Given events in China, I thought it might be good to go back to the archive and to one of the most important, and also the most moving, conversations I've had. Recorded in Professor Lian Xi's office at Duke Divinity School, he and I discuss Lin Zhao's life and times, the survival of her writings, and her growing influence in modern China. Please listen, and share with others interested in history, China, human rights, and the triumph of the human person over tyranny.

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first.

She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the "Great Leap Forward" poster, reproduced above. From her cell, Lin wrote long poems and essays, some written in her own blood, denouncing those who had brought China into such a condition of misery and oppression.

Eventually she was judged incapable of re-education and executed. Her family was billed (as was typical) for the cost of the bullet that ended her life.

But Lin Zhao's writings survived: Totalitarian societies are also bureaucratic ones, strangely loath to destroy even the evidence of their own tyranny. When Lin Zhao's sentence was commuted during the rule of Deng Xiaoping, her family gained access to her work.

In 21st century China, these writings have made her a prophet of change and a voice denouncing oppression. They have also made her as much an opponent of the current government as she was of Mao's dictatorship.

For Further Investigation

Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China (Basic Books, 2018)

Xi Lian, bio at Duke Divinity School website

Review of Blood Letters in the South China Morning Post

Xi Lian gives a short presentation on Lin Zhao