five

SHATTERED JADE

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!

—King Lear

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

—Blaise Pascal¹

AFTER HER ARREST, LIN ZHAO WAS SENT TO THE NO. 2 DETENTION House of Shanghai. Located on the former Rue Massenet (Now Sinan Road), the facility was completed in 1911 and became known as the French Concession Jail, with a capacity of 1,100.

By 1931, the rising tide of nationalism had eroded the system of extraterritoriality imposed on the Chinese since the Opium War. The French turned over administrative control of the jail to the Guomindang government, a milestone in China’s struggle to regain its sovereignty. The Nationalists quickly filled the jail with local CCP leaders and pro-Communist progressives. Among them were Deng Zhongxia, former CCP party secretary of Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces, the poet Ai Qing, and Shi Liang, the China Democratic League leader and Xu Xianmin’s colleague during the 1940s. After the triumph of the Communists in 1949, it became known as Shanghai’s No. 2 Detention House.²

Most of Lin Zhao’s friends arrested in 1960 in connection with A Spark of Fire were incarcerated in Gansu province. In August 1961, Zhang Chunyuan managed to escape using a modern version of the ancient “ruse of bodily distress”: he starved himself and repeatedly self-induced vomiting until he passed out. He was taken to a reform-through-labor hospital outside the prison. One evening a couple of weeks later, he walked out of the hospital dressed as a doctor going off his shift.

Zhang made his way to Suzhou, where he learned about Lin Zhao’s arrest, and then continued on to Shanghai. “Lin Zhao, I cannot go in to visit you. I only circled around the high, red wall twice as a small token of my thoughts for you,” Zhang Chunyuan wrote in a postcard sent in the name of Xu Xianmin to the No. 2 Detention House. “You may wonder how I came to Shanghai.… Someone was willing to let his big brother walk free.”

As if that was not enough to rouse the suspicion of the authorities, Zhang added, “I had a 390-day personal experience of the life and study you are having in there.” Lin Zhao never received the postcard. It was later found in Zhang Chunyuan’s prison file. He was rearrested on September 6, 1961. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965, Zhang was executed instead in 1970 during the “One Strike, Three Anti” campaign for allegedly “repeating counterrevolutionary activities inside prison.”³

The guiding principle of CCP’s prison system, adapted from the penal doctrines of the early twentieth century, was to reform, or “move and convert” (ganhua), the hearts and minds of the inmates as part of the revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society toward “ideological totalism.” Under Mao’s rule, the pre-revolution goal of reforming the convicts was replaced by the CCP’s “revolutionary conquest” of thoughts.⁴

Lin Zhao’s initial response to the attempted conquest of her mind was to counter with a passionate self-defense of some two hundred thousand characters that she titled “The Diary of My Thoughts.” In a reference to the venerated Marxian doctrine—“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”—she argued that the brutal misrule of the CCP had caused her disillusionment with communism and turned her from an ardent supporter into an opponent. “External causes [became operative] through internal causes,” she added, quoting from Mao’s articulation of dialectical materialism in his 1937 essay “On Contradiction.” “The most internal and the most innate reason” for her to become a Rightist was “my very strong democratic beliefs and liberal tendencies.”⁵

Not all of her protests were solemn. At times during her interrogation, she would sing the “Oddities Song,” which had been popular during the late 1940s, on the eve of the collapse of the Nationalist state: “The moon rose from the west, / and the sun has set in the east,” she crooned. “The rocks in the riverbed—/ oh, they rolled and rolled and rolled up the hill.” The guards stomped their feet and cursed her.

She was taken by the look and bearing of one of the interrogators, she later admitted to a friend. “I almost had a crush on him, if he had not tried to extort a confession from me.” Sometimes she wanted to have nothing to do with politics anymore; she wanted to settle down instead as a housewife.⁶

By the autumn of 1961, her opposition had wavered. The relentless, institutionalized reformation program had been effective. From the steady supply of propaganda materials such as Liberation Daily—the mouthpiece of Shanghai’s party committee—Lin Zhao had learned of the CCP’s economic retrenchment, after the excesses of the Great Leap Forward.

“After coming to the No. 2 Detention House, I have learned a bit through the newspaper about the situation since the ‘Ninth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee,’” Lin Zhao wrote in “A Review and Examination of My Personal Thought Journey.” She submitted the self-examination to the authorities in October 1961 after being “illuminated and educated” by an official. “I have seen changes in the political line of the party.”⁷

The Ninth Plenum of the CCP Central Committee to which she referred was held in Beijing in January 1961. In an acknowledgment of the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward, the committee reformulated its economic policy, which slowed down the development of heavy industry. It also approved limited sideline productions outside collectivized farming, as well as the reopening of private markets in rural areas to alleviate starvation.⁸

By this point, Mao had nominally retired from the front line, replaced as chairman of the People’s Republic by Liu Shaoqi. The changes Liu Shaoqi helped bring about gradually improved life in the countryside. About 6 percent of rural land was restored to peasants as private plots, and thousands of inefficient industrial and irrigation projects were scrapped.⁹

“With the passage of time, I felt that, this time, the party has its feet on the solid ground and is seeing the masses. My feelings started to change,” Lin Zhao wrote. She was now willing to admit that, a decade after the CCP came to power, its rule was not without accomplishments, and the political reform of the previous months suggested that there was still “vitality” and a potential for renewal and progress in the party. She had made the mistake of “extremism” in adopting the “harmful” stance of opposition to the CCP. From that point on, “my responsibility is to do all I can to warmly support and concretely promote the democratization of the party’s rule.” Even if the government decided to mete out criminal punishments for her, she would calmly accept it.¹⁰

She later revealed that, whenever she thought back to what she wrote in 1961, “I would look at myself with a lonely—mocking, painful—smile! I would laugh at its author… what a naïve and childish young person!”¹¹

Lin Zhao, “A Review and Examination of My Personal Thought Journey,” submitted to the authorities at the Shanghai No. 2 Detention House, October 14, 1961. Courtesy of Tan Chanxue.

The softening of Lin Zhao’s attitudes was likely one of the main reasons she was given a medical parole in March 1962. Her tuberculosis had apparently flared up again, causing her to frequently cough up blood. She returned to her family’s apartment in Shanghai. For the first time, she was able to mourn her father, wearing a white flower in her hair. She had only learned of his death in the late summer of 1961—almost ten months after it happened.¹²

Within weeks of her release, she realized that her hope of democratization and reform of the CCP rule was only wishful thinking and that her freedom would not last. Her collaborators in the production of A Spark of Fire remained in jail. She informed the neighborhood police at the end of the month that her clothes were already packed and that she was ready to be taken back to jail.¹³

Lin Zhao’s grim expectations were not unfounded. She received a summons to appear in the Jing’an District People’s Court in late August 1962 and was indicted for her involvement in the alleged “Lanzhou University Rightist Counterrevolutionary Clique” case. She responded with a written self-defense arguing that “counterrevolutionary” was not a serious legal term and that it was a just act to resist the unjust totalitarian rule—she vowed, in fact, to “fight to the death to oppose” it. The real question, she added, was not what crimes her generation of youths had committed against the ruler, but what crimes the ruler had committed against them. Her bluntness was such that, when she appeared in court, a judge suggested that she was mentally abnormal. “Are you sick?” he asked.¹⁴

Meanwhile, still on medical parole, Lin Zhao remained free and waded deeper into trouble. One day, dressed in a body-hugging mandarin gown, or qipao, with her hair in a permanent wave, she showed up in the office of Hu Ziheng, a former political instructor at the South Jiangsu Journalism Vocational School who had become manager of the production and sales department at Liberation Daily. She gleefully made a scene. Slapping her hand against the desk of the speechless Hu, she asked: “I want to start a newspaper also. Do you Communists have the magnanimity to let me do it?”¹⁵

She also wrote a letter to Lu Ping, then the president of Peking University, and challenged him to do what his predecessor Cai Yuanpei had done in 1919 during the May Fourth Movement. After the arrest of dozens of students who had participated in the May Fourth protests, President Cai mobilized university presidents in Beijing in a joint public outcry against the warlord government, winning the release of the students. Lin Zhao asked Lu Ping to follow Cai’s example, stand up to Communist “tyranny” and bring back to campus students who had been arrested or otherwise persecuted following the democracy movement of 1957. Even though she hardly expected a response to her appeal, she later wrote, she felt compelled to make it out of a sense of responsibility.¹⁶

With her former classmates and friends either in jail or in exile, Lin Zhao dreamed of building a new alliance of disaffected intellectuals against the CCP rule. During a brief stay in Suzhou in the summer of 1962, she made the acquaintance of two young Rightists who had recently returned from a labor camp. She convinced one of them, Huang Zheng, to assist her in drafting a political platform for a “Battle League of Free Youths of China” that would “bring together activists in the Chinese democratic anti-tyranny movement of yesteryear,” namely the Rightists. Considering the fact that she had vigorously opposed any attempt at organization building when her Lanzhou University friends were preparing to publish A Spark of Fire in 1960, it is remarkable how reckless she had become in 1962, when she was being shadowed by undercover police.¹⁷

Just as impulsive was Lin Zhao’s approach of Arnold Newman, a “stateless alien,” on a street in central Shanghai near her home one day in September 1962. She begged him to take four pieces of her writing out of China. These included her letter to Lu Ping and an appeal to public opinion entitled “We Are Innocent.” When Newman asked her to whom the writings should be sent, she answered, in English: “To the world!” She was convinced that their publication would shock the West.¹⁸

Last known photo of Lin Zhao, while she was on medical parole in 1962. Courtesy of Ni Jingxiong.

Newman was probably one of some twenty thousand European Jews who, in the 1930s–1940s, fled the Nazis and found safe haven in the International Settlement in Shanghai, which one could more or less freely enter without a visa. He may have been stranded in the city after the Communist takeover and, in any event, was in no position to help her. The police soon took him into custody as an “imperialist spy,” and he surrendered the documents.¹⁹

In early November, Lin Zhao was again arrested. She was sent to the Shanghai Psychiatric Hospital, where she underwent several weeks of evaluation and was found to be mentally ill. (The examining doctor was allegedly denounced later for attempting to shield her and another high-profile counterrevolutionary by diagnosing them with mental disorders.)²⁰

Lin Zhao later reflected in her letter to the editors of People’s Daily that, since few in China had spoken out against the party under the “suffocating” rule of the CCP, “this young person who dared to ask the tiger for his skin probably was indeed ‘insane’ in the eyes of the ruler.” She admitted, at the same time, that “it is possible that, hard hit by the Anti-Rightist” purge, she did develop “certain signs of mental abnormality, but at least I was no more mentally abnormal than you gentlemen!”²¹

On December 23, she was transferred to the Shanghai Municipal Prison, commonly referred to as Tilanqiao, where she spent the next eight and a half months of her presentencing incarceration, which lasted a total of thirty months.²²

Although its main purpose was incarceration of convicts, Tilanqiao had also served as a pretrial detention center since the early 1950s. On a single day in April during the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign of 1951, a citywide crackdown on counterrevolutionaries rounded up 8,359 people, 285 of whom were executed within the next three days. An additional 1,060 were shot over the months of June and July to fill the quota personally set by Mao: he had declared that “at least around 3,000” counterrevolutionaries of various stripes in Shanghai “must be killed in 1951.” The rest were mostly sent to Tilanqiao, which became a clearinghouse for arrested counterrevolutionaries.²³

Little is known about Lin Zhao’s pretrial detention in Tilanqiao. We know that she went on a month-long hunger strike in February 1963. She also stopped taking medicine for tuberculosis in protest against the “rough and inhumane treatments” to which she was subjected after her hunger strike began, probably a reference to force-feeding. And she attempted to take her own life at least once, which landed her in a specially designed xiangpi jian or rubber cell for the suicidal.²⁴

On June 19, she penned a “Hunger Strike Declaration” stating that she “would rather spend the rest of my life in prison and wear out its floor; I vow to never be unworthy of my original aspirations or change a bit of my original ideal.” She also tried to convince a cellmate, who was about to be released, to join the “Battle League of Free Youths of China,” which had yet to materialize. “I even performed the initiation rite for her!” Lin Zhao did not realize that it was a setup: her cellmate had been recruited by the police as an informer. Once released, she lured Huang Zheng into a trap. Huang was arrested in the fall of 1963 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his role in fantasizing the league. Not surprisingly, as the “principal criminal” in the case, Lin Zhao would eventually receive a more severe punishment than her codefendants.²⁵

During this period, another cellmate, an independent preacher named Yu Yile, apparently helped Lin Zhao deepen her Christian faith. Educated at the conservative Christian Bible Institute in Nanjing, where an otherworldly pietism dominated—the school was founded by the conservative theologian Jia Yuming—Yu Yile disapproved of Lin Zhao’s political activism and attempted to bring her back to a faith shorn of worldly political passions.²⁶

Yet Lin Zhao was already beyond an otherworldly Christianity. Her faith did not offer an escape from political reality. On the contrary, it became the backbone of her rebellion against the CCP rule. In due time, it turned into a conviction that her resistance to the “demonic political party” was a divine mission that no means of torture employed by the CCP state could stop.

On August 8, 1963, to subject Lin Zhao to a full regime of interrogation, the authorities moved her to the Shanghai No. 1 Detention House—the real “demon’s den,” as she soon found out.²⁷

LOCATED ON NANCHEZHAN Road, which in the early 1900s was part of the “Chinese City” outside the Western concessions, the No. 1 Detention House was built in 1917 as the Shanghai County Detention House. It was part of a modernization project of post-imperial China, which attempted to detach, for the first time, the judicial and administrative functions of the county government. It is questionable, however, that the distinction ever came to be made. In the late 1940s, the detention house was run by the Nationalist secret police in Shanghai. In May 1949, on the eve of the Communist takeover, thirteen revolutionaries and progressives, including Huang Jingwu, the Harvard-educated audit commissioner for Guomindang’s Central Bank, were buried alive in the drill ground inside it. (Huang had attempted, by bringing the story to the media, to sabotage Chiang Kai-shek’s secret shipment of gold and silver bullion to Taiwan.)²⁸

During the Mao era, the No. 1 Detention House was mainly used for interrogating political prisoners and cracking “counterrevolutionary cases.” Occupying an area of more than two thousand square meters, the jail processed several thousand political prisoners each year in the early 1950s. At its peak, in 1954, 7,183 “counterrevolutionaries” endured interrogations within its walls. These were the “enemies without guns,” as Mao had put it.²⁹

A Chinese jail designed by a relative of Chinese American architect I. M. Pei, the No. 1 Detention House adopted indigenous architecture. It had a three-story brick block for male inmates and a two-story block for women. Each had high ceilings and long, dark hallways. The cells had cement-covered walls on all sides and a heavy, wooden door in the front—unlike those in the foreign concessions with walls on three sides and an open iron grille facing the gangway. The doors were painted a uniform red color and secured with an iron bar and a giant copper padlock. Each door had a small square shutter that could be opened from the outside to deliver food; guards left it open at night in order to monitor motion inside the cell.

“There was no sound in the hallway,” remembers Yan Zuyou, who, as a college student, was imprisoned in the No. 1 Detention House as a counterrevolutionary in 1964. “You cannot feel any breeze except a dark coldness that seeps into your bone.”³⁰ A typical cell was about three by five meters and had a cement toilet built into the far corner. Up to fourteen inmates were crammed into each. At night, they slept on the floor, most of them parallel to the outside wall. Each was allowed a width of less than half a meter, head against the feet of the next person, a rule allegedly enforced to prevent homosexual activities. The rest of the inmates would fill up the remaining space perpendicular to the door.

The window on the outside wall was set high, its lower half covered by an exterior wooden box so that even a tall person could not see the street. The room darkened early in the afternoon. “It was gloomy and dreary even on a bright, sunny day,” one former inmate recalled. At night, two adjacent cells shared a 15-watt light bulb mounted on the three-meter-high ceiling above a small opening in the wall between the cells—so high that “not even a basketball player could commit suicide by electrocuting himself.” With little exposure to sunlight—inmates were allowed to exercise outside their cells for only half an hour each week—most of them acquired a ghastly pallor and a vacant stare.³¹

Jail rules, printed on the cell wall, prohibited the exchange of material items or information among the inmates, including the circumstances of their cases and even their names, which were replaced with assigned numbers. Citing the needs of ongoing criminal investigations, the No. 1 Detention House prohibited any mail correspondence or family visits, though families were allowed to bring approved food items and daily necessities on the fifth of each month.³²

TO THIS DAY, Lin Zhao’s interrogation records remain locked away in her classified file. Without access to that file, information on her pretrial incarceration at the No. 1 Detention House can be gleaned, for the most part, only from her own prison writings.

Deep inside the jail compound, set back from the cellblock bordering the street, was a bungalow with a row of narrow, long rooms of less than eight square meters each. These were the interrogation rooms, each with a wooden counter near the end, behind which sat the interrogator. Two meters away sat a heavy wooden chair for the “criminal,” with a removable iron bar across the front that could be used to keep the inmate in place.³³

From the beginning, Lin Zhao had to face “indecent taunts,” including sexual innuendo, from her interrogator. She lodged formal protests and insisted that they be included in the interrogation records before she signed them. “I asked the interrogator what right he had to harass me? What was the connection between my political activities and my gender?” She would pay a price for her defiance. “A mere chit of a girl as you are,” she was told by her interrogator, “shall I not be able to subdue you?” She was soon put in handcuffs.³⁴

At the No. 1 Detention House, punishments meted out to inmates who misbehaved or resisted typically took the form of punitive handcuffing. Beating was uncommon and, when necessary, mostly left to fellow inmates, who were instigated by the guards. But manhandling by the guards also occurred. One female guard was particularly aggressive. “I lose track of how much hair she pulled off my head,” Lin Zhao later wrote.³⁵

During a nighttime interrogation, a female guard roughed her up and “tortured Lin Zhao as she was handcuffed and tied to the chair in the interrogation room,” she wrote, referring to herself in third person. The interrogator “leisurely sat there, enjoying it all, and said to this young person who… like a struggling, trapped animal, was still carrying on what appeared to be entirely useless resistance, ‘I think it is better to submit to the law and get a sentence of a few years.’” When Lin Zhao was later beaten by a guard and lodged her protest, the response was: “Anybody who is under attack can exercise the right of self-defense”—in spite of the fact that she was handcuffed behind her back and weak from her hunger strike at the time.³⁶

But handcuffing alone was often sufficient torture, for it had evolved into a fanciful form of penal art. Punitive handcuffing—an inmate’s hands were pulled behind his back and cuffed—ranged in duration from a day to several months. One would be unable to eat, dress or undress, or go to the bathroom without help from his fellow inmates. At times, he would be reduced to licking food from the floor. The handcuffs had various tightness settings, which would determine the level of pain inflicted. Excessively tight handcuffs bored into the skin, causing infections and even rot and leaving permanent marks, so that it looked “as if one wore those handcuffs his entire life.”³⁷

There were variations of behind-the-back handcuffing. One was the euphemistic airplane-style handcuffing: the cuffs were put on the upper arms, cutting off blood circulation and causing the arms to turn purple. Inmates so cuffed, with their upper arms pulled sharply back, looked as though they were readying their “wings” to fly. Another cuffing style, known as shoulder-pole handcuffing, gave the inmate the appearance of carrying a bamboo shoulder pole, like a farmer: one hand was pulled over the shoulder, the other was pulled up from behind, and the two were fastened together with cuffs. Yet another variation was pig-style handcuffing. The upper arms were first cuffed together behind the back. Next, both feet were cuffed. The arms and the feet were then joined together using a third pair of handcuffs, so that one looked “like a pig about to be butchered in a slaughter house.” This last style sometimes led to broken bones and permanent disabilities.³⁸

FOR LIN ZHAO, such was the shock of punitive handcuffing—she was sometimes placed in two pairs of behind-the-back handcuffs, with one pair on her wrists and another on her upper arms—that later on, she could not look back without bursting into grief: “I was repeatedly tortured in myriads of cruel ways.… Just thinking about them is driving me insane. Alas, what a world is this? What am I?”³⁹

In China, the extortion of confessions through torture can be traced back at least to the Western Zhou dynasty (ca. 1040–771 BCE). By the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), flogging with a wooden staff or a bamboo strip was common practice. Under the Han (206 BCE–220 CE), it was codified to allow for a wooden staff about an inch in diameter and five feet long, or a bamboo club about half an inch thick—which, in three hundred strikes, could easily beat the life out of the interrogated. “What confession are you not able to obtain with a wooden staff?” observed a court official to the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).⁴⁰

Shortly after the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty in 1912, the Republic of China, through a presidential decree, banned extortion of confessions. In 1935, the Nationalists’ Nanjing government introduced further judicial reforms that outlawed the use of “torture, coercion, enticements, or trickery.” However, those reforms were nonchalantly bypassed in the Guomindang secret police’s interrogation of captured Communists.

As early as 1922, a year after its founding, the Chinese Communist Party had called for an end to torture. Nevertheless, torture was widely used in the early 1930s during purges within the Red Army and again during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in the early 1940s. The so-called rescue campaign that Mao launched against suspected Nationalist “spies”—CCP cadres and progressive intellectuals who had joined the revolution in Yan’an but whose loyalty was in doubt—invariably employed cruel techniques. Bo Yibo, a top CCP leader in the Mao era, recalled his days in Yan’an when locals spoke about “ghosts” and ghastly shrieks coming from some cave dwellings at night. He later found out that almost a hundred of those being “rescued” through interrogation were being held in half a dozen caves, many laughing and crying, having lost their mind.⁴¹

In 1950, at the start of the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign, the Government Administration Council (now State Council) and the Supreme People’s Court issued the first directive of the new People’s Republic against extorting confessions through torture. In practice, however, the directive was promptly and generally ignored.⁴²

IN OCTOBER 1963, two months after her arrival at the No. 1 Detention House, Lin Zhao found herself overcome with desolation. It had already been three years after her first arrest, and the bleakness of “autumn moods” and “autumn sounds” brought to mind another “autumn.”

Qiu Jin (1875–1907)—the most celebrated feminist revolutionary of early twentieth-century China, whose family name Qiu means “autumn”—had often used qiu in her poems to evoke the barrenness of her existence and of her times. In 1904, she left her merchant husband whom her parents had forced her to marry. “Unbinding my feet I clean out a thousand years of poison,” she declared in a poem as she boarded a ship for Japan. There, as a student, she was exposed to some of the most radical nationalist ideas of the day. The next year, she joined the Revolutionary Alliance of Sun Yat-sen, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Manchu rulers of China. She returned to China in 1906 and, though imbued with reformist ideals such as equality and education for women, was drawn ever more toward the vision of a heroic, bloody revolution that would usher in a new China.

In 1907, Qiu Jin was arrested for her role in plotting an armed uprising against the imperial dynasty and summarily beheaded. For her confession, she wrote a line of verse taken from a Qing dynasty poet: “Autumn rain, autumn wind, they make one die of sorrow.”⁴³

For Lin Zhao, the parallel between Qiu Jin’s political dreams and her own was hard to overlook. She decided to compose several seven-character rhymes, each inspired by the one-line verse Qiu Jin had written before her execution. Using pen and paper provided to her to make her confessions, Lin Zhao wrote, in a preface to the poems, “I have the desire to patch the stones and will not abstain from using a dog’s tail to lengthen a sable coat.” This was a reference to the mythic Nüwa, the goddess-creator who had smelted together stones of five different colors to repair the collapsed sky and to stop the heavenly flood. Qiu Jin had also alluded to Nüwa in her writings.

Though perhaps unworthy of drawing a comparison between herself and Qiu Jin, Lin Zhao suggested, she would make known her own lament, even if it meant extending the “sable coat” with inferior material. The poems, collectively entitled “Songs of Autumn’s Sounds,” begin with these lines:

Autumn rain, autumn wind, they make one die of sorrow;

leaning against the distant sky, I mourn over the brambles before my eyes.

Fox borrows in the city wall, rats in Land and Soil God’s altar: the mountains have aged;

the fatness of the land drips away and the grain offering subsides.⁴⁴

In November, Lin Zhao was struck with a particularly acute sorrow. “The pain of grief, heavy yet burning, like molten lead, poured into my heart. Sir, I learned of your assassination two hours ago from the newspaper,” Lin Zhao wrote in “Mourning inside a Jail Cell” on November 24, 1963, two days after John F. Kennedy’s death.⁴⁵

Lin Zhao’s admiration for Kennedy dated to 1962, when she was on medical parole. Due to the blackout of Western media, “I was only able to read a few of your remarks, which were only cut up into fragments.” But even those fragments “radiated incomparably powerful and sincere humanitarian sentiments,” she explained. “I remember you saying: ‘all men who fight for freedom are our brothers.’” The line was from a speech Kennedy made on December 29, 1962. It was quoted in a New China News Agency (Xinhuashe) bulletin the next day denouncing US attempts at “counterrevolutionary restoration in Cuba.” The dispatch made its way into major party newspapers, a routine practice at the time.⁴⁶

Lin Zhao wrote, in “Mourning inside a Jail Cell”:

You said: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free!”… You have revealed to us—contemporary young fighters against tyrannical rule in China—more profoundly and more broadly the rich meaning of the sacred concept of freedom. In this way you have encouraged us and inspired in us the resolve, perseverance, and courage to dedicate our lives to her!⁴⁷

The quote was from Kennedy’s historic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, delivered near the Berlin Wall on June 26, 1963. Chinese media did not publish it at the time, but nine days later, on July 5, a Xinhuashe bulletin denounced Kennedy’s visit to Western Europe as evidence of “the American imperialists’ wild scheme of aggression.” The United States was “bent on gobbling up the German Democratic Republic and annihilating the socialist camp,” it claimed, and Kennedy had “wildly shrieked, ‘real, lasting peace in Europe can never be assured as long as one German out of four is denied the elementary right of free men’; ‘when one man is enslaved, all are not free.’”⁴⁸

Lin Zhao came upon these quotations in either People’s Daily or Liberation Daily, both of which were provided to inmates as political study materials to facilitate thought reform.⁴⁹ The live ideological vaccine used in the party propaganda had given her the very disease it was designed to prevent. “It appears that the policy of keeping the people ignorant, with its efforts at freezing and hardening all brains, is pathetically futile,” she wrote. “After all, it cannot make us not love freedom. Freedom—the most sacred, the most beautiful, and the most noble noun in the human language—always kindles the most fervent love … in the souls of people, especially the young people!”

She was convinced that Kennedy had cherished “sincere concern, sympathy, and compassion” for the Chinese people. One day, “I will certainly come to pay my respects to you—at your tomb,” she wrote. As fellow “followers of Christ,” Lin Zhao was convinced that they both “breathed” in the love of Christ and that his spirit in heaven would know that “inside a certain prison in Red China, a young soldier of freedom, with wounds from shackles in her arms, is propping up her sick body and, using a straw stem as her pen and the crudest ink and paper, silently writing down her mourning and her grief for you!”⁵⁰

LIN ZHAO’S ARM wounds had hardly healed when she was again put into two pairs of handcuffs, sometime after she revised her eulogy for Kennedy on November 25. It is unclear what prompted her new ordeal, although it was likely part of the continuing attempts to extract confessions from her. Using suicide prevention as a pretext, the jail authorities also sent someone Lin Zhao called a secret agent into her cell, to watch her day and night and to inflict “abuse, insults, swearing, and beating.”

On February 5, 1964, Lin Zhao was so distraught that she swallowed medicated soap in a frantic but futile suicide attempt.⁵¹ In her “Self Eulogy,” probably written just before she tried to kill herself, she lamented that, as a wronged political prisoner, she had cried her eyes out over the sorrows of her homeland and over her own mistake of having dedicated her life to communism in her late teens.

Lin Zhao’s “Self Eulogy” was a four-character rhyme of sixty-four lines and employed the oldest Chinese poetic form, dating from almost three millennia ago. “Once straying down the wrong path,” she wrote, “I have now turned back! /… My young heart was then pure as water, / Heaven, bear me witness against their attack!” Like the ancient hero Jing Ke who had sung his heart out on the streets of Yanjing (now Beijing) before setting off on a doomed attempt to assassinate the monstrous future First Emperor of Qin, Lin Zhao, too, had “sung my songs on Yanjing’s streets.” She also had “no regrets to be the prisoner from Chu,” a reference to Zhong Yi, the faithful minister of the feudal state of Chu in the sixth century BCE, who never forgot his home state while serving as a prisoner of war. She continued:

Freedom is without a price,

yet within bounds my life lies.

Shattered jade is what I will to be,

offered to China as a sacrifice!⁵²

Mixing despair with lofty ideals, Lin Zhao appeared to have identified with the tragic tradition of loyal Confucian ministers embracing noble failure, when a bad ruler turned away from the Way and fell under the influence of treacherous court officials. The “shattered jade” was intended to call to mind the bitter choice Confucian scholars through the ages often had to make between life and dignity. The metaphor emerged from the story of the principled stand by a sixth-century prince against a usurper of the throne. When it became clear that the only way to escape death was to change the surname of the entire clan to that of the new emperor, he swore to “rather be a shattered jade vessel than an unbroken pottery.”⁵³

Lin Zhao had written her “Self Eulogy” in her own blood. It was the first blood writing she did in prison that we know of. Like the choice of the four-character poetic form, her use of blood was in part a matter of necessity: her hands were cuffed behind her back, and she had been deprived of stationery.⁵⁴

It was also a deliberate choice: blood writing had a long tradition in Chinese culture, with roots in an ancient practice of Buddhist devotion. While Confucian teachings on filial piety dictated careful preservation of the body bestowed by one’s parents, the popular Buddhist tradition, which arose in the post–Han era, sanctioned blood writing as “a performance of virtue.” The historical Buddha allegedly claimed that, as a religious devotee in a previous existence, he had been challenged by the demon Mara to strip off his skin and write out a hymn on it using his own blood, which he did.

In China, the earliest record of blood writing as an expression of Buddhist piety dates from the early sixth century CE, when the ardent faith of the Wu Emperor of the Liang dynasty inspired many Buddhist followers to cut themselves. The Basic Annals of the Liang Dynasty noted that “some drew their own blood and sprinkled it on the ground; others drew blood and used it to copy Buddhist sutras.”⁵⁵ The ritual came to embody sublime sincerity and entered into secular culture.

In a sixteenth-century dramatic rendering of the tragic legend of Wang Zhaojun, concubine of a Han dynasty emperor during the first century BCE, blood writing was crucial to the tale’s climatic moment. Wang, a dazzling beauty from the imperial harem, was nevertheless sent off to be the wife of a barbarian chieftain in order to appease the nomadic Xiongnu tribes of Central Asia. As she neared the border, she chastised the weak-kneed generals for refusing to fight, which resulted in the emperor’s shame and her sacrifice. Before drowning herself in the Black River, she made a final statement of virtue: she tore off a piece of her dress, bit her finger, and wrote a letter in blood to the emperor, declaring her loyalty and chastity. She entrusted the letter to a wild goose, which dutifully carried it to the grieving emperor. In Mao’s China, blood writing also became a revolutionary ritual: during the Cultural Revolution, “tens of thousands” of student radicals in Beijing reportedly wrote out their pledge of devotion to Mao in blood.⁵⁶

LIN ZHAO EXPERIENCED a brief respite in the spring of 1964. The two pairs of handcuffs were removed from her wrists and arms after she wrote a statement of repentance on March 23. What she revealed in it is unclear, but it appears to have mainly concerned her 1962 letter to Lu Ping, as well as her appeal to the world entitled “We Are Innocent.” Nothing in the indictment later brought against her suggests that she had incriminated herself in her statement. Nor is there any evidence of her incriminating others.⁵⁷

On April 12, the anniversary of the martyrdom of her uncle Xu Jinyuan—a Communist activist killed by the Guomindang secret police during the violent purge of the CCP in 1927—she was overwhelmed with the cruel irony of mourning his death “from a Red prison.” “If only you had known / the millions of compatriots for whom you sacrificed your life / are now but unfree sinners and famished slaves!” she wrote. During this period, she also produced a host of other writings—essays, letters, and poems, including a verse dedicated “To the Shackles”—none of which has yet been found. On May 20, however, she was back in handcuffs.⁵⁸

By August, less than three months before the Jing’an District People’s Procuratorate produced its indictment against Lin Zhao, her interrogation appeared to have intensified. Later that month, she was beaten by several female guards. Still without stationery, and with her hands again cuffed, she wrote words of protest—“Wronged” and “Where is justice?”—in blood across her sleeves and the back of her shirt.⁵⁹

On September 7, her shackles were removed. Pen and paper were also returned to her on September 26, possibly to allow her to make confessions and incriminate others. What she produced, however, was a series of eight-line, seven-character rhymes that castigated Mao’s rule.⁶⁰

The first used the same rhyme scheme as “The Capture of Nanjing by the People’s Liberation Army,” a qilü that Mao had written in 1949, to rebuke his imperial pretensions. Mao had produced the verse after the CCP’s army crossed the Yangzi River to take the Nationalist capital Nanjing. At the time, an ebullient Mao had waxed lyrical about “the mighty army, a million strong, crossing the Great River” to capture the city from Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. “In heroic triumph heaven and earth have been overturned,” Mao rhapsodized. “It is only the right Way for seas to turn into mulberry fields.”⁶¹ Line by line, Lin Zhao turned Mao’s poem on its head:

Two dragons, locked in a fierce battle, spill blood over heaven and earth;

into the Great River, countless aggrieved souls are thrown.

Now as then, Lu Lian would rather drown in the ocean than bow to the Qin king,

and [the usurper] Cao Cao, with his sword drawn, a soaring poem would still intone.

To the common people alone our country rightly belongs;

how can mountains and rivers be for an emperor to own?

What shame to stain the Divine Land with people’s blood!

Vain talks about seas turning into mulberry fields are what we’ve known.⁶²

Just over a decade before, Mao had been the guiding “red star” in Lin Zhao’s heart; she had called out “silently the name of our great leader—our dear father.” She had traveled a long road since then.

Still, she at times clung to the hope that Mao might somehow repent. In 1963, after her re-arrest, she had “prayed for his soul.” “After all, I am a Christian,” she explained. She had “neither the right to offer forgiveness in the place of the Heavenly Father nor the right to prevent the Heavenly Father from forgiving him.” What if Mao “reproaches himself in sorrowful repentance and moves Heaven’s heart?” she wondered.⁶³

Between September 1964 and March 1965, she completed a total of nine seven-character rhymes. Most of them were directed, like the first, at Mao, and alternated between denunciation and earnest remonstrance (jian)—which Confucian scholar-officials had repeatedly offered their rulers in the past—urging him to turn away from his “wrong path.” Perhaps Mao would heed Confucius’s admonition to “restrain oneself and restore the rites” in order to achieve benevolence, she hoped.⁶⁴

“Pondering through an eternal night, chilled to the bone in dismay, / I hold a lonely jade-studded zither, but for whom shall I play?” Lin Zhao asked in another poem. She was evoking the predicament of Yue Fei, the twelfth-century Song dynasty war hero who was unable to dissuade his ruler from ruinous appeasements to the Jin invaders. “I wish to consign my worries to the jade-studded zither,” Yue Fei had written in a poem, “but few understand the music. When the string snaps, who is there to hear?” In yet another poem, Lin Zhao pleaded, “Experience for yourself the people’s plight, / “Merciful God is waiting for you to set it right.”⁶⁵

LIN ZHAO’S POEMS, rich in historical allusions and disciplined in their adherence to the seven-character rhyme scheme, were of little use to the interrogators and to those in Shanghai Jing’an District People’s Procuratorate who were busy preparing the case against her. On November 4, 1964, the indictment was completed. Based on “eight volumes of interrogation records,” it formally charged Lin Zhao as the “principal criminal” of the “‘Battle League of Free Youths of China’ Counterrevolutionary Clique.”⁶⁶

She was accused of having collaborated with her Lanzhou University Rightist friends in “plotting the publication of A Spark of Fire,” in “spreading rumors,” and in planning a “treasonous defection to the enemies.” According to the indictment, Lin Zhao “engaged in a series of counterrevolutionary activities” both during her medical parole in 1962 and after her rearrest in a “vain attempt to overthrow the people’s democratic dictatorship, sabotage the socialist cause, and give counterrevolutionary dying kicks in collusion with the imperialists.” In light of her “extremely serious crimes,” it asked for a “severe punishment.”⁶⁷

As was common practice, Lin Zhao was kept in the dark about the indictment while it was being prepared. On November 5, the day after its completion, she was surprised by a sudden act of generosity by the authorities. For the first time since her incarceration at the No. 1 Detention House, her family, though still forbidden to see her, was allowed to bring her several items she had requested: a cotton padded jacket, a bag of dried pork floss, a can of sautéed pork, a bag of candy, and a box of crackers.

For an inmate, these were rare luxuries. The three bare meals provided each day in jail, though regular—at 7:30 a.m., 11 a.m., and 4 p.m.—totaled about 375 grams of rice along with some vegetables and were never enough to fill one’s stomach. (Meat would be added to the menu on national holidays.) After she received the package that day, Lin Zhao was taken to an interrogation room, where she watched female guards cook for her the fresh dumplings her mother had sent. ⁶⁸

Maybe the guards were treating her differently now that the formal interrogation was over; or perhaps they wanted to soften the blow of the grave indictment that was about to be delivered. In any event, stunned and confused, Lin Zhao began to speculate if Mao himself was behind it all. Could it be that, in response to her writings, which routinely ended up in the hands of the jail authorities, Mao himself was attempting to cajole her into submission? “That stinky Mao worm made a point of letting you bring me dumplings in order to dally with me,” she assured her mother in a subsequent letter.⁶⁹

Within days, however, harsh reality set in, again. On November 9, another nighttime “conversation” urging her to “examine her mistakes” drove her to a teary protest. Her agitation must have been considerable. Citing “nonsensical misbehavior” on her part, the guards put the handcuffs back on her that night. This time, the manacles would remain on her for the next six and a half months, until May 26, 1965, just days before she was handed over to the Shanghai Municipal Prison. “I wonder whether I had the honor of breaking the national or even world record during this decade of the 1960s,” she later asked the editors of People’s Daily.⁷⁰

On November 10, Lin Zhao was thrown into an isolation cell “no bigger than a double bed” to compound the punishment and probably also to forestall her certain protest following the announcement of the indictment.⁷¹ Pen and ink were also removed from her possession; for the next several months, she had nothing but her own blood for writing.

Distraught, she cut the vein on her left wrist with a piece of broken glass in yet another suicide attempt. When that failed, she went on a hunger strike. That, too, was foiled, when the guards dipped a rubber tube in Lysol and forced it down her nose to force-feed her, which caused “inflammation and swelling.” A few days later, “the so-called Procuratorate personnel came to interrogate me. The moment I entered the room and before I had uttered a word, I began coughing, spattering blood all over the floor.”⁷²

On November 23, the anniversary of her father’s suicide, she gave up her hunger strike, after painting an altar dedicated to him on a wall in her cell, using her blood. She later added an incense burner above the altar and decorated it with painted flowers. On the opposite wall, she painted a cross in blood.⁷³

Lin Zhao was informed of the content of her indictment on November 17 and was given a copy of the indictment two weeks later. On December 5, a trial was held, at which she offered a self-defense. In response to the charge that while under detention, she had “resorted to loud shouting in an effort to instigate the inmates into an insurrection,” she quipped, “the ‘Indictment’ neglected to list the important fact that, while in prison, I established an ordnance bureau and built three munitions factories and two arsenals!”

A few months later, when stationery was again made available to her, she wrote out a sentence-by-sentence, acidic annotation of the indictment, while correcting the repeated typos in the printed document. It must have given her a sense of editorial as well as moral victory over it. Parts of the annotated indictment read:

[The defendant] was born in a bureaucratic bourgeoisie family. (Note: No idea what this means!)

After 1950, she joined the land reform and Five-Antis work teams. (Note: Clear evidence that this “defendant” was neither trained in New York nor dispatched by Taipei but was instead one of the innocent… blind followers incited and deceived by you!)

Criminal Lin Zhao committed the serious crime of organizing a counterrevolutionary clique… and providing intelligence to the enemies in collusion with the imperialists. (Note: Incoherent. But it raises the status of this mere chit of a girl. A rare fortune one encounters only once in three lifetimes. What incredible honor!)

The defendant produced “Seagull,” a counterrevolutionary essay… and “Prometheus’s Day of Passion.” (Note: So even Prometheus and the seagull have become “counterrevolutionaries.”)

After her arrest, she has consistently refused to confess her crimes. (Note: You still refuse to confess your monstrous crimes. Lin Zhao is innocent in her resistance. Of course she has nothing to confess!)⁷⁴

Lin Zhao was aware that, for all its grammatical blemishes, literary ineptitude, and legal vacuity, the indictment would result in certain conviction. She decided, therefore, to seek “an arbitrator between the Public Security Bureau and its political prisoners.” The day after the show trial, she asked the procuratorate to forward a letter of appeal to Shanghai’s mayor Ke Qingshi. “According to the Chinese tradition, the responsible local magistrate is the parent for the people,” she reminded him. “Therefore, Mayor Ke, I ask you to please set things straight for me.”⁷⁵

Ke, a revolutionary of high standing, had been Shanghai’s mayor since 1958 and the powerful first party secretary of the East China Bureau of the CCP Central Committee since 1961. He had earned the respect—in her view—of both the general public and intellectuals in the Shanghai area.⁷⁶ It was conceivable to her that Ke could act as a modern knight-errant, who would come to the rescue of a young female intellectual wrongly incarcerated in his domain.

In reality, Ke Qingshi had been toeing the radical Maoist line since the Great Leap Forward. As a close associate of Mao and Jiang Qing, he had decried the widespread influence of bourgeois culture and had proposed publicly in 1963 that literature should “wholeheartedly depict the thirteen years” of Communist rule. As one of the earliest CCP members, Ke was purged during the “rescue” campaign in Yan’an in 1943 as a counterrevolutionary and was tied up with ropes after he denied the charges. His wife was driven to suicide—she jumped into a well—but Mao personally spared him, after which he developed a fierce loyalty to the chairman, which endured for the rest of his life.⁷⁷

It is unlikely that Lin Zhao was entirely ignorant of Ke’s leftist leaning, but with no recourse to any legal defense, an appeal to Ke seemed to be her best option. In February 1965, after she was again beaten by guards, she wrote a long second letter to Ke detailing the incident.⁷⁸ It was evident that the mayor of Shanghai had not intervened on her behalf since she sent her first letter of appeal in December. She did not know if it had even reached him.

She was becoming desperate and sensed that her sanity was slipping away. Frightened, she wrote on the narrow wall next to the door—in inch-size characters—“No, No! God will not let me go insane. As long as I live, he will certainly keep my senses, as he keeps my memory!”

Near the end of February, after yet another encounter with the guard, who taunted her about the force-feeding she had gone through—“It saves you the trouble of brushing your teeth,” he said—she sank into a stupor. “I sat there motionless and dazed. A deep numbness… swept over me,” she later recalled. “I felt that I was perhaps indeed about to go crazy! God, God help me! I am about to be driven crazy! But I must not go crazy, I don’t want to go crazy!”⁷⁹

She was not sent to the mental hospital, as she feared she would be. She merely slipped deeper into oblivion as a new, dark order of things encroached on her mind. In this vision, Chairman Mao himself was the director of the No. 1 Detention House. Soon enough, the rice soup she demanded began to smell of Lysol and gave her stomach cramps and diarrhea. She embarked again on a hunger strike and, during her remaining months in the detention house, refused solid food, even porridge, most of the time.⁸⁰

Periodically, a formless agitation churning inside her would turn into a sudden “flash of lightning” striking her “desolate and despondent heart,” and she would “burst into tears, crying out loud like a child.” A “strange light” began to linger in her eyes, which was “frightening to behold,” as other inmates later told her. In spite of the emerging signs of a fractured mind, she received no psychiatric evaluation or treatment.⁸¹

ON MARCH 5, still handcuffed and using her own blood as ink, she copied the nine seven-character rhymes she had composed since late September onto a white shirt and wrote out a four-character rhyme as a postscript. “Grieving over my own life, / I mourn for my country even more!” it reads. The poems remained an act of remonstration directed at the ruler, she explained, but “the strings on the jade-studded zither have snapped.”

At first refusing to take the shirt, the guards accepted it the next day after she went on a hunger strike but returned it within a few hours along with her second letter of appeal to Ke Qingshi. Both were dropped onto the floor of her cell through the tiny window in the door. The guards explained that they could not be sent through the post office.⁸² It was only after she made a “scene”—presumably with loud, tearful protests—that a senior jail official, while chiding her for being “reactionary to the point of becoming hysterical,” finally took the writings.

Lin Zhao demanded a receipt. She also reminded the guards of the curious irony that, while the prison routinely searched the inmates’ belongings and confiscated every single piece of writing they produced, she had to go to such extraordinary lengths to have her writings taken from her.⁸³

IN HER AGONIZED and restless mind, Lin Zhao had perhaps fantasized about the blood-soaked pages of her two letters to Ke Qingshi landing on his desk and the mayor of Shanghai exploding in righteous indignation over the appalling mistreatment of an innocent, jailed intellectual under his watch. To her, Ke—reputedly one of the two regional party secretaries most trusted by Mao in all of China during the 1960s—was the only person who was able to stand up for her.⁸⁴

On April 10, Liberation Daily brought news of the sudden death of Ke Qingshi the previous day. With the CCP’s usual secrecy, the public announcement simply noted that Ke had died of illness, which spawned conspiracy theories of his poisoning by political enemies, especially after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In reality, Ke, whose health had declined since a diagnosis of lung cancer the previous year, died naturally of cholecystitis and acute secondary pancreatitis.⁸⁵

To Lin Zhao, however, mysterious dots began to connect: it was evident to her that, since she sent out her appeal letters, Ke had been “retained in Beijing” and prevented from returning to Shanghai. Her blood letters must have reached Ke, and he must have confronted Mao about them. And Mao, who she now believed had long harbored indecent sexual thoughts about her, must have grown jealous and “murdered” Ke by “poisoning.” She had been, therefore, the direct cause of his death; Ke had died for her.⁸⁶

Lin Zhao’s response to Ke’s presumed murder was characteristically impassioned and impulsive: she composed a long four-character rhyme mourning him as a “lone crane standing among a crowd of ravens.” Then, “in accordance with an ancient custom of our country,” she wrote, “I set up a memorial tablet for him and performed a posthumous wedding as his concubine!” She placed the tablet, painted with blood, next to the altar to her father.⁸⁷

In these extreme actions, she surprised even herself. “If he had been alive, I would never have agreed to marry him,” she later reflected. “I wasn’t quite that naïve,” she wrote, addressing Ke, “not to the extent of considering you a snow-white crow.” As first party secretary of the East China Bureau, Ke was “likewise my enemy!” She realized that her “love for the dead one,” bizarre as it seemed, was “also a protest against the Dictator,” the intensity of one corresponding to that of the other.⁸⁸

LIN ZHAO REMAINED in the No. 1 Detention House till the end of May. In her last weeks, she started a long essay, which she titled “An Appeal to Humanity.” Like all her other writings, it was confiscated upon her departure. Her detention of almost twenty-two months was perhaps unrivaled in its turbulence. The guards, in their frustration, had reminded her that not all the inmates had been treated with the same severity. “Who has been like you?” they asked.⁸⁹

It may indeed have been different if she had not been given to unbending opposition. For those who resolved to survive, bending had often helped. Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai, who had worked for Shell International Petroleum Company in its Shanghai office and who was thrown into the No. 1 Detention House in 1966, learned to begin an interrogation session with a vigorous reading from The Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations and deftly defended her views by quoting the chairman. Lin Zhao, who was familiar with what she called the “impudent, Mao style” writing—with its unbridled scatological interest—instead told the guards to not bother her when they attempted to sell the Selected Works of Mao Zedong to the inmates.⁹⁰

A measure of quietude would likely have lessened her suffering. The interrogator had admonished her to make her days “a bit more tranquil.” After all, the ground rule for all inmates was to obey. At the No. 1 Detention House, the inmates almost always made confessions. As an interrogator pointed out, one way or another, an inmate would eventually be “begging for a chance to confess.” Those who did not “would not last… in this place.”⁹¹

Other officials also told Lin Zhao to “learn to practice self-restraint and overcome impatience.” But whenever she thought of “the evil committed by the so-called instrument of suppression” and of how other exiled or imprisoned Rightists were being strangled by the “giant poisonous snake of dictatorship… how can I not be impatient?”⁹²

In that petulant state of mind, and still handcuffed, Lin Zhao added one of the final touches to the sanguinary art on the walls of her isolation cell. Next to her father’s altar, in three-inch-wide characters, she wrote a line from a poem Lu Xun had composed in 1903 when he was twenty-one: “I offer my blood as sacrifice to the Yellow Emperor.”

That line had long been purged, after Lu Xun’s death in 1936, of its Confucian sentiments and turned into a CCP slogan exhorting selfless dedication to the cause of Chinese communism. Lin Zhao found it necessary to clarify that her blood sacrifice had nothing to do with Mao’s revolution. It was intended to honor what the Yellow Emperor had stood for: “personal dignity with proper clothes and headwear, a civilization of rituals and music”—“the immortal symbol of the ancient and splendid soul of our nation.”⁹³