God Is Red

by Liao Yiwu

  In late 1948, as the Nationalist troops were on the verge of defeat, the situation in Beijing deteriorated. Many missionaries and Christians left China. My father decided to stay. On February 3, 1949, Communist troops entered Beijing and paraded past his church on Fuchengmen. Three weeks later, leaders of the various Christian denominations met to discuss how to survive under an atheist government. At the meeting, my father urged calm, because the Communists had announced that people could enjoy freedom of religion. He also believed that religion should be kept separate from secular politics. He used to tell us, “Chinese Christians should have our own independent church. We should move in the direction of self-reliance.”

  At the beginning, the new government was busy keeping order and building support among all sectors of society. The religious sector was allowed to operate without disruption. One day my father led several of his followers on the street. They beat drums and gongs to attract people to his church. Soon he drew a large crowd. He also caught the attention of Communist soldiers who were patrolling the streets. The soldiers dispersed the crowd and took my father to the Military Control Commission. They interrogated him briefly. He cited the government’s “freedom of religion” policy as defense. When he argued with his interrogators, they told him politely, “You can certainly enjoy your freedom. We have just taken over and liberated the city. There is chaos everywhere. People with all backgrounds are floating around. You shouldn’t preach outside.” In the end, the military leader let him go without giving him any trouble.

  Within the Communist Party, there was an internal policy at that time to restrict religious activities, reform followers, and eventually wipe out all religious practices in China. In the world of religion, not everyone was as holy as he or she claimed to be.

  Liao Yiwu: You are referring to Wu Yaozong?

  Yuan: Yes, I’m referring to Mr. Wu, as well as other religious celebrities such as Ding Guangxun and Liu Liangmo. Let me give you some brief background information on Wu Yaozong. He was born in 1893 and became a Christian at an early age. He studied at a seminary in New York City before returning to China as an ordained minister. When the Communists took over China, he became a big supporter and accepted the Communist ideology. He said he had experienced two major transformations in life: the first was to accept Christianity as his faith, changing from an atheist into a man of belief; the second was his acceptance of the Marxist social theories, which were antireligion. He unabashedly mixed his religious beliefs with atheist Communist ideology.

  Wu was elected as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai three times to map out the strategies for reforming Christianity in China. His plan was to sever all ties with “foreign imperialists” and to adopt the principles of self-governance, self-support—that is, free from foreign financial support—and self-propagation, which meant indigenous missionary work. These are the Three-Self principles. Soon after Wu’s plan was made public, China joined a war against the Americans in Korea. The Three-Self principles quickly turned into a patriotic movement. All Christians in China had to choose between “supporting their own country” and “supporting foreign imperialists.” It became fanatical. If you did not openly express your patriotism, you were a counterrevolutionary. About thirty-three thousand Christians in China signed up to support the so-called Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

  Despite the political pressure, many Christians stood firm and rejected the Three-Self principles. At that time, there were about sixty Christian churches and organizations in Beijing. Leaders representing eleven churches openly aired their disagreement, saying that churches in China had long adopted the principles of self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation. There was no need to sign up again. Those brave church leaders included my father’s friend Wang Mingdao.

  My father wasn’t among the outspoken leaders, but he had long maintained that there should be separation of church and politics. His favorite phrase used to be: let God take care of his affairs, and Caesar tend to his. Our church shouldn’t be used to advance the interests of the Communist Party. His position alienated him from many of his followers, many of whom deserted him. Starting in 1952, government officials constantly came to engage him in talks, pressuring him to join their camp. My father rejected their requests and refused to participate in political study sessions.

  At first, officials at the local religious-affairs office would visit, trying to persuade him to change. They acted a bit like those police officers at our home the other day. By 1955 the government’s tolerance ended. It turned out to be the largest calamity since the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when more than twenty thousand Christians were murdered. In 1955 more than a thousand churches in China were burned down. Tens of thousands of Christians were arrested. Several thousand were executed on charges of belonging to a cult. In Beijing, the government thought rebellious religious leaders would be intimidated by what was happening in other parts of the country. Chairman Mao called this “encircling your enemies.”

  Liao: Yet no one stepped forward to support the Three-Self movement?

  Yuan: That is correct. On the night of August 7, 1955, Reverend Wang Mingdao and his wife were arrested, along with dozens of other preachers.

  Liao: Those church leaders got long jail sentences.

  Yuan: From fifteen years to life imprisonment. Under threat of physical torture, Reverend Wang wrote a confession and was released immediately, but he was haunted by his betrayal. Spiritual torture was more painful than physical torture, so he turned himself in to the police. He said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my time in jail so I can appease the wrath of the Lord.”

  My father wavered too. Following the August 7 arrests, many preachers, including my father, bowed to pressure and took part in political study sessions. One Communist official told my father, “You are still young and have a bright future in front of you. You should try to reform yourself.” He encouraged my father to openly express his support for the Party’s policies at meetings, but my father chose to remain silent. Deep down, he was torn. Eventually, through prayers and self-reflection, he made up his mind, and in 1957, when called upon to declare his support for the Three-Self principles, he said the government’s religious policy was unfair. Freedom of religion was guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution, but Christians could no longer enjoy that freedom. Some Christians, the favorites of the new government, espoused the Three-Self principles, but they were hypocrites. When the Japanese came, they surrendered to the invaders. When the Americans came, they managed to get on their payrolls. Now, they ingratiated themselves to the new government. Those people were not patriotic. They were simply opportunists who took advantage of religion to serve their own interests. Afterward, Father said he had never felt so elated and liberated.

  During the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, study groups were told that the government required each of them to identify four “Rightists”—people who had strayed from the Party line. Just like that, my father had become an enemy of the people.

  However, once my father was declared a Rightist, he didn’t have to pretend to be politically progressive and stopped attending political study sessions. He stayed at home and kept up with his routine of prayer and Bible study. He preached. “The head of the church is Jesus, not an official at the religious affairs office,” he said when friends urged caution. Pastor Qi, an old friend of the family, told my father at dinner with us:

  “Brother Yuan, I want to offer you some advice. I know you won’t listen, but as a friend, I feel obligated to say it. You are in a very precarious situation now. Under this new roof, I advise you to bend your head and control your own temper. If you can’t, you should at least pretend to be compliant and keep attending political study sessions. If you continue to be stubborn and stick with your own views, you could face unimaginable consequences. Just do it for the sake of your family. You have to take care of your ailing mother and your children. I
f anything happens to you, what do you expect them to do? Your children will carry the black label of a counterrevolutionary for the rest of their lives. It’s not fair to them.”

  Pastor Qi became emotional as he talked. Tears slipped down his face. My father was not moved. In the end, Pastor Qi said, “If the Communists require us to support the Three-Self policies, we have to do it. What choices do we have?”

  At the end of 1957, the government reached out to my family one last time to “save” my father. A director at the local Public Security Bureau called my mother, asking her and my grandmother to show up at the local religious-affairs office. When they arrived, the deputy director greeted them with some harsh advice: “I’ve invited you over with the hope that you could talk with Yuan Xiangchen and change his mind. Like the Chinese saying goes, ‘Rein in the horse at the edge of a cliff.’ We can’t put up with his difficult attitude any longer. He is still young, only forty-four years old. You should assist the government in rescuing him. Don’t mistake our benevolence for weakness. If we want to lock him up, we can, in an instant. When that happens, your whole family will suffer.”

  Liao: “Rein in the horse . . .” was used during the Cultural Revolution as an ultimatum.

  Yuan: My father knew immediately what those words meant.

  Liao: Couldn’t your father make some concessions for the sake of his family? There was no justification for your father to put his family through such suffering.

  Yuan: He had thought carefully about such questions. He had also taken counsel from many friends. But the biggest misfortune for a Christian does not lie in the calamity that befalls him in this world. It is the betrayal of God for the sake of secular things on earth. Even if you are able to protect your relatives or your material possessions, your soul will forever be locked in darkness, without any prospect of salvation. My father believed that was the most terrible calamity.

  Liao: I was in jail for a long time, but I still can’t see myself as determined as your father. If the authorities had used my relatives and friends as hostages to threaten me, forcing me to give up my faith, I would have written confessions, lied, done whatever was needed.

  Yuan: But you wouldn’t chop off your right hand and swear never to write again, would you?

  Liao: Of course not.

  Yuan: It’s the same principle. My father would not betray his faith, because it was his life. When a person loses his life, then what does he have left for his family?

  In those long sleepless nights, my father would kneel and pray for courage. He faced two paths: he could express his willingness to change and join the government’s Three-Self church, or he could accept imprisonment and separation from his family.

  My father prayed for ten days, during which time no one came to bother him. He started to think that the government might change its mind about arresting him. At about eleven o’clock on the night of April 19, 1958, police came for my father. They knocked politely on the door first. Two policemen from the local ward stood outside. They “invited” my father for a quick meeting at the local Public Security Bureau office. There, several policemen were waiting for him. They read his arrest warrant and handcuffed him. He was charged with being “an active counterrevolutionary.” At the same time, a group of soldiers ransacked our house, sweeping copies of the Bible, hymnals, and other Christian reading material onto the floor and trampling them. They opened and emptied trunks, went through every cupboard. With iron bars, they searched for hiding places under the wooden floor and in the walls, tearing out sections whenever they heard a hollow sound. They even scoured the pond used for baptism rituals. They found nothing out of the ordinary for a preacher; no gold nuggets, no anti-Communist materials. At four-thirty in the morning, the soldiers left with a truckload of books and everything of any value. We children stood and watched. I shall never forget that night.

  My father did not come home again for twenty-one years and eight months. Mother, now the wife of an active counterrevolutionary, was stripped of her job as street committee director. My seventeen-year-old brother, who had been elected leader of a Communist youth organization, was removed from that position at school. My family was forced out of Fuchengmen Street, and eight of us crammed into a tiny fifteen-square-meter house on Baitasinei Street, ironically part of what used to be the west wing of a Tibetan lama’s residence near the White Tower Temple.

  To support the family, my mother went out and got a temporary job at a construction site. It was a hard-labor job that nobody else wanted. My mother was grateful for any job, even though it hardly paid anything.

  Liao: Between 1955 and 1958, Christian ministers were arrested and churches nationwide were closed down. In Beijing, more than sixty churches were combined into four, and those four were shut down in the Cultural Revolution. In a way, the government got what it wanted, the elimination of all religious activities in China.

  Yuan: But they could not control what is in people’s hearts. In those difficult years, we would join our mother in prayer every day. One day, my mother couldn’t find anything to feed her six children. She knelt and prayed, “God, we don’t have rice. We don’t have flour. We don’t have anything to eat. It’s going to be like this tomorrow. If you think we should suffer like this, we will accept it. I will feed them with hot water . . .”

  The next day, a woman came to our door. “Is this Brother Yuan’s home?” she asked. My mother nodded. The woman took an envelope from her pocket and handed it to my mother. Inside the envelope was fifty yuan. Mother looked up to thank the woman, but she had gone. Fifty yuan was enough to feed the family for two months. Mother knelt and offered her thanks to God. Over the next two decades, we regularly received anonymous cash in the mail.

  Liao: When did you learn your father’s fate?

  Yuan: We had no news of his whereabouts until November 1958, when a clerk from the local court came to our house and handed my mother a copy of the court’s verdict. We learned that he had gotten life imprisonment. When facing persecution from secular authorities, Christians never appeal. So my mother followed this tradition. It would have been futile anyway.

  In December my father sent a postcard to us from a prison in Beijing, indicating the date of our first allowed family visit. So my mother brought me, my youngest sister, and my grandmother to Zixing Road.

  The waiting room was packed with visitors. Small groups were allowed in for thirty minutes at a time. Father’s head had been shaved and he looked feeble. We were so excited to see each other. We simply held hands and didn’t know what to say. My mother meant to tell him that more Christian brothers and sisters had been arrested, but a guard stood by our side throughout the visit.

  Liao: Did your father meet any fellow Christians in prison?

  Yuan: Yes. One night in 1959, the prisoners were watching a propaganda film outside, when he noticed that sitting in front of him was his mentor, Reverend Wang Mingdao. They looked at each other for a few seconds. Neither said anything, but they both looked up at the sky—referring to their Lord in heaven.

  Sometimes, my father might run into a Christian he knew, but he became very cautious. While he was at a detention center, a former Catholic reported to the authorities that my father continued to preach during incarceration. He was punished.

  At the end of summer in 1960, there was famine in many parts of China and crime rates went up dramatically. Prisons in Beijing were overcrowded. So the government decided to send prisoners with long sentences to the labor camps in Xingkaihu, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, along the border with the then Soviet Union. My father was one of them.

  When they first arrived, they slept in tents fenced in with barbed wire and made bricks to build their own prison, after which they slept side by side in dormitories on a single fifty-meter-long bed.

  In the winter, the temperature in Heilongjiang dropped to minus thirty degrees centigrade. While working in the field one day, a fellow prisoner noticed that my father’s nose looked discolored. Father
ran inside to warm up and was spared any serious damage to his nose. Some people, who were not as fortunate, lost their ears in the cold. Father had seen several prisoners frozen to death, like bare tree trunks in the field. It’s hard to imagine how my father, a thin and physically feeble intellectual, managed to live through the long cold winters. He said he never got sick. In 1962 China and the Soviet Union officially ended their friendship and prepared for war against each other. The camps were closed. Among the more than two thousand prisoners, fifty were counterrevolutionaries—the most dangerous of criminals—and they were sent to Beijing. My father considered that to be a blessing. He would be able to see his family and the food would be better. In Heilongjiang, prisoners got by on bread made of corn chaff or wild vegetables. In Beijing, he could at least have sweet potatoes. Families could also send extra food to supplement the meager prison ration.

  In October 1965 I graduated from high school and was assigned to a military farm in the northwestern province of Ningxia. Before I left, I visited Father. He grabbed my hands and held them for a long time. “You are eighteen already and will start a new life in the countryside. You should learn to take care of yourself. Are you confident about your faith? Do you know how to sing hymns?” When I answered yes to all of his questions, he smiled. I could tell he was very happy. I didn’t see him again for fourteen years.