30 Years in China’s Prisons Fails to Alter Bishop’s Faith

For three decades, Ignatius Kung had no name.

To the outside world, he was a famous prisoner of conscience. But inside his Shanghai isolation cell, the guards and interrogators addressed him only by his prison number--at first 1423, and later, in another jail, 28234. Kung now recites those digits as if they were etched on his brain.

In 1955, when Kung was the Roman Catholic bishop of Shanghai, authorities imprisoned him on grounds that he was part of a “counterrevolutionary clique” conspiring against China by continuing to maintain allegiance to the Vatican. China was setting up its own government-sponsored “patriotic church” separate from Rome.

In jail, Kung slept and ate on a stone floor. He wore unwashed clothes that once belonged to other prisoners. Throughout it all, virtually every day, he was urged to give up, to confess, to yield. “The prosecutor said if I renounced my religion, I could get out of jail right away,” he recalled.

Kung refused. He was kept in prison until 1985, when he was finally released. Last year, he was permitted to leave China for treatment in the United States for heart problems, and he now lives in the rehabilitation wing of a hospital in this suburban community.

A 30-Year ‘Journey’

In the first extensive interview he has granted since his arrival in this country, Kung recently told the story of what he calls his 30-year “journey” in a Chinese jail.

It is a story that illustrates the extent of human rights abuses in China, which began well before the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and continued well after Deng Xiaoping, China’s current leader, came to power.

And yet Kung’s story also shows that a stubborn, devout man can survive, alone, against a regime determined to break him--and emerge from it with cheerful tranquillity.

“Other people study theology courses in the seminary,” Kung said in the interview. “I got a different kind of education from God.”

Kung is 89 years old now, a sturdy, thick-necked man with balding white hair. Even on a warm Connecticut spring day, he still wears the three layers of padded clothing customary in the Shanghai winter.

He spends his days reading and going to Mass. He watches films such as “The Ten Commandments” on a new videocassette recorder. Relatives who live nearby, such as his nephew, Joseph Kung, stop by to visit. To visiting priests, he seems a Roman Catholic version of Rip Van Winkle, and they must explain developments such as Vatican II and changes such as Mass said in the vernacular.

Now that his health is better, Kung is even preparing to see some of the United States. Within the next few weeks, he will visit San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Educated by the Jesuits in Shanghai, Kung became a priest at age 30. On Oct. 7, 1949, only six days after Mao Tse-tung declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Kung was ordained the bishop of Suzhou, and those two events set the stage for his eventual confrontation with the government.

The following year Kung became bishop of Shanghai, the top Roman Catholic clergyman in China’s largest city. Meanwhile, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party began moving to sever the ties between Chinese Catholics and the Vatican.

The effort was gradual at first. In fact, Kung said in the interview, in those first years after the revolution of 1949, the Roman Catholic Church had much greater freedom in China than it has today. As bishop, Kung was allowed to carry out his work in Shanghai; the only restriction was that he was not allowed to transfer priests from one diocese to another.

But in 1953, the regime ousted the Vatican’s nuncio and all foreign missionaries from China. “They kicked them out under the slogan that they were imperialistic,” Kung said through a translator. “They isolated us.”

The regime insisted that Kung instruct some members of his church to register and to acknowledge that they were members of reactionary groups. Kung said no. On Sept. 8, 1955, he was arrested and thrown into Shanghai No. 1 Prison.

“After the first five minutes, they called me ‘1423,’ ” Kung said.

Interrogation Ordeal

It was nearly five years before Bishop Kung was brought to trial. He was interrogated again and again.

“Every day, during those first five years, the Chinese government tried to have me confess,” he said. “They tried to make me very tired. They asked questions day and night. Sometimes they would start at midnight and go on until 6 a.m.”

He was fed two meals a day. One of them was a porridge so weak, Kung said, that “you could only see water in it.” The other meal was a bowl of rice.

His isolation cell had no bed, chair or any other furniture. Kung ate and sat on the floor. Once, authorities brought him a slab of plywood to lie on, but after a day, he discovered it was full of insects.

“They gave me leftover clothes from other prisoners,” Kung remembered. “They smelled. I didn’t know who had worn them before.”

Finally, his trial was scheduled for March 17, 1960. Yet even on the eve of the trial, authorities tried to get Kung’s confession from him.

“Sometime in February (1960), the prosecutor came to jail to see me,” Kung said. “The prosecutor said, ‘If you renounce your religion, you can get out of jail right away.’

“I said, ‘OK, here is my head. You can take that out of jail with you. I can never renounce my religion.’ ”

The trial was secret. According to Amnesty International, no record was kept, except for a press account published by the official New China News Agency.

A Life Sentence

The verdict: Bishop Kung was sentenced to life imprisonment. The same day, 13 other Roman Catholic priests were given terms of from five to 20 years in jail.

After the Chinese press published the news of Kung’s life sentence, he vanished again into the prison system for another quarter century.

“The government did not want anybody to know where I was,” Kung said. “The first few years, I was completely isolated. I had a whole floor of the jail, like a warehouse, all by myself. Whenever other people walked by my cell, they were ordered to look the other way, to avoid having any face-to-face contact with me.”

There was at least one consolation: Kung was permitted to read books of classical Chinese. He read a work of Tang Dynasty poetry so often that he memorized all 300 poems. But he was not allowed to read the Bible in his jail cell.

He prayed. He meditated. “I was not unhappy,” Kung said. “On the contrary, because I was able to resist this temptation, I felt very calm and extremely happy.”

Time passed.

For Kung, the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution was just “something that happened outside (the prison),” just another decade in the middle of his long imprisonment. Some Chinese--people such as Nien Cheng, author of the recent best-selling book “Life and Death in Shanghai”--were imprisoned for several years and finally released. Kung stayed in jail.

‘Struggle Sessions’

For about five months, Kung was brought out of his cell each day and subjected to Cultural Revolution “struggle sessions” in which small groups of Chinese, including a former priest, tried to persuade him to renounce his religion. He seems almost to have enjoyed the human contact these sessions offered.

“It was very civilized,” he said. Once again, he refused to give in.

Actually, Kung makes clear, he was not entirely unyielding. When it came to Chinese politics instead of religion, he sometimes told the prison guards what they wanted to hear. He was willing to say, for example, that the Cultural Revolution was good.

On Sept. 9, 1976, Mao died. “They called me in and asked me what I thought about the death of Mao Tse-tung,” Kung said.

Kung replied as tactfully as he could. “It didn’t matter,” he explained. “You just had to tell them the party line. It had nothing to do with me. I wanted religion.”

Even after Mao died and Deng took control of the Communist Party, Kung was still asked to recant.

“Every day, I was told I could get out,” he said. “All I had to do was renounce the Holy Father. I didn’t have to say anything. All I had to do was nod my head.”

By the mid-1980s, Kung’s situation began to improve. Apparently for health reasons, he was taken out of prison for a visit to Canton. When he returned, he was detained in a home rather than a prison cell.

Kept Under Guard

On July 3, 1985, the Chinese regime announced that Kung was being released on parole. Even then, he was kept under guard. “I was not allowed outside the compound where I lived, and no one was allowed to see me without special permission,” he said.

A week after his release, the official Shanghai newspaper Xinmin Evening News quoted Kung as saying: “Although I am old now, I still want to devote the rest of my life to the four modernizations (industry, agriculture, science and defense) and the construction of the motherland.” Journalists and diplomats were not permitted to meet with Kung to verify these statements.

Even after his parole was lifted in early 1988, Kung said, “I just avoided (giving) opinions on sensitive issues.” A few months later, with the help of his American nephew, Joseph, he was able to obtain a passport to travel to the United States.

A visitor asked Kung whether he misses China. He laughed and, perhaps out of decades of caution, deflected the question. “I’m thinking of heaven,” Kung said.