Yuan Zhiming

Before

Yuan Zhiming was one of the brightest stars of China's 1980s intellectual awakening — a doctoral scholar in philosophy at People's University and a principal writer of River Elegy (He Shang), the bold 1988 television series that swept across the nation, critiqued the weight of its past, and helped fuel a generation's longing for reform and freedom. He was a committed atheist, schooled in Marxist materialism, brilliant and ambitious. As one of the prominent intellectual voices behind the 1989 pro-democracy movement that filled Tiananmen Square, he was certain that the salvation of his country lay in the right philosophy, the right system, the right politics — that enlightened ideas could remake a people. He had given his life to that hope.

The Turning Point

Then came June 1989 and the violent crackdown. In a single night the movement was crushed, and Yuan — now a wanted man — fled, escaping into a long, disorienting exile that finally landed him in the United States. He arrived stripped of everything that had defined him: his country, his cause, his platform, and the confident certainties of his philosophy. The ideas he had trusted to save a nation had not even been able to save the moment. Disillusioned and grieving and searching, he came at last to the end of himself. It was there, in that emptiness, that he encountered the gospel he had spent his life dismissing as superstition unworthy of a serious mind. To his astonishment, the God he had argued against met him in his despair — not as an abstraction to be debated but as a living presence to be reckoned with. The philosopher who had sought to save China discovered that he himself was the one who needed saving, and that the freedom he had marched for was a faint echo of a deeper freedom held out to him in Jesus Christ. He stopped arguing, and surrendered.

After

Yuan went on to study theology and became a pastor and filmmaker, devoting the rest of his life to bringing the gospel to his own people. His documentaries — China's Confession (Shenzhou) and The Cross: Jesus in China — trace the spiritual hunger running beneath the whole sweep of China's history and tell the largely hidden story of the church's astonishing growth there. Smuggled, copied, and streamed by the millions, his films have introduced the message of Christ to vast numbers of Chinese around the world — many of them, like the man he once was, intellectuals who had assumed that faith was beneath them.

In Their Words

“I had sought truth and freedom all my life. In the end I discovered that Truth is not a theory but a Person, and His name is Jesus.”— Yuan Zhiming