Peking University journalism student, poet and dissident
Lin Zhao during her student years at Peking University, prior to her arrest and imprisonment in Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison.
eprived of paper and ink, she used hairpins and her own blood to write two hundred thousand words.1
In May 1957 she stood on a dining hall table at Peking University to defend a classmate against political denunciation.
She was branded an Ultra-Rightist, expelled from the university, and assigned to supervised labor.
In 1960 she co-founded the underground dissident journal Spark in Lanzhou to expose Great Famine starvation.
Arrested in October 1960, she was transferred to Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison, where she spent eight years in solitary confinement.
When guards took away her pens, she pricked her fingers and wrote petitions and poetry in blood on bedsheets.
On 29 April 1968 she was executed by firing squad at Shanghai Longhua Airport at the age of thirty-five.
Two days later, police officers knocked on her mother's door to demand five cents for the cost of the bullet.
“You have power, armies, and guns. I have only my blood, my paper, and my truth. But your power will perish with your flesh, while my blood will testify forever.”
The bullet cost five cents. But the truth written in her blood has proven to be priceless.