Lin Zhao

Before

Lin Zhao was a brilliant and idealistic young writer, educated in her youth at a Christian missionary school in Suzhou where the seeds of faith were first planted. Like many of her generation she threw herself wholeheartedly into the Communist revolution, certain it would sweep away injustice and remake China, and she went on to study journalism at Peking University, the country's most prestigious campus. But she had a conscience that would not bend and eyes that would not look away. As she witnessed the cruelty, the forced confessions, and the betrayals of the political campaigns of the 1950s — especially the Anti-Rightist Campaign that destroyed so many of her friends — she could not bring herself to join the chorus or stay silent. Disillusioned with the ideology she had served, she turned back to the God of her school days, and the faith planted in her youth grew into a deep, clear-eyed, and utterly immovable conviction.

The Turning Point

Branded a 'rightist,' Lin Zhao was arrested and imprisoned, and there her faith became the very thing that could not be broken. Repeatedly her captors offered her a way out: recant, confess, denounce — and she would be freed. Again and again she refused, choosing her conscience and her Lord over her own life and liberty. They moved her into solitary confinement, shackled her, and at times denied her paper and ink to silence her pen for good. But she would not be silenced. Where there was no ink, she made her own: she pricked and cut her own flesh and, dipping a sliver of bamboo or a hairpin in her blood, wrote on her shirt, on bedsheets, and on scraps of paper — letters, essays, and poems pouring out faith, protest, and prayer, hundreds of thousands of words in all. She declared herself a Christian whose soul belonged to God, and entrusted herself wholly to him even as her body was wasted and tortured. The blood she could not stop them from spilling became the ink of one of the most extraordinary testimonies of conscience in modern history.

After

On April 29, 1968, Lin Zhao was executed by firing squad at the age of thirty-six. In an act of chilling cruelty, officials are said to have come to her mother's door days later to demand a few cents in payment for the bullet. For years afterward her name was buried and her story suppressed. But her blood-written manuscripts were preserved in secret police files and eventually recovered, and her witness could not be silenced forever. Today Lin Zhao is honored as one of modern China's most revered symbols of conscience and courage — and, for the church, a luminous example of a Christian faith that held fast to Christ through chains, blood, and death itself.

In Their Words

“I am a Christian; my soul belongs to God. Even if I am ground to dust, I will not bow to falsehood — for the truth has set me free.”— Lin Zhao