The Manila hotel ballroom was festooned with red Chinese lanterns last week, and behind the podium hung a huge black and white photo of Communist Chinese workers and soldiers on a sightseeing tour of the Forbidden City. The meeting was not, however, a rally for Mao, but a gathering of 419 Evangelical Protestants from 22 nations intent on spreading the Gospel to the People's Republic.
After the founding of that republic 26 years ago, bitter anti-Communism ran strong among the Chinese Evangelicals scattered across Asia, and the Western missionaries who work with them. Many of them seemed to think that Communist China...