Wu Yaozong
Chinese Protestant leader of the YMCA who, after meetings with Zhou Enlai in 1950, issued the Christian Manifesto with thirty-nine others and in 1954 became chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.
Wu worked for the national committee of the YMCA, and the American editors of the movement’s documents call him the founder of the Three-Self Movement and its chairman from the start (Jones, Documents of the Three-Self Movement, Biographical Index, Wu Yao-tsung). The Communist Party’s account says that he and others met Zhou Enlai four times in Beijing in May 1950, that he and others, forty in all, issued the manifesto in July, and that the national conference of 1954 elected him chairman of the movement’s committee (Communist Party of China, account of the Three-Self patriotic movement). The manifesto asks Christians to support the government and to purge imperialist influence from the churches (Christian Manifesto (1950), preamble and Fundamental Aims, pp. 19–20). See the Chinese Church under the People’s Republic.
In the timeline
- 1950 to 1954, firm dateThe Chinese Church under the People’s Republic
Protestant leaders in the new People’s Republic sign a manifesto pledging loyalty to the state and an end to foreign ties, and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement is organised. Some pastors refuse to join, and Rome rejects a self-governing Catholic church.