Celebrating China’s Christians

This week, on Oct. 1, the Chinese celebrate a national holiday marking the 75th anniversary of Mao Zedong officially establishing communist rule in China. In 1949, as the communists drove Christian missionaries out of China and persecuted the 1 million Chinese Christians, no one expected Christianity to survive. To many Chinese, the church had become associated with the Western powers which had humiliated China over the previous century. The traditional religionists who had seen their deified