Review | The story of a martyr in Mao’s China: executed and her family billed for the bullet

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China
by Lian Xi
Basic Books

In The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, published in 1957, Milovan Djilas pointed out the central paradox of communist ideology: once a party had consoli­dated its power base, it would display the same exploitative characteristics as the capitalist class system it claimed to be dismantling. The Yugoslav communist politician, political theorist and author added that it was the foot soldiers who tended to suffer the most. “Revolutionaries who accept the ideas and slogans of the revolution literally,” he wrote, “are usually liquidated.”

If Djilas’ book had been published earlier, it may have changed the life of Lin Zhao, a young political activist born Peng Lingzhao who met a tragic end 50 years ago on April 29, during the Cultural Revolution. The enthusiastic young revolutionary joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1948 and spent a decade as a loyal member before being arrested on suspicion of being a rightist, in January 1958.

Djilas’ critique of communist ideology was published the same year that the far-left went on a murderous rampage across China in the name of Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign. As historian Lian Xi recalls in his new book Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China, the campaign targeted so-called “leading rightists” across the then new communist state. It resulted in hundreds of thousands of intellectuals being killed, jailed or persecuted.

The purge of rightists was part of a cleansing operation across China during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long nightmare that saw about 1.5 million people die in an orgy of ideological violence.