Chai Ling's Testimony
This is an abbreviated version. For the full version, please click here.
Chai Ling’s first experience of Christianity was as a student at Beijing University when she met another student who had taken a recent biking trip along the Yellow River. The student described a poor village he had come across in the middle of his journey where the people had secretly kept a copy of a Bible left by a missionary. They had kept this treasured possession safe for over 40 years, even though they could not read it, and even though its presence put their lives at risk. He was asked by them to read it aloud, which he did through the night until dawn broke, while the villagers listened silently. His story of this public display of such strong devotion and faith had a lasting impact on Chai Ling.
After the Tiananmen movement and Chai Ling’s escape from China, many other people were also to challenge and witness to Ling about the Christian religion and their faith in God. These included Jariy Hunter, the leader of a faith –based college in South Carolina and Rev Holt, a Methodist Minister from Cape Cod. However, perhaps the biggest influence on Ling was the human rights activist and film producer Reggie Littlejohn, who provided Ling with Christian books and films, including a movie of the Gospel of John which Ling describes as bringing her an inexplicable sense of peace.
The turning point came when Littlejohn and Ling went together to the U.S. Congress’s Human Rights testimony of China’s forced abortion practice. There, a young Chinese woman gave testimony to the experience that had brought her to the edge of life and death, and the saving power she found in putting her faith in Christ. Ling remembers how the woman broke down as she told her story and the room echoed her pain as many around her also wept.
The story struck Ling to the core and provoked a multitude of questions in her mind about who would help this young women and the 500 like her who each day take their own lives as a result of the trauma they have gone through. At the same time the realization dawned on her that if anyone could stop the brutality, it would be God. In the light of her own struggles in Tiananmen, she knew that success could not be achieved alone.
Ling finally gave her life to Christ on Friday 4th December 2009, kneeling in prayer in the corner of her Boston office, and felt a deep sense of peace for putting God in charge. Today she reflects that, even though she was not raised in a family that knew God, and at points she had doubted what good the Bible could do in her struggles, that God had always been present in her life. It was God that had enabled her to achieve the education she needed to escape a lonely life in a small fishing village, and it was God that had watched over and protected her during Tiananmen, enabling her to escape China and build a new life in America. She believes that she has survived to fulfill a calling on her life to bring God’s love to China.
Since becoming a believer, Ling has been reunited with many of her former friends from Tiananmen, who have also since found strength and meaning by putting their faith in Christ.
In June 2010, Chai Ling started a nonprofit called "All Girls Allowed". The nonprofit is aimed at exposing and stopping the human rights violations caused by China's One-Child Policy. it is based out of Boston and is an initiative of the Jenzabar Foundation. At the website, visitors can donate to save the lives of baby girls through the support of rural Chinese families, or sponsor the education of an orphan in China. There are opportunities for students, mothers, churches and other interested parties to become part of a movement of providing life, value and dignity to women and girls in China.
