Yaxue Cao, May 5, 2026
(Continued from Part One)
Clandestine Bible training
Faith was for Yang Hua a habit before it was a conviction. Like other Christian families with small children, he was carried to Sunday worship in a basket on his parents’ backs when he was little; when he was old enough, he walked on foot. He learned hymns by rote. Every evening his father gathered the family to hear him read passages from their dog-eared Bible in traditional Chinese.
But he didn’t believe there was a God.
He was a rambunctious boy and a natural leader. Though short-statured, he often led the charge of one gang against another when fights broke out among the boys. The teachers gave him some grace because he excelled in schoolwork, but his father delivered him harsh corporal punishment when parents complained about his antics. On occasions like this, he sought comfort from his grandpa, who, unlike his father, was tender and doting.
In the countryside, children worked. After school, he and his siblings helped around the house, working in the fields, cutting grass to feed the pigs and cows, or gathering wood for cooking and heating. In his memory, his family’s crops were never as good as those of the other households, as his parents were too destitute to afford adequate fertilizers. There was never enough food, or enough of anything else for that matter. What occupied the mind of the youngster was the bitterness of poverty and a keen sense of injustice.
His idea of the future was to go to college and become a bureaucrat of some sort — that was the limited world he could see.
One year, his older sister fell mentally ill. Without any discernable reason, she transformed from a shy and modest young woman into a different person entirely. She would talk for hours on end as if in an incessant dialogue with an invisible companion; she would roam in the field after dark, sometimes streaking in public. Non-Christian villagers said the family’s religious practices had irked the Chinese gods and incurred their punishment; their father said she was suffering from demonic possession. Everyone in the family was terrified, the children in particular.
For weeks, his parents fasted and prayed. One day during prayer with several Christian elders, their father ordered the demon to leave his daughter. She fell to the floor, prostrated as though dead. When she came to and sat up a while later, she was oblivious of anything that had happened. From that point on, she made a complete recovery and never again had a similar episode.
Aikman observed that “it is difficult to investigate the phenomenon of Christianity in China today without hearing stories of miraculous healings. …These ‘healing’ stories were particularly common during and just after the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and early 1980s, when it was still risky in many parts of China to attend any kind of Christian worship service.”[1] It is hard to estimate to what extent incidents like this provided conditions for the seed of faith to germinate. But for Yang Hua, it was what made him believe. From then on, he believed in God — a living, benevolent God. Fear was out, faith was in.
In 1992, at sixteen, he quit school in his last year of junior high and signed up for a training program to become an evangelist. It was one of many such training sessions organized by Christian networks in Henan across China. Sixty or so youngsters, boys and girls, in their late teens and early twenties, travelled about 70 kilometers on foot to a location, a Christian villager’s home deep in the mountains.
The nearest motorway was a two-hour walk away. A few older men stood sentinel by the road at the foothill leading up to the house. In case the police came, they would alert those at the training camp. But nothing happened — it appeared that the camp was so remote that it escaped the notice of the authorities entirely.
The youngsters slept on bamboo matting over straw bedding; girls in the rooms, boys in the hayloft in the pigsty.
The schedule was demanding. Every day, they got up at 5:30 in the morning and went to bed at 11:00 pm. Monday to Saturday, the day was broken up into several segments for Scripture reading, especially the Gospels; learning worship songs; congregational prayer; church history, and how to evangelize. Saturday afternoon was time for fetching water from a nearby well and washing clothes.
They didn’t have desks. Pupils sat on a low stool with a notebook on their knees to copy Bible passages and take notes.
Two women from Henan were their resident instructors, while visiting pastors and elders from other parts of the country came for a week or two to lecture. Women staffers cooked and administered. They ate pickle and bean stew for nearly every meal.
In the early 2000s, David Aikman visited two of such underground seminaries, one in an unidentified coastal region, one in a major city in southwestern China. He wrote, “it struck me as almost astonishing that, as Chinese society plunged ever more giddily into the ups and downs of an entrepreneurial and consumer-based lifestyle, six-eight talented young people from several provinces would voluntarily detach themselves from it all for a near-monastic six-month apprenticeship as impecunious Bible students. But as I was to discover, Emmanuel Seminary was only one among hundreds of such underground Protestant Christian centers across the whole of China.”
To his surprise, he found that admission was highly competitive as more youth desired to acquire Bible training than there were enough openings to accommodate them all.
All of them were brimming with optimism, some fantastically so. He quoted one student as saying, “We believe there will come a time when most of China will become Christian. We all believe that before the 2008 Olympic Games [in Beijing] there will be a revival in China. God chose Tiananmen Square for us to worship the Lord. Not only in Tiananmen, but the sports stadiums themselves.”[2]
Evangelizing at 16
After the six-month training in 1992, Yang Hua adopted this name, and embarked on a journey with his partner, a similar-aged lad. Their luggage consisted of a small backpack with one set of change clothes, a toothbrush, a towel, and a copy of the Bible. They had no money, and received no stipend from anyone. Indeed, it was a test of belief unfamiliar to most people, and they believed that God would aid their mission wherever they went.
The national life in the decade of 1980s was that of awakening from a dark, prolonged nightmare. Having reinvented its program from the brink of self-inflicted destruction with “reform and opening up,” the Communist Party had quickly gone through what they called “redressing the wronged, the falsely accused, and the erroneously punished.” New ideas and lectures emerged, exciting young minds on college campuses; entrepreneurial vendors appeared on streets in contrast to the lifeless Soviet style state-run stores; and in the countryside, peasants were allowed to break the yoke of the Communes to grow crops on allotted land and sell their harvest in “free markets.” “Economic special zones” were designated in the south and along the coast to attract investment and to emulate the economic success of some of its East Asian neighbors.
But even at the very beginning of this new era, the Communist Party was never at ease with the historical turn it had just made. Its vigilance was never too far below the surface. Shortly after embarking on what they called “the great thought liberation debate” within the ranks of the Party in 1978-1979, Deng Xiaoping put a brake on it by emphasizing the “Four Cardinal Principles,” namely, upholding the socialist road; upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship;upholding the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); and upholding Marxism–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. In short, the fundamentals were immovable, and things were to stay that way.
In response to the thirst for ideas and everything new and eye-opening, during the course of 1980s, the Party first launched campaigns against “Spiritual Pollution” and “bourgeois liberalization,” culminating finally in the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre when tanks rolled down the avenues in the heart of Beijing, and the soldiers’ machine guns mowed down students and residents alike, culling their calls for freedom and democracy.
Yang Hua knew nothing of these events. Where he had lived, there was no TV, no radio, and as a matter of fact, no electricity. Their lighting setup — a jar of kerosene and a wick — had not changed for generations. The farthest place he had been was the township where he went to middle school, two hours of walk from home. He had never been to Nayong (纳雍), the county seat, nor Bijie (毕节), a regional city. The provincial capital Guiyang (贵阳) was a faraway blur. He had not the slightest idea how big China was and what was going on in the rest of the country and the world.
Starting from their own region in the northwest of the province, the two evangelists walked on foot from village to village. They would tell their audience the story of Genesis; the original sin; the birth, the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the salvation. Some villagers would voice their objections: we don’t believe a foreign God; we worship our ancestors. To which the two young evangelists replied: God is the only true God and He has no nationality.
An important part of their evangelism was to pray for the sick. In a time when, in the countryside, both doctors and medicines were scarce, the sick and the family embraced the ecclesiastical treatment readily. Improvement was witnessed, and miracles did happen. In rural China, many converts came to the Christian faith through healing.
Oftentimes, the two youths were able to stay with a Christian family who fed them and gave them lodging for the night. Other times they turned themselves into temporary laborers working in the field to earn their keep.
There were times when they had no place to stay and the next stop was too far, they would stay in the mountains, kneeling and praying for guidance and protection, for people in this place to know Him. Piety was the light in the engulfing darkness.
At daybreak, they would hit the road again.
Occasionally, they were picked up by police for questioning. Thankfully nothing worse came of it.
Yang Hua said it was during these peripatetic years that he read the Bible the most, over and over again, and it was also when his faith experienced the steadiest growth.
They journeyed through northwest Guizhou province for six months. There they entered the neighboring Yunnan province where they wandered for a year. His eldest brother, an evangelist before him, had settled in the adjacent Guangxi province, which is on the southern Chinese coast and borders Vietnam.
In 1994, Yang Hua joined his brother and served in a church with him. Come 1995, an opportunity arose that brought him to service at a house church in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang.
[1] Aikman, David (2003). Jesus in Beijing (p.76). Regnery.
[2] Ibid, 125.
Yaxue Cao is the founder and editor of China Change.
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