天主教、基督教开展“三自”爱国运动 (The Catholic and Protestant churches launch the “Three-Self” patriotic movement)
The Chinese Communist Party’s own short history of how the Protestant and Catholic churches of China were brought to cut their foreign ties in the 1950s. It is cited as the Party’s statement of its policy and of the dates.
The page is an official retrospective, not a document of the 1950s. It says that Christianity came to China together with imperialist aggression, and that the Party’s aim after 1949 was to free the churches from imperialist influence and make them self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. It gives the Party’s dates for the steps taken: Zhou Enlai’s four talks with Wu Yaozong and others in May 1950, the manifesto of July 1950, the Central Committee’s directives of 1951, the Protestant national conference of 1954 and the Catholic one of 1957.
It speaks of the state’s part without disguise, saying that the government struggled against those who opposed the movement so that leadership of the churches passed to “patriotic” believers. It gives no account of what happened to those opponents. See the Chinese Church under the People’s Republic.
Cited in
- 1950 to 1954, firm date