God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [1]
I gathered from the scraps I could catch from their conversation that they were planning to print some banned materials. Yonghai was tense and would, every few minutes, raise his head furtively and look outside to see if anyone was there. They had apparently finished their business when Yonghai moved closer to me and whispered, “We have to be careful. I think Xu Wenli’s home is bugged.” I nodded, acknowledging his caution.
He wanted Xu Wenli’s help with a publication for China’s underground church members and, warming to me, talked about the concept of salvation through God. I knew little about Christianity at the time and was interested in what he had to say, but deep down I rejected his proselytizing. In the end, I said, “I don’t go to the church.” He laughed, “I don’t go to the church either . . . they are all government controlled.”
Having grown up under the rule of Mao, when religious practices were banned and Communism was treated like a national religion with Mao at its center, deified and worshipped, Liao remained skeptical of any forms of religion. He had scant knowledge of Christianity, which had long been demonized by the government as “spiritual opium” brought in by foreign imperialists. However, for a writer who had been in and out of jail for his writings critical of the government, Liao felt strongly about freedom of expression and freedom of religion. He did not share Yonghai’s faith but admired his courage.
After returning to his hometown in Sichuan, Liao began researching the Christian faith in China and learned about the underground Christian movement, of which Yonghai was at the forefront.
Liao maintained contact with Yonghai and engaged in long conversations with him about politics and faith until early 2004, when Yonghai’s telephone was disconnected; Yonghai had been arrested while preaching at a private home in China’s southeastern province of Zhejiang and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Yonghai’s arrest spurred Liao’s interest in Christian issues. When he traveled to Beijing again in early 2004, his friend Yu Jie, a writer and prominent Christian activist, gave him a copy of a documentary made by Yuan Zhiming, The Cross: Jesus in China. The film chronicles the history and growth of Christianity in China and sheds some light on early Christian martyrs and individual believers, who are part of China’s “house-church movement.” Seeing the extensive footage of large Christian gatherings was an eye-opening experience for Liao, and he felt compelled to include Christians in his wider project about people living at the margins of society in China today.
An opportunity presented itself in December 2004 when Liao, on the run from government agents who had raided his apartment while he was interviewing members of Falun Gong, a banned quasi-religious group, went into hiding in Yunnan. In Lijiang, he met a Chinese Christian doctor, identified throughout this book by only his family name, Sun, who gave up a lucrative city practice to do missionary work in the remote mountainous regions of southwestern China. Since Dr. Sun’s territory covered a large swath of China’s minority regions, where early European and American Christian missionaries had been active, Liao asked to join Dr. Sun on several monthlong journeys that took him to villages with large populations of the Miao and Yi people, two of China’s largest ethnic groups.
In those ethnic enclaves, impoverished by isolation and largely neglected by modernization, Liao stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community that had sprung from the work of Western missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liao was granted rare access for an outsider.
Liao interviewed Christians at a gleaming white church that “stood proudly among the mountain peaks, with a red cross displayed prominently on top of the steeple.” He witnessed a prayer session in a crammed courtyard