The Chinese Church under the People’s Republic

In May 1950 Wu Yaozong, a Protestant who worked for the national committee of the YMCA (Jones, Documents of the Three-Self Movement, Biographical Index, Wu Yao-tsung), came to Beijing with other church leaders and met the premier, Zhou Enlai, four times (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement). According to the Communist Party’s own account, Zhou told them that religious bodies must build churches that were self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating, and must rid themselves of imperialist control (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement).

In July Wu and others, forty in all, issued the statement known as the Christian Manifesto (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement). It called on Christians to give thoroughgoing support to the government’s Common Programme and, under the government’s leadership, to oppose imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. The churches were to make their members see that imperialism had made use of Christianity, to purge imperialist influences from within, and to be vigilant against American imperialism in particular (Christian Manifesto (1950), The Task in General and Fundamental Aims (1), pp. 19–20). The Party’s account says that 370,000 people had signed by the end of 1952, three fifths of China’s Protestants. It also says that the government struggled resolutely against what it calls the hostile forces undermining the movement, so that the leadership of the churches began to pass to patriotic believers. A national conference in Beijing in 1954 set up the committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and elected Wu its chairman (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement).

Not all would join. Wang Mingdao, pastor of the independent Christian Tabernacle in Beijing, opposed the movement openly, and in June 1955 he published the pamphlet “We, Because of Faith”; so the American editors who translated it in 1963 report, adding that he was arrested on 8 August of that year (Jones, Documents of the Three-Self Movement, editors’ introduction to Wang Ming-tao, We, Because of Faith). His objection was doctrinal. The movement’s leaders, he wrote, were modernists who denied the great doctrines of the Bible, and so unbelievers; he and those with him would not unite with them in any way or join any of their organisations (Wang Mingdao, We, Because of Faith (1955), pp. 99–114; the closing declaration is on pp. 113–114). The same editors wrote that the movement’s committee meeting of March 1956 could go ahead with more confidence after the suppression of Wang and of the dissenting leaders of the “Little Flock”, especially those centred on its Nanyang Road meeting house in Shanghai; they name Watchman Nee as the founder of that indigenous church (Jones, Documents of the Three-Self Movement, editors’ introduction, on the committee meeting of March 1956; Biographical Index, Ni To-sheng).

For Catholics the question was communion with Rome. Pius XII wrote to the Chinese church in 1954 that it could not be ruled with “autonomy of government”, that those who held to the “Three Autonomies” could not be considered Catholics, and that the movement’s promoters meant to set up a national church (Pius XII, Ad Sinarum gentem 10–11, 21–22). In 1958 he condemned the “patriotic” association formed among Chinese Catholics (Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum principis 10–11) and declared that bishops elected in China and consecrated without the mandate of the Apostolic See, and those who consecrated them, incurred excommunication (Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum principis 36–38, 47–48). The Party’s account, for its part, says that most dioceses had been headed by foreigners, that most were vacant once the foreign missionaries had gone, and that Chinese Catholics therefore chose and consecrated their own bishops (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement).