one

TO LIVE UNDER THE SUN

LIN ZHAO FOUND OUT FROM HER PARENTS THAT POLITICS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY China was a treacherous business. In the late 1920s, her mother, Xu Xianmin, at the time a student at Leyi Middle School in Suzhou, joined her radical brother Xu Jinyuan as agitators in the city’s labor movement led by the local branch of the nascent Chinese Communist Party. Xu Xianmin later recalled the moment when she came on the scene as a fifteen-year-old revolutionary neophyte. During a strike by Suzhou’s rickshaw pullers, she “wove in and out of the crowd of demonstrators on the street, running around like a lunatic,” dressed in red with megaphone in hand. “I did not really know what revolution was all about. I just followed Big Brother Jinyuan, waving a flag and shouting, but that got me the nickname ‘the lady in red.’”¹

The woman in red soon came to know what a heavy price a revolution could exact. In the wee hours of April 11, 1927, the Nationalist (Guomindang) police burst into the house where Xu Jinyuan and a few regional CCP leaders were holding an emergency meeting and arrested them. The next day, Chiang Kai-shek launched his brutal purge of the Communists in Shanghai. Hundreds of activists in Shanghai’s General Labor Union, the CCP stronghold in the city, were killed. As the campaign continued, thousands went missing. The April 12 Incident marked the end of the brief Nationalist-CCP alliance against the warlords. Thereafter the Communists were hunted down, and the bloody struggle between the two parties would continue for over two decades. A few days after his arrest, Xu Jinyuan’s murdered body was put into a hemp sack and dumped into the river. He was twenty-one.²

The manner of her brother’s death apparently dampened Xu Xianmin’s heroism. She soon distanced herself from the CCP and aligned instead with a reformist faction within the Guomindang, serving as secretary of its local county branch. But her political loyalties remained divided: to a large extent, her sympathies remained with the revolutionaries.³

LIN ZHAO, NÉE Peng Lingzhao, was born on January 23, 1932.⁴ She abandoned her birth name in her late teens when she joined the Communist revolution. The adoption of Lin as her new surname, no small sin against filial piety, marked a symbolic break with the Peng family: Peng Guoyan, her father, had not embraced the revolution in his youth. In 1922, he had been admitted to Southeast University in Nanjing, one of the first national universities established after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912. He majored in political economy, part of the university’s Western-style curriculum, which was designed to advance the modernizers’ nationalist dreams of wealth and power for the country. Those were dreams from the late nineteenth century. Battered by the failed reforms of the 1890s, the disaster of the Boxer Uprising at the turn of the century, and the country’s descent into warlordism after 1916, the dreams nevertheless remained buoyant.

In 1926, Peng Guoyan graduated from Southeast University. Unlike his fiery future wife, he envisioned the introduction of constitutional politics and efficient, accountable government—what writer and family friend Feng Yingzi called his “Westminster-style democratic ideas”—to China. His bachelor’s thesis was entitled “On the Constitution of the Irish Free State.”⁵

By 1928, a time of fresh beginnings for China appeared to have arrived. Major warlords either had been defeated or had pledged allegiance to the newly established National government in Nanjing; the radicalism of communism had been contained. National rejuvenation seemed possible under the new Nanjing government, which began a vigorous push to end almost a century of unequal treaties that had been forced on China since the Opium War of 1839–1842. Successful negotiations with Western powers soon led to reclaimed tariff autonomy.⁶

Meanwhile, the Nanjing government sought to introduce reforms in the economy, industry, education, and the army, as well as in government administration and the tax system. In Jiangsu province, examinations were held in September 1928 to select chief executives at the county level, ostensibly a break with the corrupt officialdom of the past. The twenty-four-year-old Peng scored highest in the test and became the magistrate of Wu county, which included the city of Suzhou and the neighboring areas.

Peng’s glory was short-lived. Unwilling and unable to play by the intricate rules of local politics, he neither bribed his provincial superior nor appeased the power brokers in areas nominally under his administrative control. He initiated road construction projects and the installation of telephone lines; he also cracked down on gambling and opium dens, to the ire of local police, who earned protection money from murky establishments.

Magistrate Peng apparently also harbored sympathies for Communists and leaked to Xu Xianmin, his future wife, a secret provincial order for the arrest of Suzhou leftists. Within months, he was briefly detained on vague charges of insubordination and indiscretion and removed from office.⁷

In 1930, he and Xu Xianmin were married. By the time of Lin Zhao’s birth in 1932, he was in his third short-lived administrative stint, now as the magistrate of the remote, impoverished county of Pi. In May, after only six months on the job, the scrupulous and hardworking Peng was again arrested on trumped-up charges of “wanton taxation” to profit himself. He had tried to stay above factional politics but ended up running afoul of a local strongman. He spent the next three years in jail. The wings of the would-be modernizer had again been clipped. As if this was not enough, the strongman commissioned a stone stele at taxpayers’ expense to commemorate the “inferior administrative deeds” of Peng. One could hardly have suffered a more resounding defeat.⁸

LIN ZHAO WAS five when Japan’s full-scale invasion of China began. The hostilities, which broke out in July 1937 near Beijing (called Beiping at the time), spread to the Shanghai area in August. Shanghai fell in November, and Suzhou, eighty kilometers west, quickly followed. In December, the Japanese took Nanjing, the then capital of the Republic of China, and unleashed six weeks of horror—the Rape of Nanking, in which some three hundred thousand Chinese were massacred.

As the Japanese army advanced, Lin Zhao’s family joined the estimated fifty million refugees who fled coastal China and headed west. In wartime capital Chongqing, Peng Guoyan worked for the Ministry of Finance of the Nationalist government. Xu Xianmin decided to return to occupied Shanghai and Suzhou as an undercover agent for the resistance movement—a Nationalist “commissioner” for Shanghai’s surrounding countryside. At one point, she was briefly detained and tortured by the Japanese gendarmes.⁹

From a young age, Lin Zhao found in her mother an example of courage and sacrifice. Many years later, she reflected in a prison poem that it was her uncle Xu Jinyuan who had taught her mother to fight and her mother who passed on to her the same fighting spirit.¹⁰

After the end of the Japanese occupation, Peng Guoyan returned to the lower Yangzi valley and secured a position at the government’s Central Bank in Shanghai. For her part, Xu Xianmin emerged as a progressive socialite in Suzhou. Back in the early 1930s, she had cofounded the Suzhou Women’s Association to mobilize public opinion against Japan’s takeover of Manchuria. After the war, her activist credentials and connections propelled her into prominent roles in respectable Suzhou society. She served on the board of trustees of a local bank, assumed directorship of Dahua Daily, a Suzhou newspaper, cofounded a transportation company, and successfully ran for the National Assembly in 1946 as a representative from Suzhou.¹¹

During these years, Peng Guoyan and Xu Xianmin were able to provide a respectable education for Lin Zhao and a comfortable life for their two younger children: Peng Lingfan, their second daughter, born in 1938, and a son, Peng Enhua, born in 1944. In fall 1947, Lin Zhao entered the Laura Haygood Memorial School for Girls, or Jinghai, where she would spend two of the most formative years of her life.¹²

Founded in 1903, Jinghai was named after Laura Haygood (the Chinese name of the school translates to “in admiration of Haygood”), who went to China in 1884 as the first female foreign missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She died in 1900, a well-known educator and founder of the prestigious McTyeire Home and School in Shanghai. Three years later, the Southern Methodist mission built the Laura Haygood Memorial School in Suzhou to honor her memory.¹³

Laura Haygood Memorial School for Girls, n.d. (ca. 1910s). Used with permission from General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church.

Unlike most mission schools in the nineteenth century, which catered to poor families, it was an elite school from the start. “There is the newly built Laura Haygood Memorial School for girls of the higher classes,” noted the survey volume of a century of Protestant work in China published in 1907. It offered “exceptional literary advantages” and charged “eighty dollars per annum, not including music”—several times the entire annual income of an average laborer at the time.¹⁴

The school was built in a quiet eastern corner of Suzhou, next to what was once a moat and the grassy ancient city wall on top of which one could take a stroll in the sunset. Across a narrow street was Soochow University, the pride of Methodist educational missions in China, which opened in 1901. One could look out from the wide, balustraded balconies onto the well-groomed lawn, lined with tall trees. There was a pavilion where students could meet and chat. In autumn, chrysanthemums bloomed in the flower beds and along the school’s borders; elegant flower arrangements graced the auditorium, the long hall, and the social room—with carved rosewood tables and a piano—where tea was served.¹⁵

The rules at Laura Haygood were strict: one’s posture had to be decorous, one’s gait elegant. School uniforms must be neat. Students filed into the cafeteria to the accompaniment of music, prayed before they dined, and prayed again at bedtime. In its early days, all instruction as well as textbooks were in English, with the exception of the Chinese classes.

In 1917, to meet the growing needs for modern early education in the new republic, Laura Haygood reorganized itself and became primarily a teachers’ school. The instructors, American missionaries and Chinese as well, were rigorously trained. The Chinese faculty included some of the bright literary stars of Republican China. Among its graduates were also notable future writers as well as pioneers in modern education such as Wu Yifang, president of Ginling College.¹⁶

Laura Haygood students distinguished themselves in sports as well. In spring 1948, when Lin Zhao was a junior, the school won championships in basketball and volleyball and received banners for folk dancing and track. Its students also won first and fourth places in an English declamation contest sponsored by the Rotary Club of Suzhou. Its annual concerts featured choruses and a quartet singing such pieces as “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. A graduate compared herself to a “plant growing in the big beautiful garden of Laura Haygood” with plenty of “sunshine and good rain” and vowed to also “give sunshine and good rain to other people of the world.”¹⁷

From its early days, Laura Haygood had embodied the reformist spirit in mission education: the biology teacher had girls make charts of mosquitoes and flies for their visits to local homes to promote public health; students devoted their summer vacation to teaching children who had never had opportunities for formal education. The school also cultivated cosmopolitan social mores in its students; for one, Laura Haygood girls formed mixed choirs with male students at Soochow University. Emancipation was on everyone’s lips and took tangible form in unbound feet and bobbed hair. Many students also championed coeducation as well as equal inheritance and divorce rights for women.¹⁸

In the early 1920s, Laura Haygood began publishing a bilingual, semiannual, student-run journal, called The Laura Haygood Star (Jinghai xing). With an editorial board made up of students and a missionary faculty adviser, it published articles and photographs that portrayed a progressive as well as idyllic campus life—featuring a science lab and a Chinese music band, as well as the school’s YWCA chapter. Its literary section was dedicated to translations of Western fairy tales, short stories, and plays, as well as original creative works by students. The weighty issues that the teenage contributors explored ranged from modern childhood education to the promotion of vernacular Chinese and women’s liberation from “slavery” and “husbands’ oppression.” Professionally printed by the American Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai, it had the polish of a mainstream periodical.¹⁹

After the disruptions of the Sino-Japanese War, during which its campus was occupied by the Japanese army, Laura Haygood reopened in late 1945 when Jiang Guiyun, the principal since 1927, returned with a contingent of refugee students. (Jiang’s brother, Jiang Changchuan, had baptized Chiang Kai-shek in 1930 and served as bishop of the United Methodist Church in China after 1941.) There was a record enrollment by 1947. Its college-preparatory high school was full, as were the lower grades all the way down to nursery. Lin Zhao’s father, as the former county magistrate, knew Jiang Guiyun, a connection that apparently secured her admission to its college-preparatory division.²⁰

In its first two decades, Laura Haygood mandated chapel attendance. However, under the rules first instituted in 1925 by the warlord-controlled Beijing government and enforced by the Nationalist government after 1928, religious affiliation and observance were made optional. In fact, the school attracted a significant number of students from families with more interest in the career and marriage prospects of their daughters than the well-being of their souls. “This year we have to work up from a very small nucleus of Christians,” wrote Annie Eloise Bradshaw, a veteran teacher, in July 1947.²¹

Yet there was fresh interest in Christianity among the students; thirteen girls joined the church at Easter that year, and a young Chinese teacher organized a Christian club. A student-faculty group planned vespers. Worship service was held each day, led either by a teacher or by students. Not long after she arrived at Laura Haygood, Lin Zhao was baptized by a missionary teacher and joined the church.²²

Lin Zhao’s existent writings make no mention of how or why she chose to be baptized. In a sense, her conversion was not unexpected: before Laura Haygood, she had briefly attended Vincent Miller Academy, a Presbyterian mission school near her home in the outskirts of Suzhou. A melancholy essay she wrote in May 1947, before her transfer to Laura Haygood, hinted at deep emotions stirred by an image of the Holy Mother.²³

Many years later, when she was in prison, she would write fondly of the “influence of the humanitarian ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity” that she came under in mission schools. She also associated mission Christianity with other virtues, such as efficiency and pragmatism. By the time she enrolled in Laura Haygood, her own patriotic flame, passed on from her mother, had already flared up, and the school’s Christian concerns with justice apparently appealed to her. For progressive young Christians of the late 1940s, it was not uncommon to identify Christianity with the struggle against the forces of evil in Chinese society. As Wu Yaozong, future leader of the Three-Self Church, put it in 1947, “In this painful and cruel world, the Christian truth has become a force for liberating humanity and moving history forward.”²⁴

In any event, Lin Zhao put down religious roots during her time at Laura Haygood. As she would discover later in life, they ran much deeper than she initially realized. The many hymns and biblical verses that she called to mind almost two decades later in her prison cell—which was stripped of all materials except party propaganda—were from her mission school years. They would become the imaginary bricks with which she would build her own chapel in her prison cell for weekly “grand church worship” as she put it.²⁵

DURING THE TWO years when Lin Zhao was at Laura Haygood, much of the country was ravaged by the war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Inflation skyrocketed as military expenditures exploded. The rise had begun in 1938 following the Japanese invasion. By 1945, more than 80 percent of the Nationalist government’s expenditures were financed through “monetary expansion.” By 1948, the wholesale price index in Shanghai was 6.6 million times that of 1937.²⁶

As the tide of war turned against the authoritarian government of Chiang Kai-shek, it became even more brutal and intolerant of dissent. Conditions deteriorated for ordinary people. For patriotic youths, the country was a sick parent dying from the cancerous growth of the corrupt and repressive yet inept rule of the Guomindang. Only the most extreme treatments—the “new democracy” that the Communists promised and the violent land reform that they conducted in areas under their control—seemed to promise a cure. Before long, Lin Zhao became disenchanted with Laura Haygood’s aloofness from radical politics.

For all of the school’s reformist spirit, activism at Laura Haygood during the civil war years was well contained within genteel boundaries. The school furnished occasional entertainments for children at a local orphanage and contributed to it “ten per cent of our student church collection.” A “flower mission to the hospital” was conducted during the half hour between Sunday school and church; students would put a flower in the hand of each patient.²⁷

Indeed, the temperament of the Southern Methodist mission in China as a whole was distinctly Victorian. In 1948, the Methodist Church East China Conference, which oversaw the work in the lower Yangzi valley, including Suzhou, called attention to the importance of “temperance and social service” and urged its pastors to “preach on the subject of temperance” at least once each year. “Special attention should be given to matter of total abstinence from the use of tobacco, opium, liquors, gambling, the wastage of time and money, and from all immoral and excessive practices of both a personal or social nature.”²⁸

Such social vision had little appeal to the growing number of radical students at Laura Haygood. Communist influence had been felt at the school since the 1920s. The CCP’s propaganda against Western imperialism—which also targeted the “cultural invasion” of Christian missions—had long threatened to disrupt its educational program. There was a period after 1927 during which not a single student joined the church in an entire year.²⁹

There had also been instances of Communist infiltration at Laura Haygood. For the required course in “party-spirit education” during the early 1930s, the Nationalist government had sent its own teachers to mission schools. One day, the appointed government teacher at Laura Haygood disappeared: he had been arrested. While he had included a standard question—What is the only salvation for China?—on a test he gave his students, the correct answer, he insisted, was communism.³⁰

In 1948, another underground Communist who taught at Laura Haygood initiated Lin Zhao into communism. That summer, Lin Zhao secretly joined the CCP. She was sixteen.³¹

LOOKING BACK ON that decision from her prison cell a decade and a half later, Lin Zhao wrote: “In my solemn reflections and painful self-reproach, I always saw my leftist leaning and my pursuit of communism during adolescence as a personal mistake.… It could be attributed to both the trend of the time and family influence. Lin Zhao was but treading the same path as most people of my generation! At the time when this young person began following the Communist Party, ‘the Communist Party’ only meant such things as persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and execution.” CCP membership did not carry “the sweet smell of steamed rice and meat broth,” she added.³²

But, to young patriots, persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and execution were part of the glorious price to pay for their heroic struggle against the dark forces of repression and injustice. Lin Zhao’s mother, Xu Xianmin, had battled similar forces in Suzhou after the end of the Japanese occupation: two men working for the powerful Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, or juntong, the intelligence agency of the Nationalist government, raped and killed a young woman teacher in Suzhou. The victim’s mother sought justice but was powerless against the juntong system. Xu intervened in support of the prosecution. When a letter of intimidation arrived at her home with a bullet enclosed, she published it in a newspaper. With her help, the plaintiff eventually won the court case against the rapists.³³

During the civil war years, Xu Xianmin became disillusioned with the Nationalist rule. However, already in her late thirties and a mother of three, she was no longer a revolutionary firebrand. She eventually joined the China Democratic League, a coalition of pro-democracy parties founded in 1941 that sought an alternative to both Chiang Kai-shek’s government and the CCP and that included prominent intellectuals such as poet and scholar Wen Yiduo.³⁴

Lin Zhao, by contrast, became increasingly enchanted with communism. In early 1947, while she was still a student at Vincent Miller Academy, she helped set up an independent library and reading group—called The Good Earth (Dadi)—in the home of a fellow student. With assistance from an underground CCP branch that targeted teenagers, the group promoted progressive books among local middle school students and even staged street-side dramas to raise funds. They also published their own journal, The Newborn, and turned the library into a magnet for pro-Communist youths.³⁵

One of Lin Zhao’s earliest surviving writings, an essay entitled “Between Generations,” was published in The Newborn in June 1947, when she was fifteen. It offers a glimpse into her drift toward communism and her break with her parents two years later when they attempted to stop her.

She had found herself drawn to the children in a neighborhood primary school. “They jump and shout under the sun, filled with innocence and life,” she wrote. She wanted to see those children “live forever under the sun.”

The older generation were “a bunch of rotten wood,” she declared. They were “busy making money and grabbing land. They do not wish to see the youths of our generations answer the call of the time; they only wish to see us rot with them.” In fact, most young people “have already been poisoned,” unable to look into the future. Yet it had fallen precisely upon the young “to change our country and change our society,” she added.

When that is accomplished, “there will be no corrupt officials and no dishonest profiteers. There will only be kindhearted people, kindhearted social mores, and kindhearted society.” But the new world must be built “with our own blood and sweat as bricks and timber.” Those who build it will die, she conceded, “but this kind of death is much better than a silent death at the mercy of others.”³⁶

Having reached that conclusion, she must have found it a rather simple step to take when she swore the oath of allegiance to become an underground CCP member a year later.

FOR ALL ITS risks, Lin Zhao’s choice was not an extraordinary one. Throughout the Nationalist era, patriotic activism of students had increasingly coalesced into Communist-inspired agitation directed at the failures of the Guomindang government to end the civil war and stop Japanese aggression. Theirs was a patriotism fired by the promises of the Communist revolution, whose success in Russia had heralded a bright future. As the dreamy young Qu Qiubai, one of the earliest leaders of the CCP, put it, the Bolshevik victory in 1917 shone “a ray of light, red as blood, that illuminates the whole world.”³⁷

The Guomindang’s savage purge of the Communists in 1927 had driven progressive intellectuals deeper into the arms of the CCP. While many Western-influenced liberal intellectuals heeded the warnings of Hu Shi against isms (the student of the American philosopher John Dewey favored independent, critical study of the problems of the day), radical students and intellectuals found promise and urgency in the Communist plan for saving China.

In the 1930s, following the epic, nearly six-thousand-mile Long March of the Communists to Yan’an, a town on the loess plateau in the north, many progressive writers and artists went on their revolutionary pilgrimage to the new base of the CCP. In 1936, American journalist Edgar Snow made a secret visit to Yan’an. His glowing account of Mao’s revolution, which he would later call “the most thoroughgoing social revolution in China’s three millenniums of history,” was published under the title Red Star over China in 1937. It was followed by a Chinese edition in 1938 and helped generate an infatuation with the Communists among the young. In 1938 alone, the CCP agency in Xi’an provided papers for more than ten thousand educated youths to make their way to Yan’an, which to them was the cradle of a future China.³⁸

Even American general Joseph Stilwell, who during World War II served as commander of the China-Burma-India Theater and was chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was impressed with the Communist program. He described it in simple terms: “Reduce taxes, rents, interest. Raise production, and standard of living.” In contrast, the Guomindang government was riddled with “greed, corruption, favoritism, more taxes, a ruined currency, terrible waste of life, callous disregard of all the rights of man,” he wrote.³⁹

In Lin Zhao’s eyes, the Nationalist Party at the time not only was “incapable of controlling and stabilizing the domestic political situation,” it was also unable to provide young people with a “peaceful environment for learning.” As a result, countless students abandoned their studies and were swept into communism. During the four years of civil war, membership in the CCP more than tripled, to about 4.5 million.⁴⁰

BY THE SUMMER of 1948, the Communists were already on the offensive. Later that year, Communist forces routed the Nationalists in three major battles and came to control almost all areas north of the Yangzi River. “No one will prophesy when the Communists will cross the river, occupy Nanjing, and move on down the railroad to Soochow and Shanghai,” wrote Annie Bradshaw, Lin Zhao’s teacher at Laura Haygood, in December 1948. “People don’t seem to care. There is so much chaos and deprivation now that I believe they would welcome a frying pan as escape from the fire, especially a frying pan so full of Utopian promises.”⁴¹

Throughout the Nationalist period, more than a few mission school students and graduates had in fact welcomed the frying pan of communism, which felt blissfully warm at first. The convergence of communism and Christianity was not as strange as it sounds: both the church and the CCP had decried injustice and oppression. The Communists, like the new generation of Social Gospellers in the Chinese church, sought a new order and a new world.

There was in fact a special affinity between Communist and Christian patriotism for disaffected young students in particular. Lin Zhao’s martyred uncle Xu Jinyuan had attended Vincent Miller Academy and Hangchow Christian College (Zhijiang Daxue)—both of them run by the Presbyterian missions—before he joined the Socialist Youth League (later renamed Communist Youth League) in 1923. Under radical Communist influence and spurred on by the anti-imperialist mood in the country, Xu Jinyuan soon joined the anti-Christian movement that had broken out across China in 1922. The campaign demanded the “restoration of education rights” and an end to foreign control of mission schools. In 1924, he cofounded the Suzhou branch of the Anti-Christian Federation. Soon afterward, he joined the Communist Party and, in 1926, became secretary of the party’s Suzhou branch.⁴²

A few converts to the CCP returned to the church after souring on communism. But in most cases, one hears of the graduation from the church to the party. In his Red Star over China, Edgar Snow fondly remembers the underground CCP operative known as Pastor Wang who arranged his trip to Yan’an in 1936. The pastor’s real name was Dong Jianwu. Dong had attended the Anglican St. John’s University and had become a popular Anglican priest in Shanghai. From 1925 to 1931 he was rector of St. Peter’s, a major Anglican church in the city, which drew its membership from the educated middle class in Shanghai’s International Settlement.⁴³

Unbeknownst to his parishioners, he joined the CCP in 1928, a year after Chiang Kai-shek’s coup against the Communists, and turned St. Peter’s into a secret hideout and meeting place for Communist leaders in Shanghai who had been driven underground—a “red fortress” with the “sacred aura of St. Peter’s” around it, rhapsodizes a historian of the CCP. It was Dong who in the 1930s took care of Mao Zedong’s two young sons—their mother having been captured and killed by the Guomindang in 1930—and helped arrange for their safe passage to the Soviet Union in 1936.⁴⁴

Toward the end of her life, Lin Zhao found herself in lone opposition to communism because of her “conscience as a Christian who, once lost, has found her path again.” But in 1949, her social conscience was directing her in the opposite direction. The church did not seem to be addressing the systemic evils of an unjust society as boldly as the Communists. Later, she would confront and chastise a rural Catholic priest whose preaching made his flock unresponsive to the CCP’s land reform, which redistributed farmland among the poor.⁴⁵

In the Protestant community, the “trend of the time” that Lin Zhao referred to was one of progressive Christians finding communism to be the next sacred step of social commitment. “The Nationalist Party was always a disgrace” is how Lin Zhao later recalled her adolescent views. Wu Leichuan, chancellor of Yenching University—the crown jewel of missionary educational enterprise in China—called Jesus a “revolutionary” and warned the church not to defend the status quo but to seek the kingdom of God in a “new social order.” If Christianity were to have a future in China, he argued, it had to accommodate the revolutionary cause.⁴⁶

Wu himself was on the way to joining the CCP when he died in 1944, but many Yenching graduates actually took that step. When Yenching’s president John Leighton Stuart met Mao Zedong in Chongqing in August 1945, Mao bragged about the presence of many of Stuart’s former students in Yan’an. “I laughingly replied that I was well aware of that and hoped that they were proving a credit to their training,” Stuart recalled.⁴⁷

Many missionaries felt a profound ambivalence toward communism—supportive of its noble ends but troubled by its violent means. Some would have been sympathetic to Lin Zhao’s decision to join the Communist struggle to create a more just China. Frank Joseph Rawlinson, editor-in-chief of The Chinese Recorder, the leading missionary journal in China, found himself “caught just between the old capitalistic system and that of a system in which the goods of life are distributed more equitably,” as he told his children in a letter in 1934. He wished to work in support of workers on strike; he also organized discussions among missionaries to address “the question of Russia as a possible guide to a ‘Christian’ economic order.” Rawlinson had arrived in China a fundamentalist Southern Baptist missionary. It was the plight of the Chinese poor that gave him a soft spot for the revolution.⁴⁸

Likewise, conditions in China radicalized the worldview of Maud Russell, who arrived in 1917 as a YWCA secretary but became “a Marxist, committed to socialist revolution in China.” Under Russell’s influence, Deng Yuzhi, who began working for the YWCA in the 1920s and headed its Labor Bureau in the 1930s, came to identify with the goals of the CCP, which in her view accorded with Christian values. During the 1930s, she assisted Russell in teaching a course on Christianity and communism at a YWCA student conference and, though not a party member herself, helped the CCP arrange to send the party’s cultural workers—including Mao’s future wife Jiang Qing—to teach in YWCA night schools for women workers in Shanghai.⁴⁹

On October 1, 1949, as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Deng was invited to join government officials on the viewing platform when Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic.⁵⁰

FOR A WHILE, Lin Zhao was able to hold her twin identities as a Christian and a Communist in an uneasy balance. Still a student at Laura Haygood, she undertook clandestine activities for the party, making and distributing mimeographed copies of the CCP’s propaganda materials. “All it took was a tin of oil-based ink. Nothing else was necessary. You pinned the engraved stencil to the desk using thumbtacks.… How was it difficult!”⁵¹

But as she was nearing the end of her senior year at Laura Haygood, she felt torn between her two loyalties. In spring 1949, just weeks before the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangzi River and captured Nanjing, the Nationalist government’s capital, Lin Zhao joined a dozen or so radical students at Laura Haygood in demanding a school holiday to mark International Women’s Day on March 8 and to celebrate “the happy life of women in the Soviet Union.”⁵² The ensuing clash with the school authorities apparently alienated her from Laura Haygood. It likely also led to the fraying of her ties to the church as a whole.

Demands made by mission school students to suspend classes for patriotic reasons had been a constant test for administrators since the Revolution of 1911, which ended the last imperial dynasty in China. They bespoke the unhealed wound to national pride since China’s humiliating defeats at the hands of foreign powers in the nineteenth century. John Dewey observed, after spending two years in the country from 1919 to 1921, that “wherever a few are gathered together in China the favorite indoor sport is ‘saving China.’”⁵³

That was especially the case on school campuses. Like most mission schools, Laura Haygood sought to dampen the revolutionary zeal of its students. “A delicate balance is required,” noted Annie Bradshaw, “if the teacher is to show proper sympathy with young people who are convinced that they must ‘save our country—now!’ and at the same time hold up academic standards.”⁵⁴

Progressive students were ever happy to upset that balance. After Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in September 1931, for instance, a large contingent of Laura Haygood students made up their mind to go to Nanjing to demand that Chiang Kai-shek declare war on Japan and personally lead an army to Manchuria. At the time, the principal compromised and allowed those who obtained permission from their parents to leave campus.⁵⁵

Laura Haygood’s administration had often suspected Communist agitation as being behind these and other eruptions. By and large, the American teachers at Laura Haygood frowned upon communism and, for all their dismay at the economic collapse and deteriorating societal order, tended to side with Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang, whose policies “sound as if they had been drafted by Christian statesmen.”⁵⁶

Their response to the demand from Lin Zhao’s class about International Women’s Day was predictably lukewarm. The director of religious education, who had recently returned from a period of training at Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Tennessee, lectured the senior class on the crudity of the idea.

“The Hemp Sack came and gave us a good chiding,” Lin Zhao wrote, using the unflattering nickname that she and her friends had bestowed on the director. “She started by claiming that women in America were already completely free and equal (?) and never needed to celebrate March 8.” The director also reminded the students that their primary responsibility was to study hard. She added “in a stern voice: you are all hot-blooded youths. Be careful and don’t let yourselves be used by other people!”⁵⁷

Lin Zhao could not possibly have imagined that a decade and a half later she would use almost the same words when reflecting on her youthful devotion to the revolution. “Countless hot-blooded youths fell victim to the agitation,” she wrote in her letter to People’s Daily in 1965. “They abandoned their studies, forsook honest work, got swept into the political whirlpool, and became the tools of political careerists!”⁵⁸ Perhaps at some level, she was recalling the admonition of Laura Haygood’s director of religious education, which she had spurned.

But in early March 1949, Lin Zhao and her friends were unrelenting as they claimed their right to celebrate “our own holiday” and “spread the seeds” of revolutionary womanhood. In the end, the school authorities met their demands halfway: an hour and a half would be set aside for celebrations on March 8, but there would be no cancellation of classes.⁵⁹

The administration apparently also reported the clash to the authorities. Either as a result of this incident or because Lin Zhao’s clandestine printing of mimeographed CCP propaganda materials became known, she and a fellow student named Li Biying—also an underground CCP member—were blacklisted by the local security apparatus. The party’s intelligence in Suzhou learned of this and warned its local cell of the danger. As a result, two “progressive teachers” at Laura Haygood disappeared one night. The party operatives also ordered Lin Zhao and Li Biying to leave Suzhou for their own safety. Li decamped for Shanghai; Lin Zhao ignored the order, convinced that, as the daughter of a member of the National Assembly, she was safe. For her refusal to obey a direct command from the CCP, her party membership was revoked.⁶⁰

Lin Zhao’s disregard for what must have felt like an arbitrary order to leave Suzhou was in character: throughout her life she followed her own judgments. But it was a willfulness that the party could not tolerate. The loss of her party membership on the eve of the CCP’s victory in the civil war was to weigh heavily on her. It was “a shameful blemish” in her revolutionary career, as she put it in a letter to a comrade. She was going to do penance later by throwing herself into some of the hardest work the party required of its young devotees.⁶¹

SUZHOU AND THE Nationalist capital Nanjing fell to the People’s Liberation Army in late April 1949. That summer, Lin Zhao graduated from Laura Haygood. A brilliant student (except in math), she had distinguished herself in classical Chinese, having been tutored by her erudite father, who meted out strikes to the palm for any imperfectly remembered passages.⁶²

Her parents expected her to go to college, and got a rude shock when they found out that she had secretly applied—and had been admitted—to the South Jiangsu Journalism Vocational School. A party-run institution of dubious academic standards that prepared journalists and propagandists for the revolution, it opened in Wuxi, forty kilometers from Suzhou, in July 1949.⁶³

Peng Guoyan was not among those cheering the Communist victory. As the Guomindang’s rule unraveled, he made it known to his family that he was prepared to follow in the footsteps of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, princes of a kingdom at the end of the ancient Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE).⁶⁴ After the fall of Shang, the two had refused to serve or take food from the ruler of the ascendant Zhou dynasty. They lived as hermits on a mountain, ate tree bark and wild plants, died from starvation, and were immortalized as paragons of unbending loyalty and integrity for the literati throughout Chinese history.

Lin Zhao’s mother, Xu Xianmin, cautiously supported the Communist cause. In the final months of the civil war, she used her connections in the Nationalist government to secretly aid the Communists. When two underground CCP operatives were dispatched to Suzhou to “instigate rebellion,” she put them in touch with Shi Jianqiao, the famed female assassin of the former warlord Sun Chuanfang. Shi succeeded in obtaining important intelligence on Shanghai’s military police headquarters, which she passed to the two CCP agents. Xu Xianmin also helped them instigate the defection of several Nationalist agents, and persuaded some local self-defense groups to submit to CCP leadership.⁶⁵

It was an entirely different matter when Lin Zhao chose a CCP journalism school over college. Xu Xianmin was furious and forbade her to go. Peng Guoyan had warned her about her susceptibility to manipulation by career revolutionaries. “It is the utmost cruelty to use the innocent zeal of young people for political purposes,” he told her.⁶⁶

But it was to no avail. Lin Zhao was unyielding, and escaped through her bedroom window one night. She was caught by her mother and brought back home, but her mind was already made up, she announced, and nothing could stop her, not even her mother’s threat to expel her from the family. Xu Xianmin told her that she would have to sign an agreement with her parents vowing “no contacts while alive; no mourning in the event of death” if she left the house. She grabbed a pen, signed the paper, and departed.

When Lin Zhao was filling out her enrollment forms at the journalism school and came to the question about the class origins of her parents, she put down “reactionary bureaucrats.”⁶⁷ She had left them in order to become a revolutionary journalist and to help build a new society, where the children would be able to live under the sun.