I was born under Communism in China and was educated by that system—certain things were “true” and should be accepted, never questioned. And in Mao’s China, religion was “evil” and those who believed in religion were at best deluded and in need of reeducation, at worst cultists or imperialist spies whose aim was to undermine the country. I was brought up believing that Christian orphanages and Christian hospitals were among the scariest places on earth.
In elementary school, my teacher said that foreign missionaries came to China to enslave and murder the Chinese people. The nuns who ran orphanages were monsters, we learned, and though I later came to comprehend the humorous stereotype of the disciplinarian nun among Catholics around the world, in China, they assumed nightmarish characteristics. Children taken in from poor families were raised in pots, and when they reached their teenage years, the nuns would break the pots and let them out. By then, they had become pygmies and would be forced to sit on a table all day and pray to their “God.” The pygmies were never allowed to run around.
In the course of my research, I came across an old news story issued by the state-run news agency, Xinhua, on June 5, 1964, and written by a journalist named Zhong Yuwen. It usefully illustrates how Christian missionary work was used in cultivating a wider hostility toward the West:
THE WORLD HAS CHANGED
Visiting a Children’s Hospital in Nanjing
June 5, 1964
On International Children’s Day of June 1, many young elementary school teachers and students came to visit the Nanjing Municipal Children’s Hospital. Upon their request, a doctor shared with the young visitors the hospital’s history.
In the 1940s, after ruthlessly exploiting and brutally oppressing its people for many years, the Nationalist government and other reactionaries initiated a civil war, plunging the country into chaos and bringing more hardship to its people. Many families had been ruined. Thousands of innocent children became orphaned. At that time, at the instigation of foreign imperialists, a group of foreign nuns, cloaked in religion, arrived in the city. Their ultimate goal was to service the counterrevolutionaries. They put on a so-called benevolent face of charity to win over people. They built a house near Guangzhou Road and started a “Sacred Heart Children’s Home,” adopting abandoned children. They abused the children and turned the Sacred Heart Children’s Home into a hell on earth and a children’s death camp. They ruthlessly reduced children’s food ration, adding a little milk to half a pound of thin rice and pea powder gruel every day. For a one-year-old, they only fed them rice gruel four times a day. For three or four year olds, they fed the same thin rice gruel three times daily. As a consequence, children suffered from malnutrition. They looked thin as dry wood sticks. Osteoporosis was prevalent. Many three-year-olds had problems straightening their backs; some four-year-olds still couldn’t walk. Many three-year-olds only weighed five to six kilograms. The nuns never took good care of the children and most of them had been afflicted with eczema and bed sores. Crying was supposed to be a child’s instinctive behavior but many children didn’t even have the strength to cry. They lay there silently, waiting to die. The mortality rate there was over 70 percent. When children died, those so-called philanthropists would murmur the following line with delight: “We should be happy for their deaths because their souls will land in heaven.”
In addition to abusing children physically, the nuns also poisoned their minds. Every morning, older children were forced to kneel on the cold cement floor of the church and pray, asking for God to forgive their sins. They constantly invoked God to intimidate children, asking them to beg God for forgiveness. As a consequence, children lived in constant fear and had very low self-esteem. The nuns also gave the children English names, such as Maria, Andrew, Philip, and Matilda, imposing foreign education on them so they would remain ignorant of their own motherland. In this way, the children could easily be enslaved by the imperialists.
After the Communists came and liberated the city, those children were rescued. Acting on the demands of the great masses, the people’s government punished the foreign imperialists according to law and took over the Sacred Heart Children’s Home, providing medical care to the children. Under the care of the Communist Party, the children grew up healthily, like seedlings in drought being showered with blissful rainfall. In 1953, the government converted the place where Chinese children were abused by foreign imperialists into a children’s hospital. Under the care and encouragement of the Communist Party, doctors and nurses have contributed their share to the cause of protecting the health of Chinese children.
I shared this story with my historian friend, the seventy-five-year-old Liu Shahe, who lives next to the Benevolence Temple in downtown Chengdu. He said that the Communist government was not the first to concoct lies and stir up hatred against Christian missionaries:
Liu Shahe: As a child, I used to hear that Catholic nuns were vampires who sucked blood from poor Chinese children and plucked out their eyeballs to use as decorations. People began to spread unfounded rumors way before the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-Christian movement in Northern China from 1898 to 1901. There was a notorious incident in Sichuan province. In 1896, a Christian hospital, which is now the Chengdu No. 2 Municipal People’s Hospital, was mobbed by local residents who claimed doctors had lured gullible children into the hospital with candies, then killed them, soaked their bodies in pickle jars, and ate their flesh. Several hundred angry residents smashed the windows and took over the hospital. All the doctors and nurses fled and some hid inside a church on Shaanxi Road. Residents eventually attacked the church and set it on fire. In the end, it turned out that one resident had passed the hospital lab and saw tissue samples of a dead baby stored in formaldehyde. The story took on a life of its own as it spread among the public.
Liao Yiwu: Hostility against missionaries continued under Communist rule.
Liu: The government propaganda machine perpetuated those rumors and spread new lies to stoke hatred against Christians and force people to relinquish their religions. The Xinhua report you showed me was a perfect example.
In the pre-Communist days, especially around World War II, many Americans, including diplomats, military personnel, and missionaries, came to Chongqing and Chengdu. They built airports, hospitals, and many orphanages. In the spring of 1945, Chengdu was hit by a cholera epidemic. Bodies littered the streets. All the coffins were sold out, and hospitals were packed with dying patients. A French Christian hospital on Ping’anqiao Street opened its doors to the public, and patients swarmed in. When all the beds had been taken, patients crowded the hallways and spilled over into the courtyard. French doctors and nurses worked day and night. When they ran out of drugs, they administered oral and IV rehydration solutions. Sometimes, when patients were brought in, it was already too late. The Christian doctors and nurses still wouldn’t give up and tried their best to save lives.
I used to know an American nun. Since her first name started with M, which sounded like the Chinese word “Mann,” we all called her Sister Mann. She had lived in Chengdu for many years and offered free training and workshops for young women who wanted to be midwives. As you know, in the old days women growing up in wealthy families didn’t want to take midwifery as a career, whereas those from poor families might want to do the job but didn’t have money to attend midwifery school. As a consequence, the infant mortality rate in Sichuan province was high. Of course, the Nationalist government also engaged in similar projects, but I think Sister Mann’s contributions were more prominent. She belonged to an American Christian mission hospital here. This Sister Mann was also a writer and published several books. You probably have heard about writer Han Suyin [Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing], who maintained close relations with the first generation of Chinese Communist leaders. In the late 1930s, Han Suyin worked at the same hospital as Sister Mann. The two became good friends. Han practiced her writing on Sister Mann’s typewriter. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Han Suyin went to practice medicine in Southeast Asia, but Sister Mann stayed in Chengdu and continued running her workshop. She saw Chengdu as her permanent home. In the early 1950s, the government required all schools to hang portraits of Chairman Mao in classrooms. As a Christian, Sister Mann rejected the government demands. The local leaders came to talk with her, to persuade her to comply. She wouldn’t budge. One day, while Sister Mann was away, the leaders pasted a poster of Mao on the wall above the blackboard. When she came back, she noticed the poster and was outraged. She found a ladder, climbed up, and ripped the poster off. That greatly offended the authorities. Local leaders openly accused her of being an imperialist spy and kicked her out of the country.
Sister Mann returned to the United States, and Han Suyin went to visit her in the 1960s. Han found out that Sister Mann had no interest in politics. She never badmouthed the Communist Party. She didn’t rip down Mao’s poster for political reasons; she simply believed the secular government should not place its authority above that of God.
Liao: Was this attitude prevalent?
Liu: Sister Mann’s story is not unique. When the Communist government rose to power, they rewrote history and portrayed Western Christian missionaries as monsters and saboteurs. Many missionaries who had worked and lived in China for decades were forced out of the country. All their charity work was used as evidence against Western countries, which the government claimed attempted to colonize and enslave the Chinese people. Christianity is thriving again in China. It is the job of historians and writers to uncover the historical truth and explain it to the public.