the year. In 1926, Wang began publishing a religious newspaper, Spiritual Food Quarterly (). Conflict with the Japanese and the Communists Wang believed both that church and state should be separate and that Christians should not be "yoked together with unbelievers." When the Japanese occupied Peking during World War II, they insisted that all churches join in a Japanese organized federation of churches. Wang refused on a number of occasions. Despite threats of various kinds, he was not arrested, and his church was allowed to continue to hold services. When the Communists gained control of China, Wang believed that the new government might indeed allow the religious freedom it had promised. Nevertheless, after the Maoists won the Chinese Civil War, the government pressured churches that had been started by Western missionaries to unite in denouncing Western imperialism. Wang was pressured but refused on the grounds that his church had never had any connection with missionaries. In August 1955, Wang was arrested for refusing to join the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), the state-controlled church. A few months earlier Wang had written a long article attacking the Three-Self Committee headed by Wu Yaozong as a group composed of modernist unbelievers with whom true Christians should have nothing to do. Wang, his wife, and eighteen church members, were imprisoned, and the Christian Tabernacle was closed. After signing a confession, making a humiliating plea for mercy from those he had previously denounced as "false prophets," and promising to participate in the TSPM, Wang was released from prison. Then after recovering from a possible nervous breakdown, Wang recanted, was rearrested in 1957, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1963. After the United States reestablished diplomatic relations with China in 1972, human rights organizations began to pressure China to release its political prisoners. When the Chinese government attempted to release Wang in 1979, he refused (like St. Paul in Acts 16:35–40) to leave until his name had been cleared. In 1980 the prison tricked Wang into leaving, in Wang's words "not released but… forced out by deception." Final days After Wang's release he received numerous visitors to his tiny apartment in Shanghai, including foreigners from Europe, North America, and Asia. The sheer volume of visitors made Chinese security officers nervous, especially since Wang made frank statements about his past treatment by the government. Wang remained unapologetic, and when a member of the Three-Self Church sent