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The man behind the most damning archive on religious persecution in China escaped to the United States as a godless political refugee. Chinese police knocked on Li Shi-xiong's door in 1989, after the military massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. It was a knock the anticommunist dissident from the central Chinese city of Wuhan had heard before.

A half-dozen police stormed Li's home, demanding a confession. They confronted Li with photos and videotape of him giving food and money to the demonstrators.

"I supported people who are the flowers of China," he told them. "You guys should support this."

Li had not done anything illegal, and after a harsh exchange the authorities turned to leave. But Li's parting volley—"Don't cause me any trouble! Your IQ is too low!"—secured a promise from the police commander to arrest him someday.

"I'll be waiting!" Li shouted. "Come anytime!" He knew, though, that this bravado would quickly land him back in the kind of labor camps where he, the son of political opponents, had spent his early childhood.

It took him seven years to scrape together the funds—while the government forced his businesses into bankruptcy, he says—but by 1997 Li had completed a complicated odyssey to Flushing, New York.

Li applied for political asylum and helped others do so. Impressed, a lawyer asked Li to work for him. As Li began to notice religious persecution cases among the asylum applicants, he recalled a man he had known in a labor camp.

"One rainy day I was coming back to our living quarters after a day's work in the fields," he says. "There was an elderly man with a long gray beard and poor clothes sitting on a tractor. Surprisingly, he called out to me."

The old man, a Christian, had been in the same jail cell as Li's father. "He really cared for me," Li says. "I learned about God from him. I felt closer to him than to my parents."

Li thus knew of the existence of Christians in China but nothing of their growth and suffering. In 1998 an applicant for political asylum also told him about suffering as a Christian pastor.

"I was a little surprised to hear this man's story," Li says. "He talked about being beaten and said, 'Everybody in our church was beaten.' "

Eventually Li helped the pastor obtain asylum, and his success in many other cases attracted the attention of a group of Chinese religious leaders. Warily, the leaders of an unlikely collection of orthodox and nominally Christian groups came together to meet with Li. Eventually representatives of more than 30 orthodox and heterodox Christian groups joined the work on the archive.

Li found it difficult to persuade them they needed to work harder at obtaining proof for their words. One told him, "What you want is hard and very dangerous to get."

Within three months, those applying for asylum agreed to get their house-church networks to gather testimonies about incidents of persecution. Sometimes the evidence came in recorded testimonies.

"Listening to these disembodied voices talk about their sufferings," he says, "is like sitting in a dark jail hearing the screams and the nightmares."

While working with Li, Chinese church leaders helped him come to a saving relationship with Christ.

By March 2001 Li was receiving 500 testimonies a month. He has collected 5,000 testimonies with pictures of the persecuted. In many cases, court documents and photos accompany them. He has also received less complete reports of another 17,000 cases of religious persecution.

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March 11 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3