Yaxue Cao, April 26, 2026
Introduction
If we are to take stock of the Christian experience in China, the story of Pastor Yang Hua (仰华) may provide a good example.
A third-generation Christian, the history of his family’s faith spans ninety years and can be traced back to the work of the China Inland Mission started by Hudson Taylor, one of the greatest missionaries to China.
From an evangelist at 16 years old to the leader of the Living Stone Church in Guiyang, the provincial capital of the southwestern province of Guizhou province, Yang Hua’s personal journey reflects the trials and tribulation of Chinese Christians over the past four decades.
A Christian family in the remote Chinese interior
When the first sisters of the Friedenshort Deaconess Mission[1] arrived in Guizhou from Germany via Hong Kong in 1905, they settled in a remote village 6,000 feet above the sea level in the northwest mountains. Guizhou is landlocked, separated from the traditional center of Chinese civilization by hundreds of miles of meandering mountains and dense subtropical forests. The sky was perpetually shrouded in wispy clouds, and the people lived in isolation and abject poverty. The sisters did what other missionaries from faraway lands were there to do: they dispensed medicines, schooled children, and taught the Bible. In time, they added local workers, elders, and pastors to their organization. As an associate of the China Inland Mission, they journeyed on foot on days’ end to neighboring villages and towns in the area of Bijie (毕节) to evangelize. They endured famines, diseases, and the constant outbreak of fighting between Han Chinese and the numerous aboriginal tribes.
They had success among the tribes of Miao, Nosu, and other tribes, growing the number of Christians and earning respect in the region. But not so much among the Han Chinese who, while being just as impoverished, regarded the tribal peoples with disdain and held deep cultural hostility towards the teachings of Christianity. In time, however, “not a few [had] been won through dispensary work, for this is also an appalling need” among the Chinese, according to a 1933 report by the leader of the mission.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Yang Hua’s grandfather stood out as one of the few Friedenshort Mission’s converts in his Han Chinese village in Nayong County in the region, just over one hundred dwellers.
In the 1930s, when the Red Army passed through Guizhou on the Long March, they kidnapped two missionaries and demanded a large ransom for their release. They also arrested church workers. Despite this, the missionaries persisted and continued to grow their presence. The Chinese Communist Party, being atheist by doctrine, ideologically regards all religions as “spiritual opium.” Christianity in particular is viewed as one dimension of Western imperialism.
After the CCP came to power in 1949, it expelled foreign missionaries and missionary organizations, and Guizhou was no exception. Although the Party nominally allowed freedom of religious belief, it crafted a nationalist narrative in opposition to religious faith, requiring Chinese Christians to practice their religion within an anti-imperialist, patriotic framework. It established the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee of the Protestant Churches in China” (Three-Self) to classify and control churches and believers. Church leaders and churchgoers were required to denounce the crimes of imperialism in so-called “accusation meetings.” Those unwilling to participate were labeled “imperialist stragglers” or “counterrevolutionaries” — labels that could and did get Christians thrown in jail.
Yang Hua’s grandfather was spared this fate, as he was an illiterate man who practiced his faith simply and quietly. For peasants like himself, living faraway in a remote village, whether one belonged to the Three-Self movement or not was not a pressing concern.
During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong called for the eradication of all “cow demons and snake spirits,” Christians were forbidden to gather openly and could only meet in secret. They found a cave in the mountains. Devout brothers and sisters dared not go during the day. Flashlights were not available in every household, and even when they were, people dared not use them. Instead, under the light of the moon, they would travel from different directions to the cave to gather for worship, and then quietly disperse before dawn to avoid detection.
Yang Hua, one of six siblings, was born Li Guozhi (李国志) in 1976, the year Mao Zedong died. His adopted name means “looking up to Jehovah” — containing in it one of the characters used to transliterate the name of the Christian God. By the time he was old enough to remember things, the Christian villagers had resumed their normal worship services.
Every Sunday, regardless of weather, Christians from several surrounding villages would gather for worship. Families who raised pigs or cattle would cut grass in advance, and each household would prepare all the dry food — mainly roasted potatoes — for the day. They had no dedicated church building. On the day of worship, Yang Hua and his entire family, young and old, would walk for over an hour along the mountain paths to meet at a villager’s home. There were no chairs in these homes. Instead, large stones were placed on the dirt floor with wooden planks laid across them to form benches. Dozens of adults and children would sit on these makeshift seats in rows, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, singing hymns, kneeling in prayer, and listening as five or six elders took turns preaching. At noon, they would eat the roasted potatoes they had brought with them.
While his grandfather attended church services merely as a pious member of the congregation, his father was a church leader, and one of the few elders. They had no pastor. He remembers his dad, a farmer just as everyone else, would often be called on during the night, much like a country doctor, to attend to a sick child or dying elderly so as to offer the assurance, hope, and comfort of prayers and fasting.
Evangelists from Henan province
David Aikman, former Beijing Bureau Chief of the Time Magazine, reporting on Christianity in China, wrote that Henan province, in the heart of China, ought to be famous for something else besides Shaolin Temple and its monk martial artists. “Henan,” he reported, “is where three of China’s largest Christian house church networks got started,”[2] expanded across China from the countryside to large metropolitan centers during the 1980s and 1990s before the advent of urban house churches.
Christian faith had rather deep roots in Henan. It was one of the provinces where the China Inland Mission had greater success through decades of work from the late 19th century up to the Communist takeover. All else being equal, more accessible geography helped. “By 1949, there were at least fifty-five CIM churches”[3] and a number of other Christian missions too in Henan, and a large crop of Chinese Christian leaders and church workers and, in many households, three generations of Chinese Christians.
With the regime change, an endless array of political campaigns ensued aiming at routing out the remnants of “the Old Society.” The campaign to suppress “counter-revolutionaries,” the anti-”rightist” campaign, the Four Cleanups, and then the Cultural Revolution. Prominent church leaders were thrown into jail for resisting the official government supervisory organ for protestants in China, the Three-Self. Ordinary rural Christians became targets of struggle sessions, beatings, and torture.
The revival and expansion began in the 1970s when the Cultural Revolution was still ongoing. Traveling evangelists and teachers moved from village to village to evangelize and train the younger generation. One of the crucial figures in this endeavor was Li Tian’en (李天恩). A native of Fengcheng county, Henan, he was a third-generation Christian, and trained at the Inner China Baptist Theological Seminary (華內浸會神學院) in the city of Kaifeng in the 1940s. Still a young man, he had escaped the wave of arrests in the 1950s, preaching in the countryside outside Shanghai. In 1960, he was detained and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Shortly after his release, he went back to his hometown in Henan, and started training the next generation of evangelists. In 1974, he was arrested again and subsequently sentenced to death when he organized an underground training session attended by four thousand Christians. By mere happenstance owing to the political vicissitudes of that period, his death sentence was postponed three times. By 1979, Chairman Mao was dead, the Gang of Four tried, and the Cultural Revolution over. Li Tian’en was released. He spent much of the 1980s traveling all over China, preaching and training younger Christians.
According to David Aikman’s report, during the 1980s, Fangcheng Fellowship and other networks of house churches in Henan developed a pattern in their evangelism. “They would train young people — some still teenagers, some rather new Christians — for just a few weeks, then send them out in pairs all over China” with a couple of hundred yuan and very little provisions.[4]
A senior leader of the fellowship told Aikman that the young evangelists were “told to evangelize everyone. They will not pass anyone on the street or in their journey without sharing the Gospel.” The same leader said, “by the early 1990s, the Fangcheng fellowship had sent evangelistic teams to thirty provinces and municipal regions, including China’s largest cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. The number of Christians associated with the network was around 5 million.”[5]
In the late 1980s, some of these evangelists, whether from Fangcheng Fellowship or other similar Christian networks in Henan, visited Yang Hua’s hometown in the mountains of Guizhou.
Father
The evangelists from Henan varied in age, young and old. Multiple groups came and went, not staying for more than a couple of days in one place. They used aliases to conceal their identity. They spoke about the origin of the Three-Self Movement and its true purpose, and why true Christians must listen to God, not a government organization designed to contain and restrain Christians, forbidding believers from evangelizing or making any reference to the idea of the Second Coming, among many other rules set by this body that ran counter to Christian beliefs.
They brought copies of the Bible. Until the 1980s, there was not a single printing house in China that printed Bibles and there was no place to purchase Bibles legitimately; an American veteran based in Hong Kong started an “underground railway” to smuggle Bibles to believers across China.
Yang Hua’s father, a leader of Christians in his village and nearby villages took the advice of the Henan evangelists to heart. They quietly severed their connections to the Three-Self Church and became a house church, so to speak, without a name.
In the early 1980s when Hu Yaobang was the General Secretary of the Communist Party, he treated religion with tolerance and the Party’s policy announcements reflected his ideas. According to the memoir of Zhang Tan (张坦), an official of the religious affairs in Guizhou provincial government at the time who later was baptized at the Living Stone Church, when Hu Jintao, the future General Secretary of the party, was appointed as the provincial party secretary in 1985, he spoke admirably of the English missionary Samuel Pollard and his work. Hu reportedly said, “In 1905, a British missionary named Sam Pollard came to a village called Shimenkan in Weining County, in the Bijie region of Guizhou. It was an extremely poor, desolate, and harsh place. He spread scientific knowledge and Western culture, leaving behind a spirit of sacrifice and dedication. … Through his actions, Pollard showed people that progressive science and culture, combined with perseverance and hard work, could achieve extraordinary educational development even in impoverished and underdeveloped regions. [6]
However, the signals of tolerance didn’t last long; nor did Hu Jintao admire Pollard for his Christian faith that brought him to China in the first place. By the mid-1980s, Zhang Tan said, “I discovered that religious policy was increasingly requiring us to be on guard against people in religious communities, especially against those whose faith was genuine.”[7]
At Yang Hua’s village, the raids against “evil religion” began as soon as the authorities found out that the village Christians were “independent” now. The nearest police station was a two-and-a-half hour walk away, but they came regularly. They stormed the room where the congregation gathered on Sundays, breaking the wooden benches and the chalk board, and smashing the donation box with hammers.
Thanks to the remoteness of the village, once the police left, the congregation picked up the pieces and continued their worship, knowing that the marauders wouldn’t show up again that quickly.
Homes were frequently raided too, often during the nights. Villagers hid their Bibles in the large plastic bags along with the corn that was stored there, but the police seemed to know just where to look and would rummage through the corn to find the books.
Police pursuits, raids, and altercations became commonplace. Yang Hua couldn’t remember how many times his father was detained, sometimes in the police station, other times at the county’s detention center. Sometimes for a few days, and other times for months on end. The believers factored such ordeals into the meaning of the Christian faith, and being humiliated and persecuted was part of it. After all, that’s the story of Jesus.
In detention, his father was cursed and beaten. They wanted him to quit leading others. “Keep it to yourself,” as they would say, “all will be well.” Once, the police made his father stand against the wall and jumped up to kick his chest. He coughed copious volumes of blood. Fearing that he might die in detention, the police told the family to come pick him up with a fee of 300 yuan. The family couldn’t afford it. In the end they sent him home, leaving him at the door.
Once, the police detained the four boys of the family, Yang Hua and his three older brothers, asking about his father’s activities. The boys refused to answer. They were then ordered to kneel on the floor. The police harangued them about their father’s evildoing. Still they didn’t talk. A policeman pointed a handgun at Yang Hua and pressed the barrel against his forehead. “Talk! Or I’ll blow your head off!” Getting nothing out of the three obstinate brothers, the police had to let them go in the end, but took their father, again.
In one of the more sweeping raids, several official cars, including that of the police, came to the village and arrested Yang Hua’s father and another evangelist. None of the officers or government officials handling religious affairs wanted to sit in the same car with the two farmers, whom they deemed dirty, so they crammed into cars that led the way. One of the officials’ cars lost control on the treacherous mountain paths and fell off a cliff. The next day, the provincial Communist Party newspaper and TV reported that three were killed “in the line of duty” and two wounded when rounding up “believers of evil religion.”
The event was big news back in the day, and has since become well-known lore in the community.
In reprisal, Yang Hua’s father and his evangelist partner were each sentenced to one year in prison.
[1] Hattaway, Paul (2018), Guizhou, the Precious Province (p.120), Asia Harvest.
[2] Aikman, David (2003). Jesus in Beijing (p.73). Regnery.
[3] Ibid, 74.
[4] Ibid, 77.
[5] Ibid, 78.
[6] 张坦(2016). 从崇拜柏格理到顺服上帝 http://shimenkan.org.cn/book/axin/zt/
[7] Ibid.
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