Book Review

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China. Lian Xi. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Lin Zhao is hardly a common, household name in the USA.  Lin Zhao may be presumed to be a common name in China, however, though it is likely not spoken aloud without looking over one’s shoulder to determine who might be listening.  Fifty years ago in April 1968 at the height of the violent Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China Ms. Lin Zhao was executed at the directive of the Chinese Communist Party for treasonous writings.  In fact, she incurred the wrath of the CCP and of the great Chairman Mao himself for steadfastly opposing the Communist ideology and its bloody tactics of self-preservation.

Author Lian Xi, a native of mainland China and currently professor of world Christianity at Duke University, has combed through volumes of Zhao’s writings including poetry, journal articles and personal letters.  The latter include correspondence written in her own blood - thus the title – at times written on scraps of bedsheets or of her own clothing when pen and paper were removed from her use.  Though much of those letters remain sealed by the CCP and its courts, a large quantity did reach former classmates, family or other former prisoners.  From these and from her works published earlier and prior to her seven-year incarceration Dr. Xi has drawn a riveting sketch of a young woman who displayed both exceptional talent and perseverance.

Why Lin Zhao?  Were there not also hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Chinese who were eliminated by the CCP or its minion under Mao Tse Tung’s leadership and by his directives?  What of the many who also voiced disapproval or sought to return Mao’s revolution to a democratic character; are they not worthy to be recognized?  By her own admission she only “one ordinary soldier in the general warfare of free humanity against communism and against tyranny”.  Was Lin Zhao really one of the few to have refused to recant her criticisms? In fact, Zhao bravely increased her attempts to alert her fellow citizens and to confront Mao’s regime with the blatant immorality and inhumanity of the Communist ideology and practice.  According to both the author and to Hu Jie, an independent film maker who recently produced a Chinese documentary[1] of the dissident’s story, Lin Zhao was the only one of 800 Beijing University students imprisoned for “rightist” activity, who did not recant her position.

What may contribute to the singularity of Lin Zhao’s resistance is that she openly confessed that Christianity and her allegiance to the supreme, living God formed the bedrock of her determination to uncover Mao’s atrocities and her insistence to persevere in that resistance through unimaginable tortures and, finally, her execution by bullet. (For readers, that the CCP would demand Zhao’s family reimburse it for the cost of the bullet is a small illustration of the Party’s horrors inflicted on its own people.)

I did find Xi’s account of Lin Zhao’s transition to and departure from being a Communist activist very moving.  Clearly, she was an unusual personality; her parents’ experiences and examples of being their “own persons” must have been important shaping factors.  It is less clear to me how Christianity came to be so important to her – she returned to regular church attendance more than ten years after having been influenced educationally and spiritually at a Methodist mission school, then baptized as a sixteen year old while still in secondary school.  I cannot imagine that she could endure the seven-years long tortures of prison while relying primarily on inner fortitude.  But the writing left to us and outlined in Xi’s volume leave much unexplained in greater depth about how her faith in the supreme God and Christ her Savior fortified, sustained and informed her for the rigor of persecution while thoughtfully exposing the great lies of Maoism.

I found myself also unable to appreciate deeply her poetry[2] or subtleties in journaling.  Lost in translation [for me] are the marvelous nuances of language and literature in which Lin Zhao demonstrated exceptional talent and recall.  It is that talent that so severely provoked the Party and the Chairman against whom she directed her scathing attacks.  According to the author the site near Shanghai where her ashes are interred has even been guarded to prevent any possibility of the location becoming a destination for democracy pilgrims.

Will the CCP’s records department release Lin Zhao’s personal letters?  It’s own 50 year statute of limitations expires soon.  She had hoped that her “freedom writings” would survive and communicate deeply to future generations of young people who could be otherwise drawn aside from truth, justice and Good by another budding autocrat masquerading as his people’s savior. Lian Xi’s biography will in its own way insure that countless others may draw strength from this Bonhoeffer-like martyr.

April 16, 2018

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[1] See the brief review of Jie’s documentary at https://web.archive.org/web/20120720004825/http://www.hrichina.org/sites/default/files/oldsite/PDFs/CRF.3.2004/Cultural_Reviews.pdf

[2] “Autumn rain, autumn wind, they make one die of sorrow;

leaning against the distant sky, I mourn over the brambles before

   my eyes.

Fox burrows 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.”