On this day, Chinese soldiers massacred hundreds of Christians of the A-Hmao ethnic group who were secretly worshiping in a large cave at Xinglongchang. What had led to this bloodshed, and what would be the result?
The A-Hmao are a “Hmongic” ethnic minority group whose homeland straddles the mountainous border region between Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in southern China. Most of the A-Hmaos work and live as subsistence farmers. Today their population is around 490,000.
For centuries the A-Hmao were despised and oppressed by the Chinese and their Nosu neighbors, who bullied them by seizing their land, taking some as slaves, and imposing unfair taxes. Nosu landowners customarily used the back of an A-Hmao slave to mount their horses. The A-Hmao were enslaved in other ways as well. Before their mass conversion to Christianity, they lived in terror, trying to appease a complex system of evil spirits they called bidlang.
When British missionaries Samuel Pollard and Francis Dymond first brought the liberating message of the gospel to them in 1904, thousands of the destitute and downtrodden tribesmen eagerly embraced it. Pollard next invented an alphabet for their language, and taught them to read and write. Many A-Hmao began to find their worth in Christ and His Word. Before he died of typhoid in 1915, Pollard had overseen the baptism of over 10,000 A-Hmao!
Others – both westerners and Han Chinese pastors – took his place. By 1917 they had translated and printed the New Testament. Although a severe famine in 1918 left many A-Hmao disenchanted with a Christianity that didn’t prove a quick fix, by the time the missionaries were expelled from China in 1950, the A-Hmao Church numbered more than 80,000 Christians.
At that time, Zhu Huanzheng was given leadership of the believers in northeast Yunnan Province. A Han Chinese believer, Zhu Shuiguang, also remained involved with the work. In 1951 they were arrested, along with an evangelist named John Li, when the Communists captured Zhaotong. The two Zhus and Li were horrendously tortured – all were dead within a few years.
In 1954 the government concocted a sinister plan to destroy the faith of the A-Hmao at Sapushan by selecting 16 young church leaders and sending them to work in 16 different locations. The authorities believed that by separating them from their Christian environment, the youngsters would soon reject their faith. Yet instead, this proved an Acts 8:4 moment. Not only did each of the 16 A-Hmao continue to follow Christ, they also influenced their workmates and in several locations small Christian fellowships started where there had previously been no knowledge of the gospel.
Fast-forwarding to 1974, a systematic plan to obliterate the A-Hmao church in southwest China was initiated. Yet the church leaders had defied the officials by saying if forbidden to worship openly they would worship secretly, and if attacked on Sunday they would multiply their meetings to every day of the week. The Chinese government did not enjoy being given terms by others. On July 28, they traced a secret prayer meeting to cave in Wuding County. The troops showed no mercy. They used machine guns and grenades on the unarmed and closely congregated Christians. Many of the victims were reportedly on their knees praying when they were killed.
Yet the massacre backfired. Instead of destroying the church, it caused a doubling in the number of Christians over a short time! The church outlasted the worst of the Communist regime. After being illegal for decades, the A-Hmao New Testament was reprinted in 1983. The A-Hmao finally received a full translation of the entire Bible in 2009. They remain vibrant and enthusiastic followers of Christ, with a reported 80% claiming that title!