Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China

Blood Letters tells the astonishing story of Lin Zhao, a Chinese poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith, and expressed it by writing in her own blood, at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.

The historian Lian Xi has written the first authoritative, documented biography of Lin Zhao to appear in any language. It chronicles her torturous personal journey from her successive conversions to Christianity and communism to her bitter disillusionment with the revolution following the Anti-Rightist purges of 1957. Turning to poetry as a weapon, she castigated Mao as a villainous tyrant, and was soon arrested, subjected to repeated torture, and finally silenced.

Miraculously, Lin Zhao’s prison writings survived. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with her friends, classmates, and other former political prisoners, Blood Letters paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil. In the words of Liu Xiaobo, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lin Zhao is “the only voice of freedom left for contemporary China.”