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A gesture at the right time can change a life. For Yuan Zhiming, producer of The Cross: Jesus in China video series, just such a moment came when he was 11 years old. He was unable to forget that gesture—a smile from a persecuted pastor—years later when he was an officer in the People's Liberation Army and editorial writer for China's largest newspaper, People's Daily. It lay as a hidden wellspring feeding Yuan's books and television programs, including the influential Yellow River Elegy, as he argued for greater political freedom in China.

He told CT that in the fall of 1966 he was living in his home village of Bafang in Hebei province near Beijing. The village's 5,000 residents eagerly waited for the corn to ripen. But a political storm was brewing. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the nationwide purge of Western ideology, was about to engulf them. Peasants were to believe without question that an earthly Communist paradise could be achieved in 10 years.

The flies in this revolutionary ointment were the 1,000 Christians in Yuan's village. Prominent among them were a Catholic priest and a female lay leader.

Yuan and many Protestants in North China admired the resolute faith of local Roman Catholics. Yuan told CT, "Before the Cultural Revolution, the priest was diligent in preaching in the surrounding villages." Both Protestants and Catholics respected his teaching.

One night, the leader of the local militia decided to make an object lesson out of these two believers. He led hundreds of students from 12 villages to find and harass them. Yuan followed along. The Christians were denounced as "evil snakes." The students stormed into the rooms of the priest and the woman, but the two were not there.

Yuan joined in as the students searched the surrounding area and found them in a cornfield. Their hair was shaved half-off in a yin-yang sign of degradation. Their arms were tied.

Yuan recalls, "We made them stand all the next day for a struggle meeting on a temporary stage in the center of the village. The students shouted at them all day."

"Jesus Christ is a stupid man!"

"Jesus is a liar!"

"Jesus is crazy!"

"You don't believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God! You are lying and cheating other people!"

"Admit it and we will let you go!"

Even now, Yuan shakes his head in wonder. "They just stood there. But I noticed the priest with his old-looking face breaking out into a smile."

The Christians were eventually beaten, dragged away, and locked up with pigs.

The incident provoked deep questions in Yuan. "On the surface, the students were the winners. Inside, I wondered: Don't the Christian faces say: We won!"

Yuan questioned his grandmother about Christians.

" 'Chang Er," she said, using Yuan's family nickname that means "long ears." "These people have hard bones. Their character doesn't break."

Years later in 1989, after China smashed the fledgling democracy movement, activist Yuan fled overseas to escape certain prosecution. In time, he became a Christian and committed himself to documenting the house-church movement inside China.

His thoughts often return to his childhood and his home village, Bafang. Yuan fondly observes, "The village is now bigger. My parents even moved into a new home right down the street from the big new church completed in 1990."

Yuan cannot forget his roots and how Christ was a real presence in his dusty little village. He hopes that The Cross videos honor those humble Christian farmers.

"I am in America now. But I recall that face of 40 years ago. I remember the smile."

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2