Watchman Nee's Brothers

[aron]

Apparently Watchman Nee was excommunicated by his own church for irregular business dealings, involving his brother. Recently I learned about another brother of Nee, that left China, and returned. From Angus Kinnear's "Against the Tide".

Originally Posted by AK

On February 1 the Shanghai Municipal Government took the unusual step of publishing in its Liberation Daily an official statement of Watchman's arrest on April 10,1952, and stated that he and two others, Chang Tzu-chieh and Ni Hongtsu, were held in the Shanghai First Place of Detention. Chang was a fellow worker from Tsingtao. Hong-tsu was Watchman's third brother, the eighth child in the family, and did not claim to be a practicing Christian. He was known to have been a senior political agent of Chiang Kai-shek and had been enticed back from Hong Kong with the Party's promise that his personal finances in Shanghai were protected and would be restored to him. He was eventually executed as a traitor. Unquestionably, the public association at this moment of the two brothers' names was designed to give credibility to the charge of espionage against Watchman.

Watchman Nee's brother was a senior political agent of Chiang Kai-shek, left China for Hong Kong, then returned? Also, it says that WN was silent about the accusations of dissolute morals. Did Lily Hsu (or any others) actually hear him confess? Kinnear says, 'no'.

Originally Posted by AK

Finally, for the benefit of simple God-fearing believers, Nee was charged with being a "dissolute vagabond of corrupt and indulgent living" who frequented brothel neighborhoods and had always been a shameless and indiscriminate womanizer. He had confessed, it was claimed, to seducing over a hundred women, Chinese and foreign. No evidence for this was produced.

The difficulty in taking the Communist charges on face value is their scale and stilted verbiage. But if WN was in fact a businessman who used family ties to get ahead, who did have a sordid history of apparent licentiousness, can it be dismissed out of hand because the Communists trumped up the charges? What if the truth was somewhere in between the Angus Kinnear/Witness Lee version and the PRC version? If so, how are we to know? Certainly Witness Lee wouldn't have wanted us to know WN's brother was into politics, left the country and returned, just like WN did(!). The WL story might start to look suspect.