In 1948 he published an article titled "The Present Day Tragedy of Christianity" criticizing foreign missionaries, for which he was fired as editor.

While still promoting officially sanctioned religious policy, Tian Feng occasionally expresses hopes for ecumenism or criticizes certain impediments to the freedom of religion in China.

In the article, he criticized foreign missionary activities in China and equated Protestantism with exploitative capitalism; he called them "two expressions of the same society".

Tian Feng writings in the late 1940s and early 1950s sometimes exhibited enthusiasm about the prospects of the new society brought about by the Chinese Communist Revolution.

[10] Chinese Protestants ceased to credit foreign missionaries for their religious and humanitarian work in China and instead started criticizing them for being tools of Western imperialism.

This was the fate of Isaac Wei [zh], the leader of the independent True Jesus Church, who confessed in 1952,[17] but ended up in prison.

[18] In 1954, Tian Feng was used to discredit Wang Ming-Dao,[19] a prominent evangelist who was determined to keep his Christian Tabernacle church out of the TSPM.

[22] In 1956 it was the turn of Watchman Nee, a leader of the anti-communist local churches affiliation who had been long persecuted by the government, to be attacked in an editorial of Tian Feng.

[31] In addition to overtly political material, Tian Feng in its early TSPM years provided an "open forum" for adapting Christianity to the new communist China and some positive results were yielded in public discussions published in the magazine.

[32] At times, Tian Feng even acted as the "agony aunt" of Christian communities, coaching them on everyday practice.

[38] Most recently, since the TSPM and China Christian Council (CCC) have begun their controversial "Reconstruction of Theological Thinking" project, Tian Feng has lost subscribers.

[44] Recent issues have shown a widening of its scope and an "outward-looking ecumenism" of the state-sanctioned Protestant churches of China.

[42][45] The magazine also publishes stories about coping with economic change in China, family problems and friction between different churches.