The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs: Testimonies and Autobiographical Accounts, edited by Gerolamo Fazzini, translated by Michael Miller, with a preface by Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, Bishop of Hong Kong, Ignatius Press, 2009.
Americans, living under the protections of the First Amendment, often take freedom of religion for granted. Unfortunately, religious persecution continues to be widespread around the world, and one of the most dangerous places to be a Christian during the mid-twentieth century was communist China. This is true to a much lesser but still very real extent today. Communism is inherently hostile to religion, and often people who live under totalitarian rule turn to religion in order to survive.
It is a popular trope in many circles that religion, particularly Christianity, especially Catholicism, is on the decline. In Europe and other portions of the West, there is indeed a secularist trend, although this may not be nearly so strong as is often believed. Although Islam, Mormonism, and Scientology are each frequently cited by pundits as the world’s fastest growing religion, most demographers and religious scholars believe that Christianity actually holds that title. Christianity is booming in Africa, and converts are also abundant throughout Asia. China, in particular, has a substantial Christian population, and this fact is deeply unsettling to the communist government.
The horrors of communist totalitarianism and the crippling effects it can have on the human soul have been recorded, often with great power and skill, such as in the great novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or the movie The Killing Fields, but the communist atrocities have not permeated the public attention to the extent that they ought to have. Many Americans are completely unaware of the horrors of the gulags, and unfortunately much of today’s news coverage of life in China is sanitized for the protection of the Chinese government’s reputation. Other books that have exposed the terrors committed under Mao, such as Cheng Ming’s Black Clouds Thicken (2006) have been censored from publication in China, and many revelatory books that have been published in the West have not yet been translated into English. Jean Pasqualini’s Prisoner of Mao (1973) tried to reveal the facts of prison camp life, but the scholarly establishment in France banded together to label the book CIA-backed propaganda, and Paqualini’s experiences were largely dismissed due to the efforts of those who wished to advertise China as “the ‘good face’ of communism.”
The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs is a collection of firsthand accounts by Chinese Catholics, both priests and laypeople, explaining just how desperately the Communists sought to crush the soul of every believer. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao attempted to render China a completely atheistic nation. Untold numbers rebelled, and such “counterrevolutionaries” were rounded up and placed into reeducation camps. Thousands died, many conformed to the dictates of the regime, and others, like the individuals included in this book, fought the system.
The stories in this book are political and moral dynamite. The moral outrage in each memoir is palpable, yet firmly understated. As Cardinal Zen notes in his introduction, the writers are all committed Catholics, and they firmly believe in forgiving their oppressors. Cardinal Zen declared at one Mass he celebrated in Rome that, “The color red that I wear expresses the willingness of a cardinal to shed his own blood. But it is not my blood that has been shed: it is the blood and tears of the many unnamed heroes of both the official and the underground Church who have suffered for being faithful to the Church” (7).
Many of the atrocities committed in this work occurred decades ago, but there has been little if any coverage of them. There are many reasons for this. Innumerable individuals of character and courage who have endured the persecutions firsthand, and a substantial amount of them have attempted to document their sufferings and indignities. With so many people who are willing and able to bring these deeply disturbing issues to light, one might reasonably wonder why a Chinese version of Solzhenitsyn has not yet emerged. There are many reasons for this. Plenty of survivors have written personal accounts of anti-religious violence and persecution, but most of these accounts have failed to find a publisher in their native country, partially because the government’s fears that undermine its authority in China and abroad, partially because of self-censorship due to fears of reprisals and concern over the safety of loved ones.
Many manuscripts were written and then hidden, only brought out years later after political turmoil subsided. Some entries in this anthology are journal entries written during incarceration in labor camps. Father Tan Tiande and Father Huang Yongmu’s diary entries are included here. In some cases, these memoirs are published posthumously, with relatives of the deceased deciding that it is time for their family members’ tribulations to be revealed to the broader public. Much of the book is composed of the experiences of priests and monks, although some lay Catholics are included. Gertrude Li Minwen, a Catholic who faced the wrath of the Maoists for her devotion to her faith, had to resort to deceptive tactics in order to bring her story to the West. She wrote out her experiences in tiny characters on wafer-like paper sheets trimmed into shoe insoles, and the missionary Father Giovanni Carbone tucked the stacked papers into his footwear and escaped with them when he was driven from China in 1952.
Cardinal Zen writes: “How many times journalists have asked me: is the Church in China still persecuted today? It is not easy to answer this question in a short sentence because, as you know, the situation is quite complex. The Communist regime that was responsible for the sufferings described in this book is still in power; while it has rejected the radical policies of Maoism, it has never asked pardon for the outrages inflicted on believers and on so many other innocent Chinese citizens. From the political perspective, the ultimate cause of the persecution against the Christians is still very much in effect: the one-party system, which has governed uninterruptedly for almost sixty years without popular mandate or endorsement, without democracy” (14).
The experiences in this book are deeply unsettling, but many passages are also inspiring. The harsh weather conditions in North Chinese prison camps are described by people accustomed to the more clement temperatures of southern China. Father Francis Tan Tiande describes how he debated a Communist Party official over the existence of God, and at the end of their conversation, the official locked the priest in chains. Father Joseph Li Chang and his friends had to search for colleagues of theirs who vanished mysteriously, only to wind up with no definite answers. Punishments in prisons included starvation, solitary confinement in lightless cells, or corporal punishment. Christians were repeatedly ordered by authorities to put their duties as Chinese citizens above the dictates of their faith, which became a major sticking point between believers and the government.
The accounts of this book are set during a very dark time in China’s past. Gerolamo Fazzini writes, “Even though disturbing reports continue to surface from time to time– arrests of bishops and priests, severe tensions and restrictions, appointments of illegitimate bishops, heated disputes over church properties– the present situation of the Church in China is not even distantly comparable to the environment reflected in The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs. Since the early 1980’s a decidedly different climate has emerged” (31). It is easier to be a Christian in China now, and indeed, Christianity is becoming an increasingly powerful force in Chinese life, politics, and culture.
Today, there are two main Catholic churches in China. There is the official, “patriotic” branch of the Church that is sanctioned by the government, which selects bishops and is hostile to the influence of the Vatican. The second is the underground branch of the Church, which rejects the influence of the communist government and refuses to register its members with the authorities. The fact that many Christians keep their religious affiliations secret in for safety reasons makes exact statistics hard to determine.
Father Angelo Lazzarotto sums up the current state of Catholicism in China, explaining that: “Through the dramatic events ushered in by Communist policies in China, a clear light is shed on the fundamental contradictions that still exist that make it extremely dangerous and precarious for Christian communities to safeguard their faith, especially the Catholic faith. For the reigning ideology, it remains intolerable that the churches should claim to offer a different and autonomous answer to the fundamental questions of life and death, and thus to the meaning of man and society, an answer that contradicts the “scientific” version of truth devised by Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong. Here is the key to understanding the persistent uneasiness and the barely concealed repression that the Church still continues to experience today” (32).
The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs is crucial to understanding the history of both Catholicism and communism in China. These brief biographical passages give a human face to the struggle to preserve one’s conscience in spite of a hostile power. The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs does not quite have the same level of scope and drama as The Gulag Archipelago, but hopefully once more hidden memoirs are released and further scholarship can be performed, a Chinese equivalent of Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork can be written. In the meantime, The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs has the power to enflame the consciences of its readers and make Westerners realize just how lucky they are to have the right to religious freedom.
–Chris Chan
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