Wang Mingdao

Wang Mingdao was born in Beijing during the Boxer siege, in which his father took his own life. He grew into an independent preacher who would take orders from no foreign mission and no government, and built a plain brick tabernacle in Beijing with Chinese money. Under Japanese occupation he refused to join the church union the occupiers organized. After 1949 he refused, in print, to join the state-sponsored Three-Self movement, on the ground that he could not be yoked to men who denied the resurrection.

He was arrested with his wife Jingwen in 1955. After a year of interrogation he signed a confession and was released - and then could not bear it, went about saying he had denied his Lord like Peter, and was rearrested in 1958 and sentenced to life. He came out in 1980, nearly blind and deaf, and spent his last years receiving visitors in a small flat, telling younger Christians not to trust their own strength.