Yaxue Cao, May 30, 2026
(Continued from Part One: The Forefathers and Part Two: An Evangelist at 16)
‘My burden is in Guizhou’
When Yang Hua left home as a youth of 16, little did he know he was part of a vast undercurrent movement that would deeply influence Chinese society in the years to come.
In the fourth year of his journey in 1996, he came to Wenzhou in Zhejiang province on the eastern Chinese coast. At the time, it was already a city of over one million souls, or a total of seven million including its rural districts. For Yang Hua, it was a special place to be.In every way possible, it was the diametric opposite of the backwater Guizhou he had come from. It was one of the hottest places in China for commerce, with factories dotting the city proper and surrounding townships — making products such as garments, shoes, sunglasses, furniture, lighting fixtures, cigarette lighters, and small home appliances that were sold around the world. Wenzhou was also known as “China’s Jerusalem” for its large concentration of Christians and their confident, rather public demonstrations of faith.
Depending on the source, it was estimated that up to 15 percent of Wenzhou’s population were Christians, consisting of people of all ages and all walks of life. Cao Nanlai (曹南来), a researcher at the Renmin University of China who conducted field research from 2004 to 2006, cited this number in his introduction to the Chinese version of his book Constructing China’s Jerusalem – Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou. Today, the percentage is likely higher, meaning that we are reckoning with well over one million Christians in the area of administrative Wenzhou.
One of the factors that accounts for the prevalence of Christianity in Wenzhou are its deep historical roots in the area. The first church in Wenzhou was built in 1877 by George Stott, a Scottish missionary of the China Inland Mission. But before 1949, three of the six missionary societies in Wenzhou had been established by local Christian leaders. Many Christians in Wenzhou are of the third or even fourth generation. This mattered, so much so that the Communist Party selected Wenzhou for its 1958 experiment in creating “a religion-free area” to root out Christianity altogether. Christians were forced underground for the next two decades. After Mao’s death, when China embarked on reform, Christians in Wenzhou roared back to life. Cao described how Christian factory owners preached to their workers and applied Christian ethics in management; how Handel’s Messiah was played during Christmas banquets with thousands of participants. According to Cao, in the 1980s alone,[1] over 500 new churches in Wenzhou were built, while churches built in previous generations had been restored. The church-building trend – both Protestant and Catholic – would continue for two more decades as Wenzhou’s prosperous Christians showcased their faith and wealth, with bigger, more elaborate churches — some in the style of European cathedrals — appearing in places ranging from downtown streets to rural fields.
In Wenzhou, Christian factory owners and businessmen felt they were blessed by both the state and by God. They were good taxpayers, they observed all the laws and regulations, they did good for society, and they were proud Chinese loyal to the political system. They felt valued by the local government, and, after over a decade of economic reforms, they rejected the earlier generation’s mindset of fear and confrontation developed under the Maoist repressions. Even though it troubled them somewhat that their churches could not obtain proper registration from the authorities, they didn’t think too much of it. They were comfortable about their relationship with the government, which at the time of Cao’s field research, was friendly and stable. “Indeed, they [the Christian residents] feel so empowered that some even imagine conducting evangelization in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.”[2]
Yang Hua served in a church of several hundred congregants in Wenzhou, which was a vast improvement to his impecunious missionary journey across the southwest provinces. The church leaders liked him very much and hoped that he would stay with them to be an evangelist, marry a local Christian girl, build a house with the help of the church, and set down roots. For Yang Hua, it was an enticing prospect no doubt, but also unsettling: he had left home to answer a spiritual calling, not to seek a spot of comfort.
“Does Guizhou also have a lot of factories?” “Are there many people in Guizhou believing in Christ?” “Are there churches there?” Members of the congregation would pepper him out of curiosity.
Before long, the voice that came from within him was crystal clear: “My burden is in Guizhou.”
After a brief sojourn in Wenzhou, he thanked the church leaders for their invitation and returned to Guizhou, taking residency in Guiyang, the provincial capital.
In the 1990s, there emerged a “Bible fever” or “Christianity fever” on university campuses and among the intelligentsia in China. In large measure, it was a continuation of the search and debate for the path to future China that had begun in the late 1970s and grew very active throughout the 1980s. The underlying understanding was that communism was dead, nobody really believed in it, and authoritarianism had no future, despite the Communist Party’s imposed narratives of legitimacy. The old translations of St. Augustin and Thomas Aquinas were republished; Paul Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundations and many other Christian-themed works were newly translated and published in the 1990s, and among them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism were wildly popular. This small but influential band of academics were not Christians; they called themselves “cultural Christians.” If anything, they looked down on Chinese Christians who at that time were few in number and mostly elderly people in cities, or peasants in the countryside.
Many foreigners were teaching English in China, some of whom had strong Christian ties or were outright evangelists. They held Bible study sessions, worship, and Christian holiday celebrations for students in their apartments. Pastors and evangelists from the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea came to China too. Christmas became fashionable among young people.
It was against this backdrop that Yang Hua joined a campus fellowship at the Guizhou University of Industry (贵州工业大学) after he returned. Though of the same age as the college students, he was already an experienced evangelist. Police had their eyes on these groups already and were conducting searches in dorms and going after them. To evade notice, he would lead the group of 20 or so young people to parks and hills for their weekly meetings. Singing hymns was one of their favorite activities.
During his ministry work on university campuses, he met a young man and fellow Guizhou native named Su Tianfu (苏天富). United by their shared devotion, the two became close friends. Su was the first Christian in his family, having converted while studying fine arts at a teachers’ college. After graduation, he found a job as an art teacher, but he soon felt a calling and resigned from the school to become a preacher. However, he had received no formal theological training. Through church networks, he went to Guangzhou to study theology and practice evangelism.
In 1997, Yang Hua went to a place called Yachihe (鸭池河), about two hours from Guiyang by bus. Nestled among mist-shrouded mountains, it was the base of the Ninth Hydropower Bureau of China — a state-owned enterprise that built dams. He went there to lead a few local Christians to spread the gospel. They visited homes, told Bible stories, prayed for the sick, helped those in need, and organized house church gatherings. Gradually, more and more people began attending. One of the brothers worked as the caretaker for the Party members’ activity room at the Ninth Hydropower Bureau, but since no one actually used the room, they borrowed it as a meeting place.
Yang Hua worked there for more than two years, and grew the congregation to around one hundred people. Then, he left the congregation to the ministry to newer evangelists and returned to Guiyang.
Around the same time, his friend Su Tianfu also returned to Guiyang with his wife whom he had met in Guangzhou and married recently. Yang Hua picked them up at the train station. As was the case with Yang Hua, Su had also felt that his calling was in his home province. Shortly afterwards, Yang Hua also started a family. His bride was a nurse he had met at house gatherings. Her name was Wang Hongwu (王洪雾).
Yang Hua and Su began a partnership that has lasted to this day. In Guiyang, just as the new century was dawning, they each led a family gathering. They also began to build a network of Christians in the province, bringing copies of the Bible, books, and videotapes to the countryside. Starting in 2003, they also organized workers on missions to areas without churches, both long and short-term.
They were keenly aware of the remarkable legacy left by the China Inland Mission in Guizhou, and the fact that some Miao and Yi villages were entirely Christian — a phenomenon virtually unheard of among Han Chinese communities. But there was much work to be done, much like a dilapidated monument in need of renewal.
During the 1980s and 1990s, most of the preachers working in Guizhou came from other places. Yang Hua and Su Tianfu believed that Guizhou needed to build its own organic missionary network and reduce its dependence on Christians from out of province. Between 2003 and 2008, they organized training programs in Guiyang to help house churches in rural areas train their own local ministry workers. The programs included both long-term and short-term training. For rural young people hoping to become evangelists, the training would last six months or a year; for middle-aged brothers and sisters already serving as preachers, the training was several weeks. Over the course of five years, the programs trained more than one hundred rural evangelists.
All of this was the nuts-and-bolts work of China’s evangelical churches, in the same vein as the work carried out a century earlier by the China Inland Mission. The problem was that, in the Guizhou of a century later, there was no support network for the work these two young men wanted to do. Financial contributions from their own congregation in Guiyang, which consisted of just a couple dozen believers, amounted to little. Donations from outside sources came only sporadically; when they did occur, the money was put into training, while their own livelihoods were supported by their wives’ wages.
That was not all. Their activities attracted the attention of the local authorities. Over time, being visited and threatened by the police became a part of their routine. Once, someone tipped them off saying that the police were in the process of investigating them and planning their arrest. It didn’t happen, but it was a harbinger of danger, and they knew it.
By 2008, Yang Hua and Su were at the end of the road. Their work throughout the province was constantly subject to various kinds of interference, and their resources dried up to the point that they were unable to afford rent for the classroom they used for training.
They knew that, to move forward, they would need to establish a church, a real church. They got on their knees and prayed for guidance.
[1] Cao, Nanlai (2011). Constructing China’s Jerusalem – Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (p.2). Stanford University Press.
[2] Ibid, 32.
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