Career
He was a leader among Chinese house churches, and known for his resistance against participation in the state-controlled "Three-Self Patriotic churches". Yuan’s ministry began after the Japanese surrender in 1945. He was assisted by a Norwegian missionary.
Yuan opened a prayer room in Beijing so that he could preach.
When the government set up the Three Self Patriotic Movement to develop national churches under party control in 1950, a year after the communist revolution, Yuan and other pastors refused to join. In 1958 he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for "counter-revolutionary crimes".
I was sent to near the Russian border doing farm work, growing rice. Wang Ming-Dao and I thought we would die martyrs there.
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"In the labor camp it was very cold," he wrote, "food was bad, and the work was hard, but in 22 years I never once got sick.
I was thin and wore glasses, but I came back alive. Many did not. I met only four Catholic priests. They were in the same situation I was in.
They refused to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association."
Yuan was released in 1979 and went back into Christian ministry.