Watchman Nee Tuosheng was born in 1903 in Swatow, China, into a family with Methodist roots. Converted at seventeen under the ministry of Dora Yu, he threw himself almost immediately into Christian work, gathering small assemblies of believers across China on principles he believed were drawn directly from the New Testament rather than from inherited denominational structures. He read widely in the writings of earlier evangelical and Keswick teachers — figures such as Andrew Murray and Jesse Penn-Lewis — and synthesized their insights into a body of teaching that was distinctly his own in texture and application.
Nee came of age during one of the most turbulent periods in Chinese history, navigating civil war, Japanese occupation, and finally the Communist revolution of 1949. Against this backdrop he built a network of local churches, eventually centered in Shanghai, that prized indigenous leadership and financial independence from Western missionary organizations. His approach anticipated by decades what missiologists would later call the indigenous church movement, though Nee himself framed everything in devotional and ecclesiological rather than strategic terms.
His written work, much of it transcribed from spoken messages, reached readers far beyond China. *The Normal Christian Life*, drawn from addresses on Romans 6 through 8 delivered in Europe in 1938 and 1939, remains his most widely read work, offering a sustained account of union with Christ and the believer's participation in his death and resurrection. Other titles, including *Sit, Walk, Stand* and *The Spiritual Man*, extended his exploration of what he understood to be the full dimensions of Christian experience and the nature of human constitution before God.
In 1952 the new Communist government arrested Nee on charges that included economic crimes; he was sentenced to fifteen years, later extended, and died in a labor camp in 1972. His imprisonment, endured without public recantation, gave his writings a gravity that scholarship alone could not have supplied, and his influence on evangelical and charismatic communities worldwide has continued long after his death.