John Baptist Zhao Mingxi

John Baptist Zhao Mingxi was a Chinese Catholic layman who suffered martyrdom in the last years of the Qing dynasty. He belonged to the Catholic population of Hebei in northern China, a region evangelized over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries by Jesuit, Lazarist, and other missionaries, and in which a number of rural villages had become substantially Catholic. Like most of the Chinese among the Martyrs of China, he is known to history chiefly through the fact and circumstances of his death rather than through any full contemporary biography. He is commemorated as one of the 120 Martyrs of China canonized by Pope John Paul II.

In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion swept northern China. Boxers, and in some districts Qing troops and local militias, attacked foreigners and Chinese Christians as supposed agents of foreign influence. Hebei, then within Zhili, saw intense violence against Catholic communities: villages were besieged, churches burned, and those who would not apostatize were killed. John Baptist Zhao Mingxi is listed among the faithful who died in that persecution. Hagiographical tradition links him with Peter Zhao Mingzhen, described as a kinsman or brother, both associated with the Shenxian area of Hebei, and both said to have been put to death in early July 1900 for refusing to deny the Christian faith.

Surviving notices of the lay Chinese martyrs of 1900 are typically brief. Missionary reports, later beatification and canonization acts, and local Catholic memory preserve names, baptism, perseverance, and the approximate time and region of death, but seldom a connected account of childhood, work, or household. In that respect Zhao Mingxi is representative of the great majority of the eighty-seven Chinese among the one hundred and twenty. Their witness was that of ordinary villagers and family members who chose death rather than a formal repudiation of baptism.

On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized Augustine Zhao Rong, a Chinese priest martyred in 1815, together with 119 companions, including John Baptist Zhao Mingxi. The group comprises 87 Chinese Catholics and 33 missionaries, spanning several centuries of persecution, with a large number from 1900. Their feast is kept on 9 July in the General Roman Calendar. Individual patronages are not customarily assigned to him in standard directories of saints. Exact birth date, native village, marital status, and burial place are not securely established in the widely available historical literature.