2005 Article: Watchman Nee and the Little Flock movement in Maoist China

[aron]

There is an article on Watchman Nee in the magazine "Church History", which seems to be a fairly mainstream scholarly publication (American Society of Church History/Cambridge U. Press). The author is Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, who teaches history at Pace University.

Here is an interesting quote (among several):

"During the Hundred Flowers Campaign, a short period of liberalization in May and June 1957, some of the Little Flock members followed Mao Zedong's call "to criticize the Communist Party from without to let fresh air into its hermetic Leninist shell." Xia Xiulian of the Chongqing Assembly in Sichuan province published a letter criticizing the local bureaus of public security and religious affairs. But when the Anti-Rightist Campaign was launched to punish those who had spoken out against the Party, Xia Xiulian and most of the Little Flock leaders were arrested and condemned by the state as counterrevolutionaries."

Sounds like Steve Isitt's experience to me.

There is also information on Watchman Nee's "Jerusalem" model in which he consolidated power, overturning the principle of "locality" upon which he had established his church ministry. Many Protestant congregations had left their Western affiliations en masse and moved to the Little Flock, and now Nee was centralizing the program, and his hold on the reins.

There is also a part on the infiltration of the Communist Party by Little Flock members, and vice versa.

If you get access to the JSTOR program at your local library you should be able to find this article.

It amazes me how little we really know about what happened in China in the first half of the century. For example, the article says that WN was arrested and tried in 1956. I had assumed that this occurred immediately following the Chinese Communist take-over following WWII. But actually it seems that he was quite active there for a number of years following.