Han Wenzao

Felix Corley's obituary of Han Wenzao [13 February] says more about the writer's anti-Communist prejudices than about his subject, writes Canon Christopher Hall. Han's son stayed with us in 1987 while he was a postgraduate student in Bangor. We learnt how peer pressure meant that all his contemporaries were Red Guards. At primary school he had had to write letters denouncing his parents as spies for working for the YMCA. Like Catholics in 17th-century England, Chinese Christians were suspect for their loyalty to foreign powers. In China it used to be said: "One more Christian, one less Chinese."

At great personal cost Chinese Christians earned recognition and respect for Christianity as an indigenous faith through the persecution they shared with Marxists and professional classes during the Cultural Revolution.