival was the latest in a series of moves by Chinese authorities to extend the hand of recognition to China's Christians and other religious believers. In January the Religious Affairs Bureau, dormant for years, was revived in Peking, along with units in Shanghai and Canton. In February a national-level conference in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, established an eight-year plan for government-sponsored academic research on religion. Shanghai's Catholic Bishop Gong Binmei (Kung Pin-mei), 77, and Protestant Evangelist Wang Mingdao (Wang Ming-tao), 79, both imprisoned for over 20 years, have reportedly been released. The People's Daily declared that China's government would "staunchly and consistently" uphold article 46 of China's 1978 constitution. Article 46 guarantees that the people have "freedom to believe in religion and freedom not to believe in religion."

Characteristically, the article takes back with the left hand what it gave with the right. A further clause guarantees freedom "to propagate atheism." Despite the new "soft line," Peking has never abandoned its Marxist hostility to all religion. It believes that, after suitable "atheistic education," the Chinese will "throw off the various kinds of spiritual shackles." The new thaw is essentially an expression of a "united front" policy toward China's primary problem: modernization. The government is determined to attract wide support both at home and abroad for its ambitious new economic and social goals.

There has also been an implicit recognition of a perplexing reality. The harsh 1966-76 drive to expunge major religions from the national consciousness was a failure. According to China's religious leaders in the U.S. last week, Islam's 10 million adherents have held on, Buddhism's 100 million believers are "lingering." Christianity, according to Bishop Ding, has actually gained "new converts." The official count back in 1954 was 700,000 baptized Protestants and about 3 million Roman Catholics. Today there are no accurate statistics. But it is clear that persecution has created thousands of small, self-contained Christian communities, which operate in secret, mostly without an ordained minister, often without scriptures.

A picture of these small but highly evangelical Chinese congregations has been emerging from recent accounts by Overseas Chinese visitors to close Christian friends and relatives. Jonathan Chao, of Hong Kong's Chinese Church Research Center, says that in the late 1960s the first clandestine groups met in threes and fours in private homes. As the pressures lessened somewhat, the numbers grew from 30 to 50 at each meeting. They would sing, pray, study Bible passages painstakingly copied by hand, and listen to a "sermon" from one of their own.

Numbers grew swiftly, especially after reports that physical and mental illnesses were cured by prayer.

In Hong Kong last week one Christian newly arrived from China told TIME'S Hong Kong Correspondent Bing Wong about a large meeting. Her story: "There were 800 of us gathered in a masonry barn near a coastal city in Guangdong. It was warm, and there was no breeze, so the barn became stuffy at times. As no chairs or benches were available, everybody stood. The leader played the rickety piano and led the congregation in singing hymns. After the sermon we prayed:

'Lord, be with us and protect our meeting from being interrupted.' Nobody had a Bible, a hymn book or a prayer script."

In an obvious attempt to assert party control over this religious revival, Chinese authorities are now trying to reconstitute the Chinese Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a sort of Protestant superchurch originally set up in the 1950s to cut off all links to foreign churches and unite Protestants in one government-controlled group. The "Three-Selfs" stood for self-government, self-propagation and self-support. But the organization is still mistrusted by Christians; they remember the old days when it sowed suspicion in congregations in order to sabotage the influence of independent-minded church leaders.

While courting their country's Protestants, China's Communist authorities have not neglected the much larger Roman Catholic community. Late in July the Catholic Patriotic Association, China's "autonomous" Catholic church, which was forced to break with Rome in 1957, elected a new "bishop," Michael Fu Tieshan, 47. The appointment was the first since the death of Yao Guangyu in 1964. Chinese Catholics have been cut off from Rome and from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. (At the only legally open Catholic church, in Peking, the Mass is still said in Latin.) The Vatican has refused to recognize Fu's election. But when Pope John Paul II recently spoke of those ties to the Chinese Catholic community that "never have been broken spiritually," he was implicitly offering to open diplomatic relations again. Peking quickly responded.

A5 a final sweetener in the attempt to attract Christians to official church programs, the government is planning to print a revised edition of the Bible, the so-called "Union" translation of 1919. The New Testament portion is promised for next spring. That news should be encouraging to American evangelicals, who have had a special feeling for China as a missionary field for more than a century. How many copies will ever reach China's Christians remains a question. Meanwhile, one observer of the scene in Hong Kong remained optimistic about the Chinese church. Citing a Chinese proverb, he said: "In no prairie fire do seeds perish; see, their new blades shoot forth amidst the spring breezes." sb

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