Ting, K. H.

(Ding, Guangxun)

(b. 1915)

   Protestant church leader in Communist China

   K. H. Ting was born in Shanghai in 1915, the son of a banker and grandson of an Anglican priest. He attended St. John's University in Shanghai and received a B.D. (1942) and M.A. (1948) at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was ordained a priest in 1942. He pastored the International Church in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. Returning to the West after the war, he was for a period the student secretary of the Student Christian Movement in Canada and worked for the World Student Christian Federation in Geneva.

   Ting returned to China in 1951, shortly after Western missionaries had been expelled. The postrevolutionary government in China moved swiftly to consolidate the various Protestant denominations into a single body that was structured through several organizations, including the three-self patriotic movement. Ting was elected to its first national committee in 1954. in 1962, he was named president of the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, previously sponsored by a variety of denominations.

   During the Cultural Revolution, when all public religious practice was banned, Ting and his wife, Kuy Siu-may, were kept under close observation in modest quarters where they had been relocated. He and several other faculty members were for a time engaged by the government in translating documents, and he worked on a new English-Chinese dictionary.

   In the late 1970s, as the Cultural Revolution died out and religious activity was once again tolerated, Ting emerged into prominence. He attended the Third Assembly of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, held at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1979. In 1981, he resumed leadership of the reopened Nanjing Theological Seminary. He was elected president of both the revived three-self movement and the China Christian Council. He led in the creation of the Chinese Theological Review in 1985, and that same year became president of the Amity Foundation, a new Christian organization created to embody a variety of good works, from education, to social and health services, to rural development across China.

   In 1995, Ting retired as leader of the China Christian Council and the three-self movement. In 2000, the Amity Foundation presented Ting Amity's 25-millionth copy of the Bible.

   Further reading:

   ■ Alan Hunter and Kim-Kwon Chan. Protestantism in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

   ■ K. H. Ting, "A Call for Clarity: Fourteen Points from Christians in People's Republic of China to Christians Abroad," China and Ourselves 24, 1 (February, 1981); , A Chinese Contribution to Ecumenical Theology: Selected Writings of Bishop K. H. Ting, ed. by Janice and Philip Wickeri (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2002); , No Longer Strangers: Selected Writings of K. H. Ting (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989).