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Biography

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John Wang Kuixin (Chinese: 王奎心) was a Chinese Roman Catholic layman who suffered martyrdom during the Boxer Rebellion. He was born in 1875 in Zhujiahe village, Wei County, in Zhili province of the Qing dynasty (now part of Hebei province in China). Historical records concerning his family background, education, and personal life are sparse. He is known to have been a farmer and a practicing Catholic in a village that had developed a significant Christian community over the course of the nineteenth century through the missionary activity of the Society of Jesus and other Catholic orders in northern China.

The year 1900 saw the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, a violent popular movement directed against foreign influence and against Chinese Christians, who were perceived as having adopted a foreign religion. In July of that year, Catholics from the surrounding district took refuge in Zhujiahe, which was regarded as a relatively secure Catholic settlement. A combined force of Boxers and Qing imperial troops laid siege to the village. Two Jesuit priests, Léon-Ignace Mangin and Paul Denn, were present and were killed along with a large number of Chinese faithful. Contemporary missionary reports and later ecclesiastical investigations estimated that several hundred Catholics died in the assault and its aftermath.

John Wang Kuixin was put to death on 21 July 1900 at the age of about twenty-five. He is commemorated together with Joseph Wang Kuiju, another lay Catholic from Zhujiahe who died on the same day, as well as with many other victims of the massacre. Surviving accounts emphasize that the Christians of the village were offered the chance to save their lives by renouncing their faith and that many, including the laypeople later recognized as martyrs, refused. Individual details of Wang Kuixin’s last moments have not been preserved independently of the general narrative of the Zhujiahe killings.

In the twentieth century the Catholic Church undertook a formal examination of the deaths of Chinese Catholics and foreign missionaries killed in hatred of the faith. John Wang Kuixin was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1955 as part of a group of Chinese martyrs of the Boxer Rebellion. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him together with one hundred and nineteen other martyrs of China spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The group is known liturgically as Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, or the Holy Martyrs of China. Their feast is kept on 9 July in the Roman Catholic Church. No distinct personal patronages are customarily attached to John Wang Kuixin; he is venerated as one of the martyrs from the Chinese Catholic community.

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