"It is the will of the people which will prevail"

with contributions from Nien Cheng

Nien Cheng has lived with the sweep of twentieth-century history. China, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States have all been home to her.

But the nearly seven years she spent in a small cell in a Shanghai prison was perhaps the pivotal period of her life. "For me," she wrote in her book Life and Death in Shanghai, "crossing the prison threshold was the beginning of a new phase of my life that, through my struggle for survival and for justice, was to make me a spiritually stronger ... person."

It was her years as a political prisoner during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s that also prompted Mme. Cheng to write: "Throughout the years of my imprisonment, I had turned to God often and felt His presence. In the drab surroundings of the gray cell, I had known magic moments of transcendence that I had not experienced in the ease and comfort of my normal life. My belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness had been restored, and I had renewed courage to fight on. My faith had sustained me in these the darkest hours of my life and brought me safely through privation, sickness, and torture. At the same time, my suffering had strengthened my faith and made me realize that God was always there. It was up to me to come to Him."*

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