The Church in China

NEWS

The following report was prepared exclusively forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Forrest J. Boyd, White House correspondent for the Mutual Broadcasting System, who was among the newsmen accompanying President Nixon on his historic trip to Communist China:

As one of the few Americans able to enter China since the Communists took control of the mainland, I felt a special responsibility to try to find out something about the state of the Church, and what had happened to Christian believers. Before leaving Washington I got a briefing from people connected with World Vision’s China-watching post in Hong Kong and from the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, a former prisoner of the Communists in Eastern Europe who has gathered considerable data on the plight of Christians in Marxist lands.

At the Shanghai Airport, where we first touched Chinese soil, all of us traveling with the Presidential party were given a two-page list of places we would visit. There were no churches on the list, so I inquired of Mao Kuo-hua, the interpreter assigned to me and author Theodore H. White, whether we could visit a church. I was told the request would be considered.

I subsequently reminded Mr. Mao of my request to visit a church, and on our last afternoon in Peking three of us were taken to a Catholic church not far from the Nationalities Hotel and the Great Hall of the People. With me were Bob Considine of the Hearst newspapers and Hugh Mulligan of Associated Press. Both are Roman Catholics. I belong to Fourth Presbyterian Church, Bethesda, Maryland. The word-for-word transcript of our recorded conversation with the priest shows how difficult it is to get information, how evasive and imprecise the Chinese are in their answers, and how impossible it is to reach a definitive conclusion as to how much freedom of religion there really is.

I was told there are both Protestant and Catholic churches open in China, but was unable to learn how many or where they were. I could not find out anything about the fate of Watchman Nee and other Christians reportedly imprisoned.

We talked first with two members of the congregation, who told us that the church was the largest and oldest in Peking, that the priest in charge was Mu Jun-hua, and that services were held every day. Then through our interpreter we talked to the priest himself (some of our questions were directed to the interpreter, some to the priest). Western correspondents resident in Peking were amazed that we got the interview.

Question. He looks very young. How old is he? Answer. Over 40.

Was he ordained by the Bishop of Peking? By the bishop of the Peking Diocese.

What year was that? 1956.

Since then the Bishop died? Right.

Do you call yourself a Father? Yes. Are you all Catholic? Yes, we are—no, two of us are.

Is your prayer book in Chinese or is it in Latin? At present we still use the Latin.

Despite the fact that the church is not connected with the Vatican anymore, is the belief and the order of service the same? The religious ceremonies, our services are the same.

Has Father been out of China? No.

Does the government allow complete freedom of worship? There is complete freedom for religious belief. It is stipulated in the constitution.

Why are there no altar boys, no little boys to assist at the services? Well, the educational undertakings in China have developed considerably, and at the age of 7, the children go to school. In order not to hinder their education, the parents don’t want them to come here, to be what you call them, altar boys.

Is Father aware of the fact that a famous American bishop named Walsh was a prisoner of the People’s Republic for about twenty years, and was released recently? I read it in the newspaper.

During the time he was a prisoner or when he was released? I read news items about when he was arrested, and I also read the news item about his release. He used the priest’s cloak with religion and carried out espionage activities for the CIA.

Does Father believe that? Yes.

We have heard that some Catholic believers were put in prison at the time of the liberation. Is this true, and if so, are they still in prison? Well, I know of no such information regarding your question. Maybe there is such information spread. They are slanders spread by those people with ulterior motives, and those people who are arrested. It is not because of their religious belief, but it is because they have carried out counter-revolutionary activities. That’s why they were arrested. And in our country there is full, complete freedom of religious belief.

In his answer about Bishop Walsh being an agent of the CIA, does he believe that this applies to all of the foreign missionaries who were in China? Were they espionage agents? Were they considered that? Not all of the foreign missionaries are of the type like Walsh. As you know, in old China, China was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country, and the religious undertakings in those days were in the hands of the foreign missionaries. After the liberation many of these foreign missionaries realized that the consciousness of the Chinese people has enhanced, and when they saw this, many of them applied themselves to leave China after the liberation. So many of them left our country. There are also foreign missionaries who use their religion as their cloak and carried out activities that are detrimental to the interests of the people. With regard to these people, some of them were deported out from China and some of them were arrested, according to law. Not only Walsh was arrested because of espionage activities he carried out; there is also another Italian called Martino.… On October 1, 1950, he attempted to shoot in Tien An Men, because October 1 is a national holiday and people are celebrating the national holiday in Tien An Men. And this person, Martino, attempted to shoot in Tien An Men in order to kill the leadership of our country and with the people the government arrested him according to law.

The Father was French-educated? By French priests? Yes.

Do you speak French? No. When we studied, we studied Latin.

The seminary you went to was here in Peking? Where you studied to be a priest? Yes. In Peking.

All Chinese priests then on the faculty? There were also French faculty.

Were they spies, the ones on the faculty then, or were they good priests? Well, among them, there were some good and there were some bad.

Do the Chinese priests marry now since the liberation? No, they do not marry.

You say there are no more altar boys, and I understand very few young people come to your church. Therefore, they will not be church-goers, they will not be practicing Catholics, let’s say. Does that mean eventually the Chinese Catholic church will die out as the old members die off and one day there will be no Chinese Catholic church, because everybody will be dead? Well, China is a country of multi-religions and multinationalities, and in our country we have the freedom of religious belief.

How many come to church? If they come in big numbers, as many as 500. But in times when there are a very few people, just a few.

Mostly old people? More old people, and fewer among the young people.

Do you know if there are any Protestant churches in Peking? There are.

Do you know how many or what the names are? We don’t know, but we know that there are.

Is there a bureau of religion or department of religion in the government? There is a civil-affairs bureau in the government, and they also handle the questions of religion. If there is any problem involved with the church, then we may ask their assistance.

Father, do you feel as close to God as, let’s say, a priest in Germany who has his allegiance to the Vatican, or do you feel like you are choosing a different way to God? I believe in the Catholic doctrine, and as you know, we love our great leader, Chairman Mao, our motherland, and also are led by the Communist party. We regard this as proper. Those are the things that we should do. And we regard those foreign priests who have carried out the work of subversive activities or instruments toward the Chinese people, those acts are not in conformity with the Bible. We regard that what we have done is more in conformity with the doctrine of the Church as well as the Bible.

What contribution do you think the church can make to society in China under Chairman Mao and the People’s Republic? Well, we are doing our part together with the people of the whole country in construction of socialism in our country.

The announced doctrine of Communism is atheism. Chairman Mao, and I suppose Premier Chou En-lai, are atheists, as are many other officials, I would think. How does he feel about serving the purposes of a government whose leaders don’t believe in the existence of what he says a mass for? Well, the Communists are atheists, but this will not hinder us from our contribution to the construction of socialism. There are policies as formulated by the Communist party that provide for those people who believe in religion, provide a freedom of religious belief, so in this way we can construct socialism together with the people of the whole country.

How many confessions would Father hear in a week? Every week there are confessions. Several dozen.

Chinese Evangelism: Checking It Out

Of the estimated 25 million Chinese who live outside the People’s Republic of China, 500,000 live in North America, 350,000 of them in the United States. And immigrants are arriving daily.

A look at current evangelistic work among them may offer a clue to how Red China will be evangelized—and by whom—if the doors open wider. Most of the outreach to American Chinese is being carried out by Chinese believers.

For reasons of culture and language the family-minded Chinese tend to be clannish, even about church. More than 200 Chinese churches have been established in North America (more than one-fourth are in the San Francisco Bay region), and there is a flourishing movement of nameless “Little Flock” type house groups patterned after the teachings of Chinese pietist Watchman Nee.

One of the largest and oldest Chinese churches in the country is the Chinese Cumberland Presbyterian Church in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It dates from 1872. More than 600 persons attend regularly, half of them in their teens and twenties. Pastor Ernest Chan, 33, a Fuller Seminary graduate, conducts services in both Cantonese and English. (Most of the San Francisco area’s 60,000 Chinese speak Cantonese. Nationally, Cantonese and Mandarin are the two major dialects. Many Chinese communities and churches operate schools to teach children their ancestral language and culture, which accounts partially for a strong sense of national heritage and pride in even second- and third-generation American-born Chinese.)

Chan says “tremendous” spiritual activity and interest is evident among the young. “In the past few weeks our students have led thirty Chinese kids to Christ at San Francisco State College,” he asserted in an interview. Many of his young people have received Campus Crusade training. They are engaged in street witnessing, home Bible-study groups, and weekend gospel-music tours.

Chan is chairman of the city’s Chinese Christian Union, a ten-church alliance that sponsors evangelistic rallies, radio broadcasts, and joint services. He is also coordinating a North American Congress of Chinese Evangelicals to be held on the West Coast in December. The congress is an outgrowth of the last Inter-Varsity missions conference at Urbana.

Program chairman for the upcoming congress is Moses Chow, 47, head of Ambassadors for Christ, a Chinese outreach organization based in Washington, D. C. Chow says evangelical tides are running high among clergymen. Whereas the majority of Chinese ministers fifteen years ago were theologically liberal, two-thirds are evangelicals today, he estimates. He blames the earlier liberalism on the seminary training offered by mainline denominations.

Chow’s organization sends young Chinese believers to Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Taiwan as short-term missionary workers. Additionally, there are dozens of American-trained Chinese missionaries working full-time in the Orient, he says. And meanwhile, evangelical schools in Asia are graduating hundreds of students. Increasingly, the Chinese abroad are being reached by Chinese.

On the home front, outreach is picking up on a number of campuses. Chow’s daughter Joyce, a University of Maryland student, says dozens of Chinese students on her campus have formed a Bible-study and outreach group. “God is doing a wonderful work among the Chinese these days,” she says. “We have a deep burden to reach our own people for Christ.”

Other outreach organizations include Los Angeles-based Chinese for Christ headed by Calvin Chao and Detroit’s Chinese Christian Missions led by Tom Wong. The Gospel Center in Berkeley, steered by Moses Yu of Chinese for Christ, conducts a large ministry among University of California students. Many internationals, as well as Chinese Americans, have reportedly professed Christ there.

Both Chan and Chow agree that reaction to President Nixon’s trip by the Chinese in America has been mixed.

“At first our people were disappointed, but now they think that maybe some good, like increased travel permission, will come of it,” commented Chan. “The reaction elsewhere outside the mainland is universally negative, though.”

“Regardless of politics the Chinese are a proud people,” Chow stated. “They remember that barbarians used to come and bow down to the emperors. What Nixon did,” he added with an inscrutable smile, “revived the memories.”

Last fall a missionary with the China Bible Fund of Hong Kong told Wesley Seminary students in Washington that, on the basis of interviews of those who travel across the border, he believes evangelical Christianity on the mainland has more than doubled in size under Mao. He said that two of Shanghai’s house congregations, for instance, have since the early fifties grown to more than forty such groups.

Chow, however, says most of the believers he talked with in Hong Kong last year doubt that such growth is true. But persons returning from the People’s Republic did tell him of meeting relatives “who still love Christ” and of a Christianity alive in the underground.

Chow also tells of a recent meeting he had with a Chinese communist official in this country. The Communist insisted that his nation allowed religious freedom—“freedom to believe, freedom not to believe.” Evangelism, he conceded, is thus disallowed.

Chow gave him a new-script Bible and asked him to verify the accuracy of the script. The official said he would take the Bible back to the People’s Republic and check it out.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Mcintire Marches On

Radio preacher Carl McIntire has been busier than usual the past few weeks. He returned from an Asian trip and put the finishing touches on a fund-raising campaign for overseas relief that grossed, he says, more than $1 million. He picketed an anti-war convocation in Kansas City and explained his hard-line position to seminarians who invited him in from the cold. Then he embarked on a whirlwind nationwide tour to twenty cities to protest President Nixon’s visit to Red China. His itinerary included a demonstration in San Francisco’s Chinatown that drew thirty-two persons.

Time didn’t matter: he scheduled a 12:30 A.M. protest rally at the San Antonio airport. He was fogged out of New Orleans and rained on at a preachin of 200 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, where he announced plans for a march to be held on the eve of Nixon’s May 22 departure for Moscow.

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