China: The Lonely Remnant

Second of Two Parts

Reports from visitors on politically arranged tours that everybody is happy in the New China simply do not square with the fact that “freedom swimmers” by the thousands readily risk their lives to exchange the glories of Mao’s utopia for the thirty-five square feet of resettlement space that Hong Kong provides for each refugee. Most flee in fear of reprisal for their own extreme deeds in local situations during the Cultural Revolution.

China has currently become a funding “sales point” for evangelical enterprises. But veteran China-watchers disagree sharply over the range and depth of evangelical effort, and they question the propriety of some promotional claims. Remarkable reports have been dispersed, including estimates that perhaps millions of evangelical believers survive in China, and that the underground Christian population may number as high as one in forty. Some Christian workers directly accuse others of exaggerating evangelical penetration and potential in Mao’s China, while those so accused insist that their critics distort the facts and know better.

The journalist George N. Patterson, former missionary to China, contends that reports of mass conversions and baptisms in China, and of the smuggling in of hundreds of thousands of Bibles from Hong Kong, are spurious. Patterson argues that most of these Bibles, promotionally funded as destined for Red China, are stored instead in church and school basements in Hong Kong and environs, and that reports of vast multitudes of secret believers are self-refuting.

The China Bible Fund, established in Kowloon by George and Ruth Fox Holmes, claims to have distributed 380,000 Scripture portions and Bibles in Chinese during the past nine years to churches and agencies promising to redistribute these solely to believers going into mainland China. The Fox Holmeses contend that these Bibles reach their target, carried by returning evangelical students and Christians visiting relatives, especially by church members in the New Territories who make periodic visits, or by seamen traveling to Shanghai and fishermen who sell their catch in Hong Kong for higher prices but have permits to buy victuals in ports along the mainland China coast.

Customs officials have sporadically intercepted these Bibles, or held them for later pickup at time of emigration. In one case, a customs inspector, clearing a Bible, identified himself as a Christian. In another instance a departing student found the customs official reading a Bible that had been confiscated at entry. How many Bibles get across the border, however, is a moot point. Many of the Bibles sent to pastors in the New Territories for redistribution were actually put to use locally in worship services and in extension churches or in evangelical schools. But the Fox Holmeses insist that used copies are more readily deployed into China than new copies. More recently 20,000 copies have been printed in the new Simplified Script. In the New Territories, where the traditional script is used and the newer versions therefore have no commercial value, many of these Bibles reportedly are stacked away in the churches. These, in any case, would have to go into Red China new and unused. Perhaps half the 500 cooperating pastors, when questioned, openly say, “Surely you know that Communists are on the watch, and that it is quite impossible to get Bibles into China.” The Fox Holmeses say that these workers are merely being secretive.

In any event, some Bibles have indubitably gotten into China, and the Communist hostility to Christianity justifies some risk ventures, however unsure the returns. In some cases where young people had earlier left a Bible and led their families to Christ, house churches are known to have begun.

For two years the Bible Society has sponsored a radio program from Hong Kong broadcasting the Bible at dictation speed in the new Simplified Script, hopeful that copyists are making good use of these materials on Chinese soil. Far East Broadcasting Company has for years broadcast many hours daily in five languages to the Chinese people. Interviews with refugees have confirmed that there is at least some hearing of evangelical programs.

Any overview of the Christian situation in China remains exasperatingly incomplete. There seems to be considerably more tolerance of Christians along the seacoast of East China facing Taiwan. Although church buildings cannot be used for services, believers there meet as groups for worship services and the Lord’s Supper, and various evangelical clusters are quite aware of one another’s activities. But elsewhere in China, followers of the Risen Lord face greater risks.

Not infrequently Chinese evangelical believers returning on visas for short visits will report the winning of some kinsman to Christ, and others find that some relative or other has in the interim found the Saviour. Yet one Hong Kong girl of nineteen, a devout Roman Catholic, told me that she had recently visited her father after eight years’ separation, and that she found nobody practicing Christianity privately or publicly and remains to be convinced of more encouraging reports by others. Some refugees who have run the border blockades say that only in some few cities have churches survived; these are scant in number and represent mergers of members from several earlier works. Since group evangelism is prohibited and new members are disallowed, even these colonies are officially condemned to a slow natural death.

It is of course possible that mainland China shelters many secret believers—but who can confidently tell what is secret? The situation will alter somewhat if Fox Holmes, who served thirty years ago as a British consul-general in one of the Chinese provinces, can actually persuade Mao’s government, as he hopes, to permit the printing of the Bible in mainland China so it will not be derogated as a foreign book. Not a few China-watchers consider this an idle dream for the present.

A remarkable discovery of the Asian Congress on Evangelism, held in Singapore in 1968, was the evident refusal of dispersed Chinese in Asia to yield mainland China to an atheistic future. Today, when slits are lengthening in the bamboo curtain, one wonders whether Christians have perhaps wearied in prayer at a moment when God may be manifesting his power in new and unforeseen ways. There are some reasons for bright hope, and nobody has summarized them better than a Lutheran missionary, Anders Hanson, who was born in China and has served in Hong Kong for quarter of a century since mainland doors closed. What argues for an ongoing Christian future in China, he contends, is, first, God’s provision for the survival of his cause in lands where the Gospel has struck many roots, and then the ingenuity of the Chinese themselves in preserving globally what they believe, and doing so on an underground and subculture basis.

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