Lin Zhao (the pen name of Peng Lingzhao) was a writer and poet. Born on January 23, 1932 Lin grew up in an intellectual family in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.
In 1947, she enrolled in the Suzhou Jinghai Women's Normal School, a Methodist girls school and was baptized. She secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1948, and began writing critiques of the Kuomintang-led government under the pen name Lin Zhao.
She lost her CCP membership in less than a year because of her disobedience to the Party. After graduating in 1949, she ignored her parents' advice to go to university and, at the risk of breaking with her family, enrolled in the Party-run Sunan Journalism College, and then participated in the Land Reform Movement after graduating in May 1950. She worked hard to rejoin the Party, but was not accepted.
In 1952, she was assigned to work for Changzhou People News, and then for the Changzhou Federation of Literary and Art. In 1954, Lin enrolled in the journalism program at the Chinese Literature Department of Peking University, where she joined the Peking University Poetry Society and later became an editor of the campus publication Red Chamber. It was there that she broke with Communism and gradually rediscovered her Christian faith.
In 1957, Lin was labeled a Rightist for speaking up for other students. One of her poems from that era read:
The power of truth
never lies in
the arrogant air
of the guardians of truth.
Lin later wrote a 240-line poem called “Seagull” and circulated it among friends. The poem tells the story of a ship carrying chained prisoners. Their crime: they seek freedom.
Freedom, I cry out inside me, freedom!
The thought of you has filled my heart with yearning,
like a choking man gasping for air,
like one dying of thirst lurching toward a spring.
It was read by the group of students in Tianshui, Gansu Province, who were founding the magazine
Spark (
see separate entry). Thrilled by her overtly political message, one of their leaders, Zhang Chunyuan (
), traveled to meet her. She agreed to allow the students to print “Seagull” and a new poem, “A Day in the Life of Prometheus,” in their magazine.
The magazine was shut down in 1960 and people affiliated with it were detained, including Lin. She was released on medical parole in early 1962 due to tuberculosis, but was arrested and imprisoned again in December of the same year for her continuous advocacy for democratic reforms.
In May 1965, she was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for leading the Chinese Free Youth Militant League, which the party called a counter-revolutionary movement. During her imprisonment, Lin continued to write, detailing her grievances with the government and her demands for political reform. When she was denied a pen and paper, she sometimes used a sharpened straw or chopstick to prick her finger and write in blood.
Like many political prisoners, Lin was regularly tortured. The most common form was handcuffing, with the arms pulled behind the back and the handcuffs tightly fastened, leaving the inmate unable to eat, dress, or use the toilet without help. Inmates like Lin who were in solitary confinement often had to lick their food off the floor and soil their trousers. Some cuffs were so tight that the shoulders would be damaged, and the flesh of the wrists would rot, leaving permanent marks. At times, prisoners would beat Lin, or guards would pull out her hair.
For the final six years of her life, Lin didn’t leave prison. But when the cuffs were taken off she kept writing, using ink and paper that her relatives sent her. When she was denied writing implements or when the issue was urgent, she wrote in her own blood. She would sharpen the end of a toothbrush by scraping it on the floor and then prick her finger, collecting the blood in a spoon and then writing with a sliver of bamboo or reed. Sometimes she wrote on scraps of paper, other times on her clothing.
Lin’s writing was direct, angry, and shorn of nuance. Most famously, she wrote a 137-page letter to the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily. She also used her blood to paint an altar on her prison wall in honor of her father, who had committed suicide after his arrest in 1960. She later used her blood to add images of an incense burner and flowers, and from 9:30 am to noon each Sunday she held what she called “grand church worship,” singing the hymns and saying the prayers that she had learned in the Methodist girls’ school.
Lin's focus came from her conviction that her writings would last. In 1967 she described a recent 30,000-character batch of blood letters that she had sent to her mother in this self-confident way: “In the future, they will make up yet another volume of either my complete published works or a posthumous collection of my papers.” None of her letters reached her mother, let alone People’s Daily. But prison guards didn’t destroy valuable evidence against this enemy of the state. Instead, they methodically filed her writings in her ever-expanding file.
In 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Lin was listed as a counter-revolutionary who should be executed. She was made to wear a “Monkey King cap”—named after the mythical Chinese hero who was so uncontrollable that he had to wear a band around his head that could be contracted to bring him to heel. In her case, it was a rubber hood with a slit cut for the eyes and a hole for her nose. The hood was removed only at mealtime.
On April 29, 1968, she got an updated death sentence and was executed on the same day. According to subsequent reports, her parents were asked to pay the cost of the bullet used to shoot her.
In 1979, Peking University formally lifted the charge against Lin of being a Rightist. Later, the Xinhua news agency held a memorial service for her because she had once worked as a journalist. She was formally rehabilitated in 1980.
The judge who reviewed Lin’s file decided to give much of her writing to her family in 1982. He didn’t include official court documents, but he released sheets of manuscripts, numbered and bound with green thread, and four notebooks filled with her diaries, as well as ink copies of her blood letters home, which Lin had copied so they would be preserved for posterity. The judge based his decision on aesthetics. He said he was impressed by Lin’s poetry and felt that her family deserved to have it.
In the early 2000s, Lin’s friends edited her writings. They made photos of the blood letters and compiled PDFs that were posted online and went viral. One of the first dissidents to discover them was Ding Zilin, the mother of a Tiananmen massacre victim. A fellow alumna of the onetime Methodist school in Suzhou, Ding found Lin’s letters to be revelatory, describing the same system that had also killed her son. She later wrote that they were “a kind of redemption for my soul.”
In the 1980s, admirers and family members found Lin’s ashes and buried them at Lingyan Hill outside her hometown, the eastern city of Suzhou. Her grave has become one of the most visited pilgrimage sites for China’s human rights activists. Every year on the anniversary of her death, April 29, the area is locked down; the rest of the time it is guarded by closed-circuit television.
Inspired by her story, the documentary filmmaker Hu Jie (see separate entry) made a 2004 film, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, which tells her tale through interviews with those who knew her. Through Hu Jie, the Chinese Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo came to know of her, praising her, as did the prominent rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who called her “a martyred saint, a prophet and a poet with an ecstatic soul, the Prometheus of a free China.”
For people like the well-known writer and critic Cui Weiping, people like Lin showed that the search for a freer, more humane China wasn’t new. It was something that Chinese people had been struggling for since the party took power. For Cui, the effect was electric. Reading Lin’s words half a century after they were written, she declared: “Now we have our genealogy.”
Details of Lin Zhao’s life from Ian Johnson,
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (New York, Oxford University Press, 2023) and
Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China (New York: Basic Books, 2018).
