The Mountains Are High, but God is Near!

by Wesley Kawato

Perhaps the old Chinese philosopher was thinking of Guizhou Province when he said "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away." Guizhou is located in Southern China, over 1,000 miles from Beijing. It's a land of high mountains and spectacular river valleys. Some of China's most beautiful waterfalls are located in this province.

Why Is Guizhou Province Poor?
Guizhou is also China's poorest province. It has been bypassed by the economic boom of recent decades because of its remote location. Not only is this province far from Beijing but it is also far from the major ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Poor roads continue to hinder economic development. Tourists find it hard to reach Guizhou's beautiful waterfalls. The province has few natural resources except medicinal plants used to make traditional herbal remedies. One Chinese corporation recently bought an entire village for use as an herbal remedy-processing center. Only time will tell if such private ventures will end Guizhou's poverty. But the province has potential. The same fertile soil used to grow medicinal herbs can also support other crops. Even some American farmers fear that crops grown in Guizhou may one day put them out of business.

A major reason for Guizhou's poverty has always been their neglect by the national government. The national government has usually favored the Han Chinese majority when approving development projects. One third of Guizhou's 37 million people belong to one or more of China's 55 officially recognized minority groups. Only the neighboring Yunnan Province has more minority groups than Guizhou.

Since 1949, when the communists took control of China, there have not been many protests in Guizhou over the unequal treatment of minorities. That is because the previous Nationalist government treated minorities even worse than the communists. The Nationalists recognized only five people groups when they took census data! There are over seven million Miaos living in Guizhou. The Nationalists lumped all the Miao subgroups with the Han Chinese. But the communists at least recognized the Miao as one of China's 55 official minority groups, though there are actually many Miao subgroups, as you will see as you pray through this issue.

Protestant Efforts to Reach Guizhou Province for Christ
The mountains may be high, the emperor may be far away, but God's heart is with the peoples of Guizhou. Yet efforts to reach Guizhou began slowly. When Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship--OMF), landed at Shanghai in 1854, he found that all Christian missionary activity was confined to the coastal regions of China. Protestant mission agencies were unwilling to press on into the interior because of the dangers involved. Prior to 1911 the government of China was unstable, and there were frequent civil wars. When Taylor arrived, China was still reeling from the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion.

It wasn't until 1877 that the China Inland Mission (CIM) sent its first missionary to Guizhou. For many years this person, and others who joined him, worked only with the majority Han Chinese. Northeast Guizhou has a Han Chinese majority. That is not the case with the rest of the province.

In 1896, CIM began working among some of Guizhou's larger minority groups such as the Miao. This people group cluster can also be found in Yunnan Province, to the southwest, as well as in northern Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In 1896 Samuel Clarke led the first effort to reach the Miao peoples in Guizhou. The former neglect was the result of not recognizing the existence of that province's many ethnic minorities. Early missionaries to China relied on census data they had obtained from the Chinese government. The Manchu Dynasty neglected China's ethnic minorities as badly as the post-1911 Nationalist government.

Samuel Clarke set up his first preaching station in the city of Panghai and quickly ran into problems. Government officials who resented his presence harassed him. Prior to 1877 much of the Chinese interior had been closed to Christian missionaries. A series of unequal treaties changed that.

Then the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 disrupted preaching. Anti-foreign sentiment began growing in Guizhou a year before the outbreak of the main rebellion in 1900. In 1899 WilLian Fleming and Pan Xiushan were martyred for their Christian faith. Fleming had been one of Samuel Clarke's coworkers. Mr. Xiushan had been one of Clarke's first Miao converts. Both were accused of being arms smugglers and they were executed on trumped-up charges.

When the Boxer Rebellion reached Guizhou, heavy fighting forced many missionaries to flee from the province, including Clarke, who, with his new coworker, J. R. Adams, survived the fighting only because the governor of Guizhou gave them a military escort. This was a miracle from God because the governor had to disobey an order from the Dowager Empress to provide such an escort.

The fighting ended by 1902. Adams returned to the Miao regions of Guizhou and found himself starting over almost from scratch. Prior to the rebellion Clarke and Adams had been on the verge of baptizing their first large group of converts. Of the 250 people who had previously expressed an interest in receiving the Lord, only 20 were baptized in 1902. Some of these 250 people had been killed during the fighting. Still others had recanted their faith, choosing to save their lives and forfeit their souls. Most of these 20 converts came from a subgroup called the Flowery Miao. These people became the nucleus of the Miao Church in Guizhou.

Adams and his new coworker, Curtis Waters, began preaching the gospel in various Flowery Miao villages in Guizhou. By 1907 they had won 7,000 people to the Lord. Word of the revival reached various Flowery Miao villages in neighboring Yunnan Province. People walked for miles to hear the gospel at the preaching stations set up by Adams and Waters. Other missionaries helped CIM organize these converts into churches in Yunnan Province. Guizhou became a springboard for spreading the gospel to other provinces. By 1932 there were 300,000 Christians among the Flowery Miao living in Guizhou and Yunnan. CIM estimated that 70 percent of that people group had been won to the Lord.

That development freed CIM to work with other minority groups in the same region. James Broomhall took the gospel to the Yi, a large people group cluster found in Guizhou and Yunnan. By the end of World War II there were 200,000 Yi Christians.

Wit1h the return of peace in 1945, Broomhall organized an outreach to the Nosu subgroup in the nearby Sichuan Province. Many erroneously believed that the Nosus were a subgroup of the Yi. Broomhall organized his Yi converts from Guizhou and Yunnan into outreach teams and quickly ran into problems. The Nosu "dialect" shared few words in common with the Yi language and Broomhall's native preachers couldn't make themselves understood. That forced him to end the outreach. Returning to his home base, he told his superiors that there was something wrong with the way people groups were defined in China. They needed a full-fledged ethnographic study.

But that detailed ethnographic study was never started due to the chaos of the Communist Revolution of 1949. When Mao Zedong took control of China, he expelled all Christian missionaries, including James Broomhall and his coworkers. Mao had promised to give each ethnic group a representative in the new Chinese parLianent. So in the years that followed, the communists made a serious effort to identify and catalog China's various ethnic groups. Mao placed heavy pressure on Chinese census takers because he wanted to keep the number of minority groups down to an absolute minimum while appearing to keep his promise. The resulting census officially recognized 55 minority groups. To get that low number, the communists lumped together many groups that spoke very different languages and practiced different customs.

China partially reopened to Christian missionaries after the Tienanmen Square protest of 1989. Christian ethnographers have been able to do some research since that time. The new data seems to indicate that there may be more than 300 people groups in China, but no one will know for sure until more research is done. At this time, Operation China, GPD's main source for China issues, is the best available.

There were one million Christians in China in 1949. When many missionary agencies returned to China in the 1990s they found 50 million Christians in the country. Missionaries returning to Guizhou found that there were now 1.4 million Christians in the province, up from the 100,000 they had left behind. Most of these believers were from the Flowery Miao.

New work has begun since 1990. Gospel radio broadcasts to the White Miao subgroup sparked a revival in neighboring Yunnan Province. Between 1992 and 1994 several thousand White Miao received the Lord. Then the Chinese police arrested numerous White Miao house church leaders, crushing the revival before it could spread to the White Miaos in Guizhou.

Let's Pray!
Please join us in praying for the Holy Spirit to permeate the hearts of many more peoples in this land of high mountains. May God mobilize the church among the Flowery Miao to reach out to every Miao subgroup. Some of these groups don't have a single known believer among them. May God provide ethnographers who will finish the task of identifying China's numerous people groups. A people group must be identified before God's people can reach it. Only then can effective outreach strategies be developed.