God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [2]
Many of those Liao interviewed for this book had never opened up to an outsider. They shared stories about “tall and blond or red-haired” foreigners saving villages during the devastating Third Pandemic of bubonic plague that swept China and much of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. They told how the foreigners promoted public hygiene and taught villagers how to protect their water supplies, how they spread literacy by building schools, improved health through their hospitals, and saved infants and young children abandoned by their parents because of poverty. Villagers also opened up to Liao and told him tales of brutal suppression and persecution of prominent Christian leaders in the Mao era, including the tragic and heroic story of Reverend Wang Zhiming, a Protestant minister executed during the Cultural Revolution and honored by Westminster Abbey as one of ten Christian martyrs of the past century, with a statue above the west entrance to the abbey.
Liao was moved by the sustaining power of faith and the optimistic spirit among the congregations he encountered. For example, after recounting the tragic story of Reverend Wang Zhiming, his son, Reverend Wang Zisheng, told Liao: “I don’t feel bitter. As Christians, we forgive the sinner and move on to the future. We are grateful for what we have today. There is so much for us to do. In our society today, people’s minds are entangled and chaotic. They need the words of the gospel now more than at any other time.”
In the cities, Liao witnessed the political tensions that dog unregistered and government-sanctioned house churches but was refreshed by the more laissez-faire approach by government authorities to religion in the countryside. Villagers treated politics and religion in a more pragmatic manner. They might have been baptized at a government Three-Self Patriotic Church but would feel no qualms about praying with and listening to leaders of a house church. “The holy figure on the cross above the pulpit is my Lord, whether it was above the pulpit at a government church or inside a living room,” a twenty-four-year-old man told Liao. Moreover, Liao found it common for families to display a portrait of Chairman Mao on one wall and a picture of Jesus on another.
In late spring 2009 Liao and I started discussing the possibility of developing a book based on his experiences in Yunnan. He wanted to explore the broader issue of spirituality in China in the post-Mao era, when the widespread loss of faith in Communism as well as rampant corruption and greed resulting from the country’s relentless push for modernization have created a faith crisis. Though God Is Red takes Christianity as its subject, its objective is to delve into the past and present experiences of a particular group of people in search of clues about China’s future.
In the summer of 2009 Liao went back to Yunnan and stayed for a month in the ancient section of Dali, a city well known for its diverse and robust religious culture. There he conducted a series of new interviews to expand the scope of this book. He visited the city’s two oldest Christian churches built by Western missionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century and tracked down local Christian leaders and activists to record their life stories.
In God Is Red, Liao has brought to readers, for the first time, a collection of eighteen loosely interlinked interviews and essays written between 2002 and 2010. The past, present, and future coexist in the pages of God Is Red. Some stories, while unique and colorful, typify the experiences of ordinary Chinese Christians and shed light on the social and political controversies that envelop and at times overshadow the issue of Christian faith in China today. Other pieces capture the dark years of the Mao era, when the claws of political persecution left no place untouched in China and when