Lian Xi, Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School and a leading scholar of Protestant Christianity in China, has written an absorbing biography of Lin Zhao, a once-unknown victim of China's Cultural Revolution who is now celebrated by pro-democracy activists.
Lin was born in 1932 in Suzhou. Her father was a member of the National Assembly and her mother was a successful entrepreneur. Lin was baptized while a student at the Laura Haygood Memorial School, an elite Southern Methodist mission school. Her youthful idealism, however, led her to secretly join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1948, when she was sixteen. Her membership was revoked soon thereafter, however, for ignoring an order to flee an anticipated crackdown on Communists in Suzhou. Nevertheless, as the CCP prevailed in the civil war a year later, Lin was admitted to a party institute to study journalism. She then wrote for a local newspaper. In 1951, she volunteered to serve on a land reform team in the countryside. She enthusiastically participated in a “struggle session” against a landlord and exulted in his execution.
Lin hoped to be readmitted to the party, and her writing followed the party line. In response to Stalin's death in 1953, for example, she wrote a poem hailing him as “our dear father,” whose face radiated “love and care for humanity” (75). By this time she was estranged from her family, dropping her Peng family name (Peng Linzhao became Lin Zhao). She appears at this time to have also abandoned her Christianity.
In 1954, Lin was admitted to Peking University. The intellectual atmosphere there was relatively open then, and at first she thrived. An accomplished poet in both classical and modern forms, she joined the student poetry club. Lin also served on the editorial board of a student magazine.
In 1956 and early 1957, the Hundred Flowers Campaign encouraged open criticism of the behavior and policies of the CCP. Lin's contribution was a poem with the title “Party, I Call Out to You,” in which she spoke of “dark shadows under the sun” (81). In June of 1957, the party launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign to target those who had spoken out. Lin, along with many of her classmates, was named a Rightist. She refused to engage in “self-criticism” and attempted suicide. She was sentenced to three years of reform-through-labor, but because she had tuberculosis she was allowed to work on campus.
Lin then became romantically involved with Gan Cui, a student who had been denounced as a Rightist and expelled from the party. At this time she returned to her Christian faith; she and Gan Cui both attended church in Beijing. They asked their department's party secretary for permission to marry but were turned down. Gan Cui was then assigned to a construction battalion in Xinjiang, and the couple never saw each other again. Lin was allowed to move to Shanghai, where her mother lived.
By 1959, Lin had become thoroughly hostile toward the Communist Party, not only because of its persecution of dissidents but also because the Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, had devastated the agricultural economy and caused widespread starvation. Lin joined a clandestine group that published an underground mimeographed periodical, A Spark of Fire (Xinghuo). Its only issue, in January 1960, condemned the Great Leap Forward and attacked the “fascist rule of a centralized state.” She contributed a long poem, “A Day in Prometheus's Passion,” an anti-Communist allegory. Inevitably, she and her fellow dissidents were arrested.
Aside from a medical parole in 1962, she was incarcerated for the rest of her life, most of the time in Shanghai's notorious Tilanqiao Prison. There a fellow prisoner, the preacher Yu Yile, helped Lin reconnect to Christianity. Yu came from an indigenized, conservative, pietistic tradition quite different from Lin's mainstream Methodist background. He tried to persuade her to abandon political activism, but Lin regarded her mission to oppose Communism as central to her faith. She steadfastly refused to confess to any crimes or engage in “thought reform.” Initially she was given a twenty-year prison term as an “unrepentant counterrevolutionary,” but in 1968 she was sentenced to death and executed. She was thirty-six.
In 1981, after the CCP had repudiated the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai High People's Court reviewed Lin's case, revoked her death sentence, and posthumously exonerated her. Amazingly, many of Lin's prison writings were turned over to her family, though her prison file remains unavailable.
Lin would have been lost to posterity were it not for this remarkable preservation of her prison writings, several hundred pages of letters, diaries, poems, and essays. Sometimes, when denied ink and paper, she pricked her finger and wrote on cloth with her blood—hence the title of the book. Her writings reveal her thinking about both politics and religion. (They also reveal the fragility of her mental as well as physical health.) In 1965, she expressed her political views in a 137-page letter—never delivered, of course—to the editorial board of People's Daily. She denounced the CCP's rule as “tyranny and slavery,” which, she wrote, had to be overthrown in order to establish “political democratization . . . to make sure that there will never be another emperor in China.” But Lin could not countenance violence to achieve this end. “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” (5).
In 2004, a digitalized version of this letter appeared on the internet. That year, filmmaker Hu Jie made her the subject of his independent documentary, “Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun” (Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul). Her reputation among Chinese dissidents grew. In 2013, her friends privately published The Collected Writings of Lin Zhao in Shanghai. During her imprisonment, only her jailers read her writings. She has reached a much wider audience in the last two decades than she did in her lifetime over a half century ago.
Drawing from Lin's prison writings as well as interviews of many of her surviving friends and colleagues, Lian Xi has done a masterful job in reconstructing Lin's life.
