Miraculously, Lin Zhao’s prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with her friends, her classmates, and other former political prisoners, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.
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.
Lin Zhao endured as aresister 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.”
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.”
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.
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. 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!
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.”
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!”
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!”
(The book is available at https://www.amazon.in/Blood-Letters-Lian-Xi/dp/1541644239)
