Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. Below is today's resurrected item

Author's note: Below is an article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 1981 about the status of the Roman Catholic Church in China. Here we are in 2008, and the Vatican and the Communist Party are still negotiating. The status of the Roman Catholic Church is one of those China sagas, like Tibet and Taiwan, where you can turn back the clock a quarter of a century, and time more or less seems to have stood still.

There was a story attached to this article, and after all these years, it might as well be told, although I will leave out the key name.

I collected stamps when I was a boy, and in 1981 resumed the hobby because I found it to be a great excuse for meeting and talking to ordinary Chinese people. Stamp collecting was the first underground hobby to break to the surface of traumatized post-Maoist Chinese society—and in the early 1980s people were pulling amazing old stamps and sheets of stamps out of secret places in which they had been hidden to prevent their destruction by the Red Guards, and were trading them in steamy, garlic-flavored, blue Mao-jacketed huddles in post offices in all the main cities of China. There was a post office on Nanjing Lu in Shanghai, on the north side of the road, about three intersections from the Peace Hotel, and I used to go there and hang out whenever I was in the city. One day, I got picked up, as it were, by a guy who invited me home to see his stamp collection. I said sure, and we boarded one of the old crowded Shanghai buses.

I was surely one of only a handful of foreigners in the city riding a local bus that day and everyone was staring at me, and my philatelic friend suddenly stated loudly: "I am a Catholic."

The people next to us looked at him as if he was crazy, which he clearly was a little. We finally got off the bus, I have no idea where, and walked down the dark lanes to a tenement house dating from the 1920s or earlier. Up rickety stairs into a long Dickensian room with wooden cross beams holding up the ceiling, and everywhere, absolutely everywhere, Christian Catholic images. Crosses, images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

We sat down and started talking about religion, although at one point in the evening, we did actually look at his stamp collection. He knew I was a foreign journalist, and he absolutely knew that we must have been followed or noticed. But he wanted to talk about the situation of the Roman church and loyal Catholics in China, and I of course wrote it all down. It turned out he was a key figure in the underground Catholic church information network.

There had been no similar interview or contact up to that point by a foreign journalist with the underground church that I was aware of. He didn't place any restrictions on me, but I felt a huge sense of responsibility, and I waited several months before I sent the article to London, knowing that it would be read with interest by others in Peking maybe even before it was read by the sub-editors in London. I changed his gender, and did not include some information that would have clearly linked the story to Shanghai, including a story about a vision of the Virgin Mary appearing before a large group of Catholics who had gathered at Sheshan, the Catholic cathedral on a hill west of Shanghai, just the previous year. I am not religious, and there was a slightly mad light in his eyes. But given the pressures he and his fellow believers were under, it was not surprising that they moved somewhat away from normal behavior patterns.

Among other tasks, he was responsible for listening to short-wave radio (not necessarily a legal activity through to the end of the 1970s at least), noting all information and pronouncements about the Pope and the church, then passing them on to other cells around China.

He was in effect the Xinhua News Agency of the underground church.

A few months after the publication of the article, I was sitting in a bar in Taipei having a drink with Lionel Tsai, the Reuters bureau chief who had fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1949, and in walked an old white-haired gentleman who Lionel invited to sit with us. His name was Father McGrath, an Irish Catholic priest, and he had lived and worked in Shanghai for many years, also moving to Taiwan in 1949. I told him something of the story of my stamp-collecting friend, and Father McGrath said: "I know him, I know the whole family." He had bad news. The guy had recently been picked up and put back in prison.

I have no way of knowing whether it was because of my conversation with him, or because of the article. Or maybe neither. But he knew the risks far better than I did. But I hope he is now okay. China has changed so much since, and if he is still alive, it is my understanding that he can now probably believe in whatever he wants without having to be either afraid or slightly whacko.

The faithful gather secretly in small groups throughout China to worship the god they believe in, fearful always that the Communist authorities will discover them.

The Roman Catholic Church of China, loyal to the Pope and outlawed by the Chinese authorities, is still clinging tenaciously to life more than 20 years after all its houses of worship were forcibly closed.

I recently talked at length with a member of the underground church. She told me of great bravery in the face of implacable opposition from the authorities, who view Catholics loyal to the Pope as "lackeys of the Vatican".

It is a story which suggests that China's new and much-vaunted policy of religious freedom is at best highly selective. The Roman Catholic I met agreed to talk to me only on the strict understanding that her name and identity would remain secret.

She has been a Roman Catholic all her life. During the past 32 years of Communist rule in China, she claims her whole family has been persecuted for their beliefs life untold thousands of other Roman Catholics.

In 1957, the Chinese Government set up their own Catholic association independent of the Roman Church in an attempt to sever the spiritual and temporal ties between the Vatican and the faithful in China.

A few churches of the "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association" have opened in the past year or so, but the woman said most Catholics in China would have nothing to do with it.

The faithful hold religious services clandestinely, often with look-outs posted outside to warn of intruders. "We attend Mass every Sunday we can, sometimes in people's homes, sometimes elsewhere. The number at each service varies. Sometimes there are as many as 100," she said.

But security usually makes it impossible for the whole service to be completed in one place. "The priest gives us the sacrament and we take it home and receive it there," she said.

Wearing ordinary clothes, the priests perform weddings, christenings, and say the last rites, all in strict secrecy. The government seems to know who most of the priests are.

Some members of the church with access to short-wave radios and foreign newspapers and magazines, search for pronouncements by the Pope, which they translate into Chinese, transcribe many times over and distribute to other groups of the faithful.

No one knows how many Catholics, either Roman or independent, there are in China. Before the Communist victory in1949, the Vatican estimated its Chinese flock at about 4.5 million.

The government says the number has dropped since, but many official and unofficial religious leaders say the number has been rising steadily in the past decade or more, partly as a result of increasing disillusionment with communism.

The woman did admit: "Things have been slightly easier in the past few years." But she said she and other Roman Catholics in China looked forward to the day when the church could operate more in the open, working to make China a "Godly country".