Wang Zhiming

Life and Ministry

Wang Zhiming was born about AD 1907 into the Miao people of Wuding County in northwestern Yunnan, evangelized in childhood by the China Inland Mission station at Sapushan founded by Samuel Pollard's successors, trained as a village schoolteacher by the mission, and ordained an elder of the Yunnan Synod of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in AD 1951. He served as the senior Protestant pastor of the Miao Christian community at Wuding through the great upheavals of land reform, the anti-rightist campaign, and the Great Leap Forward, baptizing several hundred Miao converts annually and refusing to denounce his fellow pastors or his bishop in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution after AD 1966. He was eventually compelled to sign a confession of counter-revolutionary activity, but refused to administer the political mass weddings or condemn the Christians of his congregation.

Circumstances of Death

Arrested at his Sapushan parsonage in May AD 1969 and held without trial for four years, Wang was brought out to a public denunciation rally at the Wuding sports field on 29 December AD 1973, attended by an estimated ten thousand people, where his sentence of death by shooting was read out by the local Revolutionary Committee. Before the sentence could be carried out, his tongue was cut out — by the standard practice of the Cultural Revolution executions, to prevent the condemned from addressing the crowd. He was shot in the chest immediately afterward in front of his wife and children. His body was buried in an unmarked grave; his sons, themselves imprisoned, were released in AD 1981.

Legacy

Wang Zhiming was rehabilitated by the Yunnan provincial authorities in AD 1980; his memorial stands at Sapushan and is visited annually by the Miao Christians of his district. He is one of the ten twentieth-century Christian martyrs whose statues stand over the west door of Westminster Abbey, unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in AD 1998 — the only Chinese figure among the ten. His witness is that the silenced tongue still preaches: the village pastor of Wuding cannot now speak in English, but his statue at the door of the abbey of the kings of England preaches the gospel to every Christian who enters that abbey. The Miao churches he had pastored continued, and now number their members in the hundreds of thousands.