ON MAY 31, 1965, THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD LIN ZHAO—POET, JOURNALIST, dissident—was tried in the Jing’an District People’s Court in Shanghai. She was charged as the lead member of a “counterrevolutionary clique” that had published A Spark of Fire, an underground journal that decried Communist misrule and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which caused an unprecedented famine in 1959–1961 and claimed at least thirty-six million lives nationwide.1
Lin Zhao had also contributed a long poem entitled “A Day in Prometheus’s Passion” to the journal. It mocked Mao as a villainous Zeus trying, and failing, to force Prometheus to put out the fire of freedom taken from heaven. According to the authorities, the poem “viciously attacked” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the socialist system and inspired fellow counterrevolutionaries to “blatantly call for ‘a peaceful, democratic, and free’” China.2 She was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
“This is a shameful ruling!” Lin Zhao wrote on the back of the verdict the next day, in her own blood. “But I heard it with pride! It is the enemy’s estimation of my individual act of combat. Deep inside my heart I feel the pride of a combatant! I have done too little. It is far from enough. Yes, I must do more to live up to your estimation! Other than that, this so-called ruling is completely meaningless to me! I despise it!”3
It was an unexpected, jarring note in the symphony of Mao’s revolution. The Communist movement, which began in the 1920s and which Mao had led since the 1930s, had triumphed with the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The revolution had turned communism into a sacred creed and a mass religion in China, complete with its Marxist and Maoist scriptures, priests (the cadres), and revolutionary liturgy.
The cult of Mao dated to the 1940s but blossomed with the publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao—known in the West as The Little Red Book—in 1964. Over one billion copies were printed over the next decade. During the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, collective rituals of slogan chanting and of waving The Little Red Book were performed daily in front of the portrait of the “great leader.” Meanwhile, some 4.8 billion Mao badges were made. The largest was as big as a soccer ball.4
Sacrilege was hard to imagine and rare. Even those condemned “counterrevolutionaries” sent to execution grounds had often chanted “Long live Chairman Mao” as shots were fired, in a last-ditch effort to escape the wrath of the revolution and to attest their loyalty to it.5
At a time when critics of the party had been silenced throughout China, Lin Zhao chose to oppose it openly from her prison cell. “From the day of my arrest I have declared in front of those Communists my identity as a resister,” she wrote in a blood letter to her mother from prison. “I have been open in my basic stand as a freedom fighter against communism and against tyranny.”6
Lin Zhao’s dissent seemed as futile as it was suicidal. What sustained it was her intense religious faith. She had been baptized in her teens at the Laura Haygood Memorial School, a Southern Methodist mission school in her hometown of Suzhou, but drifted away from the church when she joined the Communist revolution in 1949 to help “emancipate” the masses and create a new, just society, as she believed. Her disenchantment with the revolution came in the late 1950s, when she was purged as a Rightist—along with at least 1.2 million others across China—for expressing democratic ideas.7 Thereafter she gradually returned to a fervent Christian faith.
As a Christian, she believed that her struggle was both political and spiritual. In a postsentencing letter from prison to the editors of People’s Daily—the party’s mouthpiece—she explained that, in opposing communism, she was following “the line of a servant of God, the political line of Christ.” “My life belongs to God,” she claimed. God willing, she would be able to live. “But if God wants me to become a willing martyr, I will only be grateful from the bottom of my heart for the honor He bestows on me!”8
Lin Zhao’s defiance of the regime was unparalleled in Mao’s China. The tens of millions who perished as the direct result of the CCP rule died as victims, their voices unheard. No significant, secular opposition to the ideology of communism was recorded in China during Mao’s reign.9 Lin Zhao endured as a resister because of her democratic ideals and because her Christian faith enabled her to preserve her moral autonomy as well as political judgment, which the Communist state had denied its citizens. Her faith provided a counterweight to the religion of Maoism and sustained her in her dissent.
THE TITLE OF this book comes from Lin Zhao’s impassioned means of expressing that dissent. “During her imprisonment,” an official document read, Lin Zhao “poked her flesh countless times and used her filthy blood to write hundreds of thousands of words of extremely reactionary, extremely malicious letters, notes, and diaries, madly attacking, abusing, and slandering our party and its leader.”10 Her letters were addressed variously to the party propaganda apparatus, the United Nations, the prison authorities, and her mother. She called them her “freedom writings.”
“As a human being, I fight for my right to live a whole, upright, and clean life—my right to life,” she explained. “It shall forever be an irreproachable struggle! Nobody has the right to tell me: in order to live, you must have chains on your neck and endure the humiliation of slavery.”11
Lin Zhao’s prison writings, which total some 500,000 characters, include essays, poems, letters, and even a play. She wrote in both ink and blood, using the latter when she was denied stationery or as an extreme act of protest. She drew blood with a makeshift prick—a bamboo pick, a hair clip, or the plastic handle of her toothbrush, sharpened against the concrete floor—and held it in a plastic spoon, in which she dipped her “pen,” often a thin bamboo strip or a straw stem. Her writing was done on paper when it was available and on shirts and torn-up bed sheets when it was not.12
At a certain point, having poked the fingers on her left hand so many times, she could no longer draw blood from them. They turned numb when pressed.13 In a letter to her mother dated November 14, 1967, she wrote:
The small puddle of blood that I squeezed out for writing is almost all gone now. My blood seems to have thinned lately; coagulation is quite poor. It may be partially due to the weather getting cold. Alas, dear Mama! This is my life! It is also my struggle! It is my battle!14
The fullest expression of Lin Zhao’s political beliefs is found in her 1965 letter to the editorial board of People’s Daily. She chose July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, as the day to begin writing it. It took her almost five months to complete the letter, which ran to about 140,000 characters, 137 pages in all. She did it in ink, but stamped it repeatedly with a shirt-button-sized seal bearing the character zhao and inked with her blood.
In the letter, Lin Zhao challenged the theory of a continuous “class struggle,” which the Communists saw as intrinsic to human history and from which there was no escape. Since the 1920s, the CCP had looked upon this theory as an immutable truth and had used it to justify the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat after 1949. The doctrine gained new urgency in the 1960s when Mao declared that “class struggle must be talked about every year, every month, and every day.”15
Lin Zhao scoffed at this. “I do not ever believe that, in such a vast living space that God has prepared for us, there is any need for humanity to engage in a life-and-death struggle!”16
The CCP dictatorship was but a modern form of “tyranny and slavery,” she wrote in her letter to the party’s propagandists. “As long as there are people who are still enslaved, not only are the enslaved not free, those who enslave others are likewise not free!” Those seeking to end Communist rule in China must likewise not “debase the goal of our struggle into a desire to become a different kind of slave owner,” she wrote. “The lofty overall goal of our battle dictates that we cannot simply set our eyes on political power—the goal must not and cannot be a simple transfer of political power!” The end was “political democratization… to make sure that there will never be another emperor in China!”17
Lin Zhao wrestled with the moral question of whether violence was a justified means to that end. Her Christian faith had hardened her for the fight. At the same time, it also tempered her opposition. She acknowledged the occasional “sparks of humanity” even in those who were at the “most savage center” of Chinese communism. As strenuously as she argued against her imprisonment, against Mao’s dictatorship, and for a free society, she was unable to sanction violence in that struggle. “As a Christian, one devoted to freedom and fighting under the Cross, I believe that killing Communists is not the best way to oppose or eliminate communism.” She admitted that, had she not “embraced a bit of Christ’s spirit,” she would have had every reason to pledge “bloody revenge against the Chinese Communist Party.”18
FOR HER REFUSAL to submit to “thought reform” and her unflagging sacrilege against Mao and his revolution, Lin Zhao’s sentence was changed to the death penalty. On April 29, 1968, she was shot under the orders issued by the Shanghai Military Control Committee of the People’s Liberation Army. She was thirty-six.
Lin Zhao died with unfulfilled wishes: having caused her mother much grief because of her involvement in politics, she had wanted to make amends by caring for her in her old age. She told her mother in one of her last blood letters, written in November 1967: “When the morning light of freedom in a century of human rights shines upon the vast land of this country, we shall pour out our hearts to each other!”19 That letter, and her other blood writings, were confiscated by the prison and never sent.
She had vowed to make a pilgrimage one day to the tomb of American president John F. Kennedy to pay her respects, for he had taught her—in his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech of 1963—that freedom is indivisible and that “when one man is enslaved, all are not free.”20
And she had written an appeal to the United Nations in 1966 asking to testify in person about her torture and about human rights abuses in China. In the event of her death while in detention, she asked the United Nations to “conduct a detailed, rigorous, and true investigation” of her case and make it public. Similar appeals from dissidents in the Soviet Union made it to the United Nations Committee for Human Rights during the 1960s, yet Lin Zhao’s letter never reached beyond her prison walls.21
Her death sentence began with a “supreme instruction” from Chairman Mao: “There certainly will be those who refuse to change till they die. They are willing to go see God carrying their granite heads on their shoulders. That will be of little consequence.”22
That would be true, and this book would not have been possible, if her prison writings had not survived.
Lin Zhao had believed—against all hope—that they would. Unimaginably, they did. In spite of the “extremely reactionary” and damning nature of her writings, no prison or public security bureaucrat apparently dared to risk a potentially costly political mistake by ordering their destruction. Instead, her writings were collected and filed away as part of the criminal evidence in her counterrevolutionary case. In 1981, Shanghai High People’s Court posthumously revoked Lin Zhao’s death sentence and declared her innocent. Her writings were returned to the family the next year.23
In 2004, a digitized version of Lin Zhao’s 1965 letter to People’s Daily appeared on the Internet. It quickly became a Promethean fire to political dissent in China today. The late Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo called Lin Zhao “the only voice of freedom left for contemporary China.”24
During the past decade, an increasing number of democracy activists in China have visited Lin Zhao’s tomb on Lingyan Hill on the outskirts of Suzhou to pay their respects. In recent years, as the government’s crackdown on dissidents has intensified, plainclothes as well as uniformed police in riot gear have shown up dutifully on the anniversary of her execution to block access to her tomb and break up gatherings of human rights advocates who traveled from across the country to commemorate her. The result has been an annual ritual of police detaining and roughing up pilgrims at the foot of Lingyan Hill.25
Throughout contemporary China, no other spirit of the dead has required such unrelenting exorcism.26 In death even more so than in life, Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the Communist state.
To the poet Shen Zeyi, Lin Zhao’s friend and classmate at Peking University, she was the “Lamplight in the Snowy Fields,” the title of a poem he penned in 1979 when he emerged from his own banishment, only to learn about her death:
For some reason
I always miss the lamplight on the other side of the mountain.
On a desolate night filled with a cold fog
in the middle of the fields covered with white snow
it shone a beautiful, lonely, inviolable light.
Where its radiance touched
it cast as far off as it could
the thick, dark night
of windswept, deep snow.27
That lamplight bore witness to human dignity and the tenacity of the human will to be free. In the course of the twentieth century, the giant wheel of totalitarian systems rolled over the lives of untold tens of millions worldwide. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl during the Nazi era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn under the Soviet regime, and Jerzy Popiełuszko in Communist Poland, Lin Zhao attempted—to borrow Bonhoeffer’s words—to “drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Religious faith played a role in the heroic struggles of these individuals. It gave Bonhoeffer the moral clarity to pronounce the Nazi doctrine a heresy, and it inspired Solzhenitsyn to oppose communism as a “spiritual enslavement.” To Solzhenitsyn, the immoral totalitarianism of the Soviet Union had demanded a “total surrender of our souls.” When Caesar demands “that we render unto him what is God’s—that is a sacrifice we dare not make!” he concluded.28
In the early 1980s, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko stood with Solidarity, the Polish trade union, in defying the martial law the Communist government in Poland had imposed. “Woe betide state authorities who want to govern citizens by threat and fear,” he cried. He believed that “to serve God is to condemn evil in all its manifestations”—and he paid for that conviction with his life.29
The connection between religious faith and the extraordinary courage of individuals to resist totalitarianism had been foretold by German theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch, whom Bonhoeffer had read as a student. Because of its own revolutionary principle of “unlimited individualism and universalism,” wrote Troeltsch, Christianity has “a disintegrating effect” upon “every form of exclusively earthly authority.”30
IN 2013, The Collected Writings of Lin Zhao—including her returned prison writings and other extant works and correspondence, compiled and annotated by her dedicated friends—was privately printed.31 I was given a copy.
It was a godsend. A year earlier, I had embarked on my search for Lin Zhao’s story. Since 2012 I have retraced her life’s journey, from the former Laura Haygood Memorial School in Suzhou where she underwent a double conversion—to Christianity and then to communism—to the picturesque campus of Peking University where she broke with communism after a political awakening. To better understand the mission school’s education that left a permanent mark on her mind, I turned to the United Methodist archives in Madison, New Jersey.
I also paid my respects to Lin Zhao at her tomb, above which a surveillance camera was installed in 2008, in the lead-up to the fortieth anniversary of her execution, lest a spiritual and political plague break out undetected from her tomb.32
I have come to know Lin Zhao not only through her writings but also through interviews and correspondence with those who knew her intimately—her former fiancé, classmates, friends, fellow counterrevolutionaries, and her sister—and those who knew her prison intimately, namely Tilanqiao’s former political inmates.
In my exclusive interview with the now retired judge who reviewed Lin Zhao’s case in 1981 for rehabilitation, I asked about his decision to return her prison writings—sheets of manuscripts, numbered and bound with green threads, and four journal notebooks that contain her “battlefield diaries,” essays, and ink copies of her “blood letters home.” Using a pen, she had meticulously copied onto notebooks and loose sheets of paper all her blood writings after they were handed to the guards so that her words would be preserved.33
The returned writings were from her secondary file, he told me. The primary file contains her interrogation records and other key materials, which total about three linear feet on a shelf. It remains to this day locked away at a secret location for classified documents outside Shanghai.
“She is a good poet,” he reminisced. “I secretly took some of her poems home and hand copied them,” he added with a mischievous smile.
“Did you see the blood writings?”
He did. Only some of them. The blood had turned dark on pieces of yellowed paper.
I asked why he didn’t return them to Lin Zhao’s family along with the other prison writings.
“Taichu shenjing le”—too much for the raw nerves—he answered.34
LIN ZHAO WOULD have been consigned to oblivion, like the millions killed as enemies of the revolution. Her story would have been lost but for the constancy of her prison writings and the caprices of history. What follows is that story.