God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [0]
The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived
and Flourished in Communist China
LIAO YIWU
Translator: Wenguang Huang
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Translator’s Note
Preface - The Mountain Path Is Red
Part I - THE TRIP TO DALI
Chapter 1 - The Cemetery
Chapter 2 - The Old Nun
Chapter 3 - The Tibetan
Chapter 4 - The Elder (I)
Chapter 5 - The Episcopalian
Chapter 6 - The Cancer Patient
Chapter 7 - The Fellowship
Part II - THE YI AND MIAO VILLAGES
Chapter 8 - The Doctor
Chapter 9 - The Martyr
Chapter 10 - The Elder (II)
Chapter 11 - The Yi Minister
Chapter 12 - The Feast
Part III - BEIJING AND CHENGDU
Chapter 13 - The Secret Visit
Chapter 14 - The Underground Minister
Chapter 15 - The Poet and the Priest
Chapter 16 - The Blind Musician
Chapter 17 - The Orphanage
Chapter 18 - The New Convert
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Translator’s Note
Liao Yiwu is one of the most prominent and outspoken contemporary writers in China today. His epic poem “Massacre,” composed in 1989 in condemnation of the government’s bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square, landed him in jail for four years. His book The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up (2008), which chronicles the lives of those on the margins of Communist society, remains banned in China. The Chinese leadership deems his writings subversive because they are critical of the socialist system.
Despite the adverse environment at home, Liao is undeterred and continues to give his curiosity full rein. In God Is Red, he turns his attention to an area hidden from the West for many years, one that remains a subject of immense controversy—the resurgence of Christianity in China. The World Christian Database estimates that there are seventy million practicing Christians in China. In a society tightly controlled by an atheist government, Christianity is China’s largest formal religion.
The number will no doubt surprise many Westerners who are more likely to associate China with incense-burning Buddhists and Taoists, or pragmatic Confucians, or red-flag-waving Communist atheists and spiritually ambivalent converts to consumerism.
Christianity entered China as early as the seventh century, and the scientific exchanges involving Jesuits in the court of Kublai Khan are well chronicled, but the religion didn’t firmly take root until the nineteenth century, when improvements in transportation and access to the interior made it possible for waves of European missionaries to work in the Middle Kingdom. Before the Communist takeover in 1949, local Chinese Christian leadership, trained abroad or tutored by missionaries, accelerated its indigenous growth. According to the China Soul for Christ Foundation, the number of followers had reached seven hundred thousand when foreign missionaries were expelled in 1949.
Before Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, many Chinese Christians were imprisoned or executed. In recent years, as the government began relaxing its control over religion, Christianity underwent explosive growth, though the Communist Party sought to keep the Christian movement in check by requiring all churches to belong to either the Three-Self Patriotic Movement or the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. The official China Daily reported in 2007 that there were an estimated forty million professed Protestants and about ten million Catholics—Beijing views Catholics as separate from mainstream Christianity—in China. While a large number of Chinese chose to recognize the political reality and practiced their religion within the government’s prescribed limits, others resisted, believing that only God, not the Party, could lay claim to their beliefs. They eschewed the “official” churches and gathered for worship in their homes—called the “house-church movement”—despite ongoing persecution by government authorities. The movement has been gaining momentum.
Liao’s interest in Christianity began in July 1998, when he was visiting a friend in Beijing and met Xu Yonghai, a neurologist-turned-preacher