A new book named Before the Bamboo Curtain was Raised: A Study of Letters from Mainland Audiences of Liangyou Radio (1959-1983) written by Kim Lai Gene Ng was published in October.
It was jointly published by the Chinese Christian Literature Council of Taiwan, and the Research Center for Chinese Christianity, Chung Yuan Christian University.
With the name of Liangyou Radio (Good Friend Radio) in early 1949, the Far East Broadcasting Company began to transmit the gospel to mainland China via radio waves, becoming the longest-running gospel broadcasting organization to date. Beginning in the late 1950s, due to the influence of a series of political movements, especially the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese church faced a precarious situation in the midst of several historical changes. For decades, Liangyou Radio never stopped broadcasting to mainland China, but the outside world had not been able to know the current situation of the Chinese church and its believers who willingly or unwillingly kept silent. Following the implementation of the freedom of religion policy in 1979 after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party opened the prelude to reform and opening up, the Chinese church finally reopened. Since then, the organization received an increasing number of letters from mainland China, which recorded the situation of the Chinese church and captured the voices of believers for decades. Based on the letters between 1959 and 1983, the situation of the great changes in the Chinese church was collected and written down in the book, providing another perspective of ordinary people beyond historical discourse.
The author Kim Lai Gene Ng has received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Divinity from Hong Kong Alliance Bible Seminary (ABS), a Master of Divinity from Divinity School of Chung Chi College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a Master of Arts from SOAS, University of London, UK. As a volunteer researcher at the Christian and Chinese Culture Research Center of ABS, Ng is also the author of The Minority in the Cracks—the Protestant M2M Cause in the Gansu-Qinghai Area (1878–1951) which was released in 2015.
- Translated by Abigail Wu
