The Secular Context

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 marked the end of an era that began with the first Opium War in 1840 when China was compelled to open her doors to the outside world.

The Place of Christianity

The association of the churches from 1840 with foreign imperialism helped to ensure that Chinese nationalism would take a secular form and that the Church would sooner or later be confronted with this negative aspect of its history. Modern Chinese history is often interpreted according to a ‘revolutionary’ paradigm and the history of Christianity in the years immedi­ately after the revolution is best understood from this point of view. How­ever, an exclusive reliance on this model distorts our understanding of the overall process. An alternative, or rather complementary, model concen­trates on China’s search for modernisation. The former approach serves to highlight the link between Christianity and imperialism but the latter is able to present a more subtle account of the place of Christianity in China’s modern history.

The Churches Face the Revolution: 1949-66

The nationalist critique of Christianity was, after 1949, inevitably joined to a Marxist-Leninist critique of religion in general. Chinese Christians were thrown on the defensive and most were ill-prepared to deal with the crisis. Few understood the process of the Chinese revolution and in past years had remained either politically uncommitted or had supported Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless, many were patriotic and some had become convinced of the need for radical social change—notably those involved in the YMCA and YWCA. Since the 1920s there had been attempts to break free of foreign controls expressed in the goals of self-support, self-administration and self­propagation (the ‘Three Selfs’). After 1949, the state asked for Christians to demonstrate their loyalty to the new system by breaking overseas connec­tions and, while Christians may have disliked the political pressure, many welcomed the chance to implement the ‘Three Selfs’. In 1951 the Three Self Patriotic Movement was launched amongst non-Catholics, to be followed after a long gap by the establishment, in 1957, of the Catholic Patriotic Association.

The religious policy of the Communist Party in the early part of this period seems to have aimed at limited toleration but with political control by the state. Like all previous Chinese governments it did not like religion to interfere in public life. Christians could only choose between acceptance or resistance. The majority chose to co-operate but there was fierce opposition in certain areas from Catholics, notably in Shanghai led by Bishop Gong Pinmei, and from some Protestants such as the independent evangelist Wang Mingdao and the leader of the Little Flock, Watchman Nee. Chinese political life swung to the left in 1957 and these three men were sentenced to long prison terms.

There was also a decline in the morale of the Church, which can only in part be accounted for by political pressure. Professor Zhao Fusan, a well-known Christian scholar, articulated this in an essay published in 1958 in Essays in Anglican Self-Criticism:¹

We did not weep with them that wept in old China, neither do we rejoice with them that rejoice in the new. We seem to have become pitiful strangers in our own country and among our own people.

The leftist policies after 1957 led finally into the Cultural Revolution of 1966 when all public religious activity was stopped. By the early 1970s most observers were inclined to accept the official Chinese view that Christianity was a spent force.