Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  “Heng,” he told Charity. The name meant “perseverance.”

  “A good name,” Ni Guizhen responded.

  Perseverance. It was a feeling that weighed heavily on everyone in the room. Mornings like this were a welcome break from their unsettled lives. Both Ni Guizhen and her sister-in-law had serious health issues. Ni Guizhen suffered insomnia so intense that the only way she could sleep was with a nightly sedative plus a tranquilizer. Charity’s health was no better. She was losing her eyesight due to diabetes, and her blood pressure sometimes reached precariously high levels.

  Stress contributed to the frail health of both women, for neither the sister nor wife of Watchman Nee had heard from him since the police had taken him away three years earlier.

  The day Watchman Nee was arrested had been a Thursday, April 10, 1952. Charity had been with him in the office of the China Biological and Chemical Laboratories (CBC). The business was being merged with a state-run company in the northeastern city of Shenyang, but the merger was suspended by government order pending a review of accounts and tax payments.

  Without any notice, agents from the Public Security Bureau (PSB) in Shenyang arrived at the CBC compound in Shanghai. They told Watchman Nee that he was needed immediately at the other company. Looking out the window of the office, Charity saw the agents standing on either side of her husband as they led him to a waiting car and drove away.

  On a train to Shenyang, officers formally arrested him. Watchman Nee, forty-eight, was charged as part of the “Five-Antis” campaign against illegal activity by the business class. The company was accused of tax evasion and stealing national property. An employee for Watchman Nee’s business had informed investigators that CBC inflated the value of a boiler it sold to the state enterprise. The government fined the pharmaceutical business 17,200 million yuan, or the equivalent of $1.5 million.

  If the crimes of Watchman Nee had been limited to cheating the government on taxes or contracts, the matter may have ended then and there. But the PSB wasn’t finished with him. Agents transferred Watchman Nee back to Shanghai and kept him locked up in a detention center near the South Railway Station.

  The only thing the family had been told was to bring some personal items for him—a thermos for hot water and a metal basin for washing—to an address on Huaihai Road in the old French Concession. A relative who dropped off the items inquired about Watchman Nee when she arrived. “Can I ask him to write me a note?”

  But she was given a curt “No” and turned away.

  For three years, the family had no contact.

  A Teacup Round or Square

  Someone like Watchman Nee, with his far-reaching influence, would have been very useful for the Protestant leaders trying to galvanize support for the Three-Self Movement.

  The Little Flock had more than seventy thousand members at about eight hundred locations across China. They were doctors and nurses, teachers and students on university campuses, factory workers, professionals, administrators, even bureaucrats with the new government. They lived in urban centers on the coast from Guangzhou up through Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou; in northern cities like Beijing and Qingdao; and in river ports like Wuhan and Chongqing in China’s interior.

  If the Little Flock was expansive before 1949, it became even larger after the communist victory. Many Christian congregations that had been dependent on foreign missions joined the Little Flock, which offered them financial help if they needed it. Some American and British missionaries were so grateful that they handed over their church property to the Little Flock before China kicked them out of the country. The Christian Assembly also welcomed individuals who were outliers in the new socialist state—former members of the Nationalist Party, capitalists, and onetime landlords, drawn by their message of salvation.

  With the new religious policy, Watchman Nee played it coyly. He did not immediately reject the Three-Self goals like some leaders of independent Christian groups. But neither did he unambiguously embrace the new order. At best, Watchman Nee strategized that he could carve out neutral ground. After all, his followers were not part of a denominational group like Lin Pu-chi’s Anglican Church. Missionaries did not influence them. They were “three-self” even before there was a Three-Self Movement. The Little Flock members were “self-supporting,” not relying on overseas funds to run their assembly halls. They were “self-governing,” with no hierarchy like that of the Anglican House of Bishops. And they handled their own grassroots expansion, thus being “self-propagating.”

  But at the same time, Watchman Nee watched what happened to people whose loyalty to the movement was questioned—Christians like Lin Pu-chi. Despite everything his Anglican brother-in-law wrote or said, despite his public efforts to distance himself from foreign missionaries, his allegiance was called into question. Lin Pu-chi was deemed someone whose “love of country” could not be totally trusted by what was now called the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Watchman Nee knew what had happened to his brother-in-law at the Church of Our Savior and the humiliation he faced in denouncing his friend and mentor Bishop Tsu. If someone like that was considered untrustworthy and not patriotic enough, what of him?

  A month after the denunciation meeting involving Lin Pu-chi, Watchman Nee tried to more clearly throw his support behind the Three-Self Movement. He gave a series of talks at the Nanyang Road assembly under the heading of “How I have turned over.” He admitted being too nonchalant about politics and urged members that it was possible to be good citizens and good Christians. In one address, he told them, “Today, we are the people of the People’s Republic of China.” The government wasn’t asking Christians to give up their faith, Watchman Nee explained. Rather, religion was like a teacup. It could be round or square. The only thing that mattered was that the plate—the socialist state—was the same for everyone. “All of a sudden I realized that the government did not ask you what your cup was; they asked what your plate was.”

  Such a public pronouncement of loyalty to country was a logical move and an obvious attempt by Watchman Nee to align the Little Flock with current policy. But the problem was that his flock was not willing to follow him. A big meeting at the Nanyang Road assembly to mobilize members behind the Three-Self Movement turned into a chaotic shouting match. People booed a man who stood to read a statement, accusing him of being a government spy. Watchman Nee looked on as the session spun out of control. Government officials did not believe that the outburst at the Nanyang Road assembly was spontaneous and instead suspected that Watchman Nee was plotting antigovernment sentiment from behind closed doors.

  Watchman Nee became viewed as someone beyond the control of the government with unchallenged influence over a vast number of people. Communist authorities saw him as someone who potentially could steer not only the religious thoughts of people but their political beliefs as well. He was a threat that had to be contained.

  After his arrest in 1952 on tax evasion and fraud, Watchman Nee was the subject of a full-scale investigation into whether he was trying to undermine the revolutionary government. It culminated in August 1955 when PSB agents at the highest level in Beijing quietly began circulating an internal assessment of him—the “Report on the Christian Assembly (Little Flock).” The confidential document, sent to security agents in every province and major city, outlined areas of concern and examples of how the Little Flock was being antagonistic to the government.

  It served a key purpose: On its pages was enough ammunition to destroy Watchman Nee and the Little Flock.

  Scandal

  In 1955, the sweltering heat of August carried into September. This was the dreaded “Autumn Tiger,” a prolonged stretch of ninety-five-degree temperatures and humidity so heavy it hung on people’s shoulders like wet wool coats.

  On the third floor of the Lin home, the couple’s second son, thirty-year-old Tim, dripped with sweat as he followed his moth
er’s instructions to remove all the furniture from the bedroom. Herself too weak to help, Ni Guizhen was nevertheless well enough to supervise others.

  Pick up that chair. Take out that bed. Mop the floor. Whitewash the walls.

  There was no time to waste. Tim was getting married, and his bride needed to come home to a fresh, clean room. Lin Pu-chi gave up his study on the third floor to make room for the newlyweds. He moved his typewriter and desk to the attic along with a small cot. With windows on both sides, the bright room caught a breeze in the evening, making it a perfect place to sleep on hot nights.

  On October 2, 1955, the family celebrated the marriage of Tim and an outgoing nurse named Emma, the English name for Hu Yimei. More than fifty relatives and friends feasted at a banquet at the old Park Hotel, a twenty-two-story art deco tower on Nanjing Road with the best view of the new People’s Square from its Sky Terrace. The daughter of a textile engineer, Emma had met Tim at a party, where they danced and flirted. Not a churchgoer like her future in-laws, Emma knew very little about the family’s background. Watchman Nee was not even a name she recognized. No one in the Lin family ever discussed him, not even in the privacy of their home, but particularly not with a newcomer like Emma.

  The newlyweds moved into the whitewashed third-floor bedroom the Sunday night of their wedding banquet and by Tuesday morning were back at work—a factory making electric meters for Tim, the hospital for Emma. Emma was heartened at how her new mother-in-law seemed so eager for the company of another woman. She felt happy in her new home.

  A month into their marriage, the couple was just coming home from their jobs when a group of men appeared at the front door. They did not wear uniforms, but they carried themselves with unquestioned authority. The plainclothes agents ordered everyone not to move. Emma had no idea what was happening. Startled and frightened, she cowered with the others.

  The men climbed the tight stairwell to the second-floor bedroom and immediately started opening drawers, riffling through papers and inspecting photo albums. When they got to the tidy third-floor bedroom with its bare, clean walls and new furniture, they stopped, looked inside, but then moved on, assuming whoever lived there had not been there very long.

  In Lin Pu-chi’s new study, the men slid open wood panels that led to a storage space under the windows and started pulling everything out. They were like search dogs, sniffing for evidence. “Do you have weapons?” they demanded, thinking the retired priest and his frail wife might be hiding a stash of pistols or knives under the floorboards in order to arm insurgents.

  The agents turned up nothing, but the search of House 19 was a warning. The matter of Watchman Nee, too painful and disturbing for anyone in the family to discuss in private, was about to become a national scandal.

  On January 29, 1956, after a long evening of fellowship at the Nanyang Road assembly hall that included a symbolic breaking of bread, Little Flock members returned to their homes. Police were lying in wait. At 10:00 p.m., they arrested six leaders of the Christian Assembly and took them into custody. Two were older women, one about seventy who ran a Little Flock bookstore, the other in her sixties and one of the first members of the assembly in Shanghai.

  The next day, all the Shanghai members of the Little Flock were summoned to a mass denunciation meeting at the Tian Chan Theater, the one-time opera house in the city center. In a well-scripted meeting that went on for hours, communist cadres inundated the Little Flock audience with evidence of the crimes of Watchman Nee. They called him a counterrevolutionary—fan geming. He faced accusations of spying; hostility to the government; fleecing fellow churchgoers; resisting land reform; and plotting against the People’s Liberation Army. On top of all of that, he was tarred as morally corrupt, a philanderer who made a mockery of his marriage and paid regular visits to prostitutes.

  Four days later, the attack on Watchman Nee moved inside the Nanyang Road assembly hall, officially now a “center of rebellion.” Members were ordered to register with the government and write confessions or face the consequences. At the mandatory meeting, Little Flock leaders continued to rail against Watchman Nee before an audience of three thousand people, including followers from the nearby cities of Suzhou and Nanjing.

  Everyone was expected to stand and admit his or her own complicity. Ni Guizhen could not escape the pressure to criticize her own actions.

  “God opened my eyes,” she wailed, “and let me see that it is God who judges the sins at church and also my own mistakes.” She said she had allowed herself to be aloof from the world and politics and now regretted her foolishness for not recognizing the will of God in this new era. “In the past, I thought I lived for God and I was faithful and willing to suffer for the Lord. I wanted to be loyal, eager to suffer for the Lord and to be a martyr. Actually, I offended God and offended people.”

  For Ni Guizhen and her family, even if they wanted to draw the curtains, lock the door, and avoid the stares of neighbors, the newspapers would not let them hide from what was happening. Every day when Lin Pu-chi picked up his copy of the Liberation Daily, he read fresh attacks on Watchman Nee and the Little Flock.

  On February 1, the newspaper highlighted the charges outlined in the nine-volume, 2,292-page criminal indictment against Watchman Nee. The article was laced with allegations of espionage and intrigue as well as titillating details of Watchman Nee’s alleged sexual exploits. Listed among the evidence: a pornographic movie that Watchman Nee allegedly filmed of a Little Flock coworker.

  The state accused the preacher with actively passing on sensitive information to Nationalist spies or intermediaries. One tip involved alerting Taiwan about a big military order for seasickness tablets, which Chinese sailors might need for a sea invasion of Taiwan.

  Another had Watchman Nee encouraging the enemy to repeat the bombardment of power plants and water stations in Shanghai like they did on February 6, 1950.

  The most diabolical plot involved Watchman Nee urging the Nationalist air force to drop snails contaminated with a parasitic disease into lakes used by the Chinese army—and then withholding ingredients to produce an antidote.

  As the days passed, headlines grew more and more shrill, with the Communist Party mouthpiece offering daily accounts from Christians who said they were tricked and hurt by Watchman Nee and the Little Flock.

  “They Sucked My Blood,” screamed one story, quoting a seventy-two-year-old handyman for a Little Flock assembly hall who said he was treated like “a cow or horse” by members before they fired him.

  “A Poisoned Christian,” read another accusation, this time from a college graduate who said the Little Flock dissuaded him from supporting the “Resist America; Aid Korea” campaign, known in the West as the Korean War.

  Under the banner of “A Big Hoax,” the Liberation Daily condemned the Little Flock for its “Give It Up” campaign that persuaded members to donate money and valuables to the Christian Assembly before communists came to power and took their wealth from them. “What on earth is it?” the paper asked rhetorically. “In fact, this is a trick to cheat money that also involves a major political conspiracy.”

  By this point, nearly all of the full-time workers and elders of the local churches of the Little Flock throughout China had been arrested. More than a thousand members were rounded up in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou and the provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian. Families could not visit the imprisoned and had no word on their conditions or treatment.

  If the media blitz was not enough to convince the public of Watchman Nee’s guilt, the government staged two exhibits during Chinese New Year to show everyone in Shanghai what it had on him.

  Nine days after the Tian Chan denunciation meeting, the national and Shanghai offices of the Three-Self Movement opened “An Exposition of the Criminal Evidence of Watchman Nee.” Innocent until proven guilty was not a judicial concept in the people’s courts. Instead, the exhibit had one purpose: to pr
esent Watchman Nee as a fraud who had duped thousands while hiding under the cloak of a religious man.

  All Little Flock members were required to attend, while other Christians—members of denominational churches as well as seminary teachers and students—were also encouraged to take a look.

  Tim could not contain his curiosity. He didn’t know much about the Little Flock. Growing up, he joined his father for Sunday service at St. Peter’s Church instead of going with his mother and sister to Little Flock meetings. As an adult, Tim had let his churchgoing slip and felt no worse for it. His interest in the exhibit was more personal: was the friendly uncle he knew from his youth the same criminal now being pilloried by authorities? He went alone; Emma wanted to stay as far away as possible from the controversy.

  At the Allied Health School on Nanjing Road, not far from the Nanyang Road assembly hall, people were divided into small groups of a dozen or so and ushered by an official into a big classroom. The school was empty because of the long holiday for New Year’s. All the desks and chairs had been removed to make way for big posters and enlargements of photographs.

  The room was silent except for the scratchy sound of a tape recording of two weeping women—the Little Flock leaders Ruth Lee and Peace Wang, who had been arrested only days earlier. The pair admitted that they were counterrevolutionaries.

  “If you cooperate, you are free,” a cadre was heard assuring the women on the tape recording. “If you refuse, the handcuffs are on the table. You will be taken into prison, where harsher punishments await you. We will deal with you until you deny your faith.”

  The two exhibits drew 4,700 people over the course of a week. Some women, deeply disillusioned and disappointed, openly sobbed. A few fainted, overwhelmed by the evidence: letters between Watchman Nee and intermediaries for the Nationalist government; confessions that he wrote during four years of captivity; financial documents; and a Little Flock petition, objecting to a government seizure of buildings owned by the group in Guling, the mountaintop retreat outside Fuzhou.