Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China And Changing the Global Balance of Power by Aikman David

Author:Aikman, David [Aikman, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781596986527
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2012-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Simon Zhao

The leader of one of those groups, the Northwest Spiritual Movement, survived an astonishing forty-five years of imprisonment in Xinjiang to keep alive the original Back to Jerusalem vision and impart it to the current leadership of China’s house church networks. His Chinese name was originally Zhao Haizhen, and he came from Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Zhao, who took the Christian name Simon, arrived in Kashgar with twenty or so teammates toward the end of 1948. The Communists, however, were already asserting their control over this part of China, and they sealed the borders with Soviet Central Asia. Zhao and his team, who had tried to sneak across illegally, were arrested and charged as traitors. All were imprisoned, and several of them died in prison. Zhao was sentenced to an astonishing forty-five years in prison, where for at least three decades he was routinely beaten and tortured, mainly because he refused to renounce his faith. In 1988, five years before the end of his term, he was released. He walked out of jail a bent, wizened man in his seventies with a long white beard and the wire of an antique hearing aid hanging down from his right ear to a plastic, battery-powered receiver in his shirt pocket. “Simon Zhao’s physical appearance was unique and added to his ministry,” a house church leader commented later. “He looked like an ancient sage, with a long white beard and white hair.”4

By chance, some of Xu’s Born-Again network were in Kashgar, heard about Simon Zhao, and sought him out. They were astonished by his story and by the fact that he had maintained his faith for nearly half a century in a labor camp. The Henan Christians of all networks had known about the Back to Jerusalem movement of the 1940s, but none had actually met anyone from the original groups. Finally, in the 1990s, Xu Yongze’s sister, Xu Yongling, traveled by bus from Henan to Kashgar to persuade Zhao to return with her and share his stories in Henan. Reluctantly, Zhao did so, spending the last few years of his life sharing the Back to Jerusalem vision and his own decades-long prison experiences with many house church groups in Henan. He died in Pingdingshan, Henan Province, in December 2001.

It isn’t clear what rekindled the Back to Jerusalem fervor among China’s house church Christians from the mid-1990s onward. It could have been the influence of Zhao’s story or simply the spontaneous reemergence of the same vision that animated the Northwest Bible Institute students and others back in the 1940s. Certainly, the enormous confidence that the house church networks had acquired during the phenomenal expansion of the 1980s was part of the explanation. The enthusiasm for the project wasn’t limited to any one network, but common all over China. “My parents’ church in Xi’an was meeting for a time with Uighur [a Turkic minority that is the largest non-Han group in Xinjiang] students from the university,” said Mary Li, the pretty Beijing website professional from Chapter 5.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.