To China by Bridge

When in 1969 I wrote, “Greater liberalizing of trading opportunities and … even more attractive facilities to tourists to visit and spend money in China … in the next ten years, is the most that serious students of China are prepared to go on record as expecting” (Christianity in Communist China, Word Books), neither I nor any other serious student of China anticipated that the greatest tourist and trade representative would be the President of the United States. That historic visit has been reported and analyzed in considerable detail. I would like to add some comments on the significance of the President’s visit and its aftermath from the point of view of Christianity in China.

The Christian cause, in China and in intelligent circles elsewhere, is being seriously discredited by unsubstantiated reports of mass conversions and baptisms inside China, of a Christian population as high as one in forty, of a large, well-organized underground church, of the smuggling in of hundreds of thousands of Bibles from Hong Kong. I have access to a file about three inches thick—which I helped to compile—of investigations into those claims; the investigations have proved that the reports are spurious (and according to one of Hong Kong’s leading judges, the sources would be liable to prosecution if a case were ever brought).

The glowing reports are also scorned by at least two highly placed intelligence sources who would be only too happy if they were true but who proved to me, conclusively, that they were impossible. The final damning indictment comes from the Chinese themselves, who are aware of what is happening in their own country—aware that, for instance, the hundreds of thousands of Bibles claimed to be smuggled into China are being openly printed by a leading Chinese Communist printing press and, when printed, gather dust in Hong Kong church and school basements.

Meanwhile, the propaganda for more money for more Bibles and other literature goes on. Unless responsible Christian leaders do something to curb this disgraceful, unprincipled exploitation of Christian zeal, the character of Christian witness—inside China, among overseas Chinese, and in responsible secular circles—will be destroyed for the next decade, regardless of what happens in China diplomatically and politically.

Before making this statement I met with several of the best-informed Christian China-watchers, Protestant and Catholic, to make sure it had their support. Let me also clearly say that no responsible Christian China-watcher is against preparing Bibles and other forms of Christian literature in anticipation of the time when they might be required.

But let me define what I mean when I say “required.” I mean required by Chinese for Chinese—for their relatives, friends, and compatriots on the mainland of China. One of the simplest ways to discredit inflated claims about the smuggling of thousands of Bibles from Hong Kong into China is to ask any individual Chinese if he personally has sent one to a relative or a friend. The silence, shifting feet, or sliding eyes, are eloquent. When they are honest they will admit that they dare not endanger the lives of relatives or friends inside China by doing this. Even the Chinese who are paid servants of Bible- or literature-handling organizations (and let me make it clear that I am not including the leading Bible societies in my denunciations, for they, too, are weary of having to respond diplomatically to these spurious claims) are conspicuous by their absence at interviews or silent about personal specifics. So the first requirement of “required” would be a responsible and independent Chinese Christian, respected by his professional peers, who would approve the literature policy even at possible personal risk.

A few years ago Timothy Yu, director of the Department of Communications in Hong Kong’s Baptist College, along with several other Chinese Christians set up a publishing company that has produced the best of secular and Christian literature, plus a simplified New Testament. He makes no claim—and to my knowledge, no attempt—to smuggle Bibles or books across the borders; but for several years he has been studying Communist Chinese linguistic usages and, in his spare time, developing a new Chinese printing process—the first innovation in that area in over a century—that has attracted the admiration and support of the prestigious International Press Institute and leading foundations. This is the kind of Christian who will be first invited to China, and whose words and works will be treated with respect.

My second criterion for “required” lies in this area of literature production, the matter of meeting a known need. The whole question of Communist Chinese linguistic usage has been grossly overstated in some Christian circles with interests in China. While there are admitted difficulties with the generally used Chinese Communist terminology, this is no more than is common with idiosyncratic usages everywhere. I had trouble right across the United States reading the sports pages of leading newspapers—and the more popular the paper, the more trouble I had. The fact that a special-interest group uses a special jargon does not mean that all literature to be used for that group has to be written in that jargon. The real test is whether the widespread use of that jargon necessitates change into other forms of communication.

Recently a group that included four journalists—one of them a respected editor and Chinese-language scholar of many years’ experience—agreed that refugees from mainland China arriving in Hong Kong have no real difficulty reading newspapers and other forms of literature, including the Bible. Particular versions should be prepared for certain groups just as they are in any other country. But what was essential, it was concluded, were forms of presentation (thought forms, image forms) that would be understood by all groups, just as in any other country.

In all the “relaxations” announced during and after President Nixon’s visit to China—commercial, diplomatic, cultural, sports, and so on—not a single mention was made of religion. And in all the millions of words filed by reporters on the trip, there was no mention of this startling omission of any official request for special religious services for such an unusually large contingent of visiting “Christians.” Whether or not this was significant to anybody in the West, it must have been of considerable significance to the Chinese Communist leaders. No wonder Chou En-lai did not find it necessary to quote Jesus Christ in his ceremonial speeches, while graciously applauding President Nixon’s quotes of Mao Tse-tung.

Only four months previously the same Chinese leaders had received—and approved—a request for a special mass for a small Italian delegation. Ada Princigalli, correspondent of the Italian news agency ANSA, reported that she had attended a Latin mass in a Spanish-style Peking church with two Italian government officials. The rite was conducted, she said, by the Reverend Wang Kiting, in his thirties, who identified himself as the Roman Catholic vicar-general of Peking. He told her that the church was open daily for worship and that the Catholic community in China considered itself “autonomous” but remained in communion with Rome. About fifteen adult Chinese attended the service, using missals in the Chinese language published in 1950.

No further report of this church’s services was heard until the visit of a Zambian delegation to Peking in January, 1972, when the Agence France Presse reported that regular Sunday masses were being held, with foreign diplomats attending, at the “Nan-tang” (Southern Church), near Peking’s ancient Hsuan Wu Men Gate—the first church to be built by Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s.

There has been no account of any Protestant service except for one isolated item mentioned in U.S. News and World Report, July 5, 1971:

A Western visitor in 1969 said his interpreter took him to an Anglican-type service in a ‘North China provincial city.’ The service, held in an upstairs room of a two-story house, was described as based on the conventional Eucharist and administered by a Chinese priest with full participation of the fourteen worshipers present—including two youths and two young adults. The visitor saw prayer-books, but no Bibles.…

No other newspaper report has provided evidence of existing churches, or even “home congregations,” since that time.

Tillman Durdin of the New York Times was the first American journalist to be granted a one-month entrance visa to mainland China since 1950. In his series of articles in early 1971 he confirmed that “old religious practices” were among the “four olds”—old things, ideas, customs, and habits—that were scheduled for elimination. On the basis of the evidence—“mainly visual”—he was able to gather during his three-week tour of east-coast areas, he thought the concerted drive against the “old religious practices” had had sweeping effect. “In not a single home seen by the writer,” he said,

was there any family altar, any tablets to ancestors, or any representation of the old gods formerly worshiped by the Chinese masses.… No religious practices were discoverable during the trip to China and guides said there were none. Religious edifices have been turned to use as schools, warehouses or recreation centers.

I have presented the negative—almost totally negative—side of the situation, according to verifiable evidence from reputable sources. Let me now add two pieces of significant evidence to relieve the negativism and perhaps even introduce a modicum of optimism. They certainly encourage me.

The first piece of verifiable optimistic evidence for Christians is that almost all refugees—mostly young, many former Red Guards—who arrive in Hong Kong report they “pray” frequently during escape. The “prayers” take different, often bizarre, forms, from “God bless me” as a kind of muttered invocation, to promises of varied kinds to the unseen God if he helps them escape (a friend of mine kept this promise on arrival: he found a church and he and his wife became Christians), to an actual kneeling down in front of a tree and asking “the God of the tree” for help. When the need for something more than education, a job, and a place in society is recognized, it would seem there is still a primal, intuitive recognition as well that “the God out there,” “the God of the tree,” or a “power other than human” is necessary even after twenty years of materialistic brainwashing. It’s a start.

The second piece of optimistic evidence is more prosaic but nonetheless significant: there is no record that any leading representative of the Three Self Reform Movement was ever arrested during the purges of the Cultural Revolution. When one considers the bitter anti-religious feelings displayed during that time, the obviously officially encouraged crack-down on churches, and the scapegoats in other fields who were publicly humiliated, this lack of persecution of religious representatives appears to be more than an oversight, and possibly a policy decision.

One intriguing possible explanation is that those leaders were being “held in reserve”—much as some political members of the Politburo—to be brought back later if it was decided to “tolerate” or “review” or “display” Christianity in China for a purpose.

This is the opportunity that was missed by President Nixon and his “Christian” entourage: to put pressure on a regime that might not have been too unhappy to comply. After all, it would only have been a “controlled” church organization—but, with that in conjunction with the atavistic heart-hunger shown by the escaping refugees, who knows what such a public if feeble flicker of light might have produced? It is one of Mao’s thoughts that “a small flame can start a prairie fire.”

The most lasting impression that James Reston of the New York Times brought back from his memorable six-week visit to China was, he said, “the intensity of the evangelistic moral fervor of the people.” He emphasized this twice when speaking to fellow journalists at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, adding, “The nearest I can come to describing it is to compare it with my early Scottish Presbyterian Sunday-school experiences.” Until Christians show that same intensity of belief in all their attitudes, they will remain unlikely to convince the Communist Chinese of their protestations of faith in anything other than capitalism.

I cannot do better than finish with the words of Dr. Donald Marvin Borchert, associate professor of philosophy at Ohio University. Writing in the Christian Century (September 29, 1971) on “The Future of Religion in a Marxist Society” Borchert concludes:

I can best describe the process of inner renewal by way of a story told me by one of my professors back in my college days.

An extremely bright young woman, an Oriental, was awarded a scholarship to study on the campus of a Christian college in one of our southern states. She was not a Christian, and there was considerable speculation among the students as to which of them would be able to argue her into Christianity. Eventually she did become a Christian, but her conversion was occasioned not by one of the brilliant campus intellects but by an unimportant little coed. When the new convert was asked what argument the unknown coed had used to win her to Christianity, the Oriental student replied: “She did not use arguments. She built a bridge from her heart to mine, and Christ walked over it.”

This incident, I believe, is a paradigm of the sort of spiritual renewal which offers hope to mankind.

Almost every Chinese, and every other literate inhabitant on the face of the earth, has read of President Nixon’s and Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s determination to “build bridges” despite differences between the American and Chinese peoples. Let Western Christians start building “heart-to-heart” bridges of understanding with Chinese Communists, and stop building pseudo-evangelistic castles—in the air.

Who knows? Christ may walk across those bridges—either way.

George N. Patterson is an author and journalist residing in Hong Kong. He went to China in 1946 as a missionary and traveled widely in Tibet 1947–50. After the Chinese Communist occupation of Tibet in 1951 he remained on the Indo-Tibetan border, studying and writing, until 1961. He has written ten books and scripts for three films.

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