Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  The four Chinese Christians fared no better. With Premier Zhou in attendance at the meeting, they were dismissed as “agents of imperialism” and “renegades and enemies of the people.”

  One was an American-educated bishop with the Methodist Episcopal Church.

  Another was a leader of the YMCA, who was accused of taking orders from America.

  A third was a Pentecostal preacher, formerly an actor, already under arrest and labeled as “Christian scum,” who was accused of raping his own daughter. “Does he deserve death?” asked his accuser. “Deserves death! Deserves death!” roared the crowd.

  And the final target was Bishop Y. Y. Tsu.

  It fell upon his colleague Bishop Robin Chen from Anhui Province to lead the attack on him. Bishop Chen, an active and early supporter of the Three-Self Movement, was the head of the House of Bishops and the face of the Sheng Kung Hui.

  “It is not an easy matter to accuse another bishop of the same church,” Bishop Chen told the audience in Beijing. “Yet standing alongside of the people and for the love of the fatherland and the love of the church, today I must accuse him.”

  He charged that his colleague “fell into a trap and became a tool of the American imperial aggressors.”

  Bishop Chen went on to itemize the departed bishop’s transgressions, starting with his work as a chaplain for the US Army. It was true that in the last eight months of the Second World War, Bishop Tsu accepted an offer to serve as a civilian chaplain in the Burma Road area, where troops transported supplies from the British colony of Burma into southwest China. He traveled with his church vestments as well as a GI uniform with a silver cross, which he donned when addressing US Army units. But in Beijing, this became an act of disloyalty. Bishop Chen told the audience that Y. Y. Tsu considered wearing that uniform “a glory.”

  And there was more. After liberation, Bishop Tsu used his KMT passport to travel outside of China, including the trip to Toronto in the summer of 1950 to attend the World Council of Churches meeting. At the convention, the World Council had passed a resolution condemning North Korea’s military incursion across the thirty-eighth parallel. But for this audience in Beijing, the emphasis was flipped, with Bishop Chen characterizing the resolution as supporting American aggression and opposing a Stockholm peace accord from 1950. He accused Bishop Tsu, who had penned many articles in the foreign press criticizing the regime’s handling of religious matters, of trying to sabotage the Three-Self Movement and acting more American than Chinese. The exiled bishop had studied with American teachers. He socialized with Americans. He kept financial accounts in dollars. He wrote letters in English. He affected an American accent. He traveled more than ten times to America, and his whole family lived there. “With this kind of life,” Bishop Chen asked, “how could he help but be pro-American and worship America?”

  It was time for self-examination, the senior bishop told the assembled. “We must take the pain and shame and anger of today and transform it into strength,” he exhorted. When conference attendees returned home, it was up to them to carry on the work of “convincing, inspiring, educating and remaking all the backward elements within the Episcopal Church.”

  He closed by saying, “People who love the Church will join the march of the Great Chinese People and shout aloud: ‘Long live the Chinese People’s Republic! Long live Chairman Mao!’”

  Secret Enemies

  All of this meant only one thing for Lin Pu-chi. It was time to toe the line or face the consequences.

  Confusion, dissension, and internal strife swept over churches as the message from Beijing trickled down to the parish level. Christians were put on notice that there would be denunciation meetings for everyone, denominational churches as well as independent groups such as Watchman Nee’s Little Flock. Why was this necessary? For the answer, those who marched to the beat of the Three-Self Movement quoted Chairman Mao: “After enemies who are open, concrete and holding the gun have been overthrown, there are still enemies who are secret, formless and not holding the gun, who will surely struggle with us desperately.”

  The denunciation meetings and public confessions were part of a process of undoing the past. The history of Christianity was so intertwined with the history of Western imperialism that the Three-Self Movement led Protestants and Catholics to concede that on some level, everyone had been complicit in this ruinous alliance. No one, no matter how respected or prominent, was immune from criticism.

  A friend of Bishop Tsu who was the former board chairman of St. John’s University described the drama playing out behind the scenes this way: Y. T. Wu, the Protestant leader at the vanguard of the Three-Self Movement, would give a hint to a certain church that so-and-so of its congregation was persona non grata with the government and would have to make a self-confession. Y. T. Wu would pass on the confession to the government’s Religious Affairs Bureau. Often, the statement would come back stamped with “not enough.” The target then would have to try again, groping in the dark to ascertain what authorities might or might not know about him. People tended to err on the side of too much information, unintentionally playing into the hands of authorities. A former mathematics professor from St. John’s had to write four confessions before his testimony was accepted. “We can thus understand better why our bishops made such denouncements of others and themselves at the public accusation meetings,” David W. K. Au wrote in his letter to Bishop Tsu. “They really deserve our sympathy more than our bitterness.”

  Lin Pu-chi’s future was uncertain. The religious front that was forming was pulling people like a riptide. Denominational lines were blurring, casting doubt on whether there would be any distinction at all between churches. Lin Pu-chi’s work as editor of the Chinese Churchman magazine, meanwhile, ceased. His editorial in the June 1951 issue was his last. The piece included the strident rhetoric of the moment, extolling readers to participate in the Three-Self Movement and not to separate political life from religious life. At the same time, the editorial was self-critical in an honest, introspective way. The intrinsic problem of British Anglicans and American Episcopalians, he wrote, lay with their reliance on institutions and traditions. Every service, every prayer followed a rigid form. The clergy had become lazy, delivering messages that were perfunctory, bloodless, uninspiring, all intellect and no emotion. In the editorial, it was as if in using the collective “we,” he was actually conceding the failings of the singular “I.” The church was weak because its priests were weak. It was like a large wealthy family. And when the family fell, the grand buildings and antiques had no practical value. “But we are not willing to give them up, being afraid of betraying our forefathers,” the editorial stated.

  A notice on the last page of the issue said the July edition was postponed. The leaders of the Sheng Kung Hui had held a meeting on June 13 to elect five clerics to carry on the work of promoting the “Movement to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea” as well as the “Three-Self Reform Movement.” Lin Pu-chi was among them.

  The pressure to conform was mounting, and it didn’t matter what Lin Pu-chi might have said or written in the past. The question now was whether he could bend to the political will of the majority, whether he would stand with the masses—or not.

  The Church of Our Savior was on a narrow street shaded with sycamore trees in the former French Concession of Shanghai. It held special meaning for the Lin family. In his twenty years in Shanghai, Lin Pu-chi had frequently conducted services at the church, which had moved from Hongkou to the Rue Maresca after being destroyed during fighting in 1937. His daughter, Martha, was married there in 1948 in a ceremony conducted by the American bishop of Shanghai.

  After Sunday services on July 29, 1951, more than a thousand people, coming from parishes all over China, returned for an afternoon session on a topic of mandatory study: how the United States had used churches as a form of cultural aggression. One by one, Protestant groups across the city were hol
ding large-scale denunciation meetings, part of the ongoing process of ideological molding. Four other Protestant groups had already staged their mass meetings, and at least a dozen more would follow over the next month.

  First to speak was the vestryman of the church, a Shanghai businessman who was actively cooperating with the new regime. Just back from an inspection tour of troops in Korea, he claimed to have personally witnessed Americans using religion as a form of aggression. Army chaplains, he said, were “the claws and teeth” of this cultural assault and were actually spies.

  The next speaker was the former dean of the Central Theological Seminary at St. John’s University. For more than a century, this man told the crowd, America had manipulated the umbrella group for the church, the Sheng Kung Hui. He criticized himself for thinking religion was above politics and for preventing seminary students from studying political topics.

  After him, the bishop from Jiangsu castigated Bishop William Roberts, the Yale-educated American missionary, beloved by many, who taught at St. John’s and was a leader of the Sheng Kung Hui for years.

  When he finished, it was Lin Pu-chi’s turn to speak.

  He rose from his seat and walked to the pulpit. He looked down on the faces in the crowd. He saw many friends, clergy as well as people from all over China, fellow believers whom he had met over the past quarter century in his journey from Fuzhou to Shanghai. As a young priest, Lin Pu-chi knew what it felt like to be attacked and punished for his beliefs. In his hometown of Fuzhou, when he was thirty-three years old and a rising star in the church, he was captured and taunted for a day by antiforeign protesters. The mob treated him like a hack for foreigners, no better than a comprador, doing the bidding of British and American clerics. They threw a coarse rope around his neck, pulling him through the streets of Fuzhou and ridiculing him as “a running dog of imperialists.”

  Now, more than twenty years later, he would have to do the same to his closest friend, Bishop Tsu, using words instead of muscle to bring him down. And of all places, this act of disloyalty would take place in the very parish where both the bishop’s father and uncle had been vicars, the latter for almost forty years.

  All eyes looked up to Lin Pu-chi as he began to speak.

  “I have experienced an intense internal struggle,” Lin Pu-chi began. “I stand here today with incomparable compunction, indignation, and grief.”

  Bishop Tsu had been his teacher at St. John’s and his boss at the Sheng Kung Hui offices, he told the congregation. Despite those ties, he explained, “I accuse him with the spirit of placing righteousness above private loyalty and expose his deeds as a lackey and accomplice of American imperialism and degenerate and sinner of our church.”

  Lin Pu-chi then repeated a litany of transgressions that matched word for word some of the same allegations delivered three months earlier in Beijing in the first denunciation of Bishop Tsu. It was a script, and he was an actor. Bishop Tsu was “ostensibly a Chinese” but in action and thought more American, Lin Pu-chi told the audience. Then, adding a detail that only he would know, he said that the bishop had recounted to him how his grown daughter in California wanted to someday marry an American rather than a Chinese man.

  Lin Pu-chi’s own sons had homes in Connecticut and Washington, DC, jobs with US hospitals and American lives that they detailed in their monthly letters. Yet here he stood, pressured to castigate Bishop Tsu for perceived offenses that could have been his own. He criticized his mentor, saying, “His whole family is now in America, which proves that he has been completely Americanized.”

  Bishop Robin Chen had the final word. Y. Y. Tsu was no longer a bishop of any diocese in China. The House of Bishops, too, had severed relations with its counterparts in Hong Kong and Macao and would no longer recognize as members any foreign bishops. They also voted to quit the World Council of Churches. “This is the first accusation meeting in the history of the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui,” Bishop Chen remarked. “From today, we want not only to develop our Three-Self Movement, but also to cut off all the poisonous influence of America.”

  Two Sundays later, as parishioners filed into the Church of Our Savior, ushers handed out a sheet with the order of service on one side and church news on the other. One news item was a reminder about a request made in June, urging members to donate funds for planes and guns to oppose America and defend China.

  Churchgoers took note, too, that they would be singing a new hymn—the “Christians’ Patriotic Hymn.”

  Chinese Christians love your country;

  Increase production;

  Do your best to support the front;

  For country, for the Lord’s church;

  Quickly donate war weapons to defeat American wolves.

  • 13 •

  Missing

  Shanghai, 1955

  He sat by the living room window, waiting, looking, listening. It had become his end-of-the-month ritual. As soon as he spied the mailman coming down the lane, Lin Pu-chi was out of his chair and reaching for the letters coming through the mail slot on the door. He flipped quickly through the envelopes, hoping to see the thin blue one with a Philadelphia postmark. And there it was.

  Paul, his youngest, was now working as a neurosurgeon in that city and married to an American nurse. Lin Pu-chi wrote to him the first week of every month, with Paul replying by the month’s end. The patriarch was discreet in what he shared with his son. He had to assume that security agents were monitoring his letters. Paul, too, knew when to be circumspect and hold back on potentially sensitive news. Now was one of those times. Even though the Korean War had ended two years earlier, Paul did not tell his father that he had enlisted as an officer in the US Army medical corps. No one—not the family in Shanghai or agents intercepting the mail—needed to know that he would be shipping out to a hospital in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1955 and living on an army base.

  Lin Pu-chi sliced open the envelope and read his daughter-in-law’s perfect cursive handwriting. The young couple had married in 1953. It was left to her, not her busy surgeon husband, to keep the family in Shanghai abreast of their lives. Along with the usual patter about home life and family news, she mentioned nonchalantly about sending a birthday gift to Aunt Mary.

  He exhaled.

  That was their code for the money his son wired to an aunt in Hong Kong. Money transfers had to be handled with subterfuge. Paul could not walk into a bank in Philadelphia and simply send cash to an account in Shanghai. China had severed financial relations with the United States years earlier. But not so with Hong Kong, which, while still part of the British Empire, remained a Chinese city at heart. The family had to be clever, dance a little two-step so that no one noticed what was going on. Twice a year, in April and October, Paul mailed a check for $500 to Lin Pu-chi’s younger sister in Hong Kong. Aunt Mary deposited the money, wrote a check on her account, and then mailed it to Shanghai.

  The “birthday gift” had been late this April, leaving Lin Pu-chi to fret. In his last letter, he had addressed his son in Chinese instead of English so that his American daughter-in-law would not understand, sheepishly inquiring: Do you have any problem with Mother’s birthday gift? We hope you will continue to send it, as it is very much needed here.

  It was mortifying to have to admit to his son that the family needed the money to get by. But Lin Pu-chi had no work and contributed nothing to the household income. At a time when he should have been at the prime of his career, he was idle. The only church work he had was substituting at the chapel at St. John’s or saying the service in his native Fuzhou dialect for a small congregation in the city. Even then, Lin Pu-chi had to cover the price of his bus fare, receiving no remuneration of any kind from the churches. Once close to the inner circle of leaders in the Anglican and Episcopal Church, he had been shunted aside, replaced by younger clerics more politically in step with the new regime.

  A stud
io portrait of Ni Guizhen and Lin Pu-chi from the 1950s. During this difficult period, Ni Guizhen could barely mask her stress and strain. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  This month’s letter from Philadelphia included four photos of his son and daughter-in-law with their newborn second child, Daria, who joined her jiejie, Angela. Lin Pu-chi took the photos and letter to the second floor, where his wife was spending the morning with her sister-in-law Charity, the wife of Watchman Nee. Charity was a frequent visitor, stopping by at least once a week. Martha’s two daughters were so accustomed to seeing her that they called her New Granny, or xin ah-bu in the local dialect.

  Whenever Charity came over, the women retreated to Ni Guizhen’s bedroom, closed the door, took out their hymnals, and sang with abandon. Lyrics written by Watchman Nee—some in English, some in Chinese—were favorites. They felt like he was speaking to them through music.

  Oh, let us remember in running our race

  That faith is not feeling, and trust is not trace;

  And when all is seeming as black as the night

  We’ll keep on believing and go on with the fight.

  “Look, pictures of the baby,” Lin Pu-chi interrupted, laying out the snapshots for the women to ogle.

  “Who is that one?” Charity asked, pointing to the older child.

  “Ah-E,” he told her, using his granddaughter’s Chinese name, which meant peace and happiness. “Look at her holding that flower, such a mischievous look in her eye! What’s in her mind, do you think?”

  “And the baby? Her name?” Charity asked.

  It was Lin Pu-chi’s duty as the patriarch of the family to name all the children in the new generation. American grandchildren received Chinese names; and Chinese grandchildren, English ones.