• Complain

Xi - Blood Letters

Here you can read online Xi - Blood Letters full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2018, publisher: Basic Books, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Blood Letters
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Basic Books
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2018
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Blood Letters: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Blood Letters" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The staggering story of the most influential Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regime

Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a Chinese poet and journalist arrested by the regime in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Alone among the victims of Maos dictatorship, she maintained a stubborn and open opposition during the years she was imprisoned. She rooted her dissent in her Christian faithand expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.

Miraculously, Lin Zhaos prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with friends, family, and classmates, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the...

Xi: author's other books


Who wrote Blood Letters? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Blood Letters — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Blood Letters" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Copyright 2018 by Lian Xi Hachette Book Group supports the right to free - photo 1

Copyright 2018 by Lian Xi

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Basic Books

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

www.basicbooks.com

First Edition: March 2018

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931841.

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4423-6 (hardcover); 978-1-5416-4422-9 (ebook)

E3-20180205-JV-NF

Blood Letters tells the story of Lin Zhaos martyrdom with the elegance her life demands. Those who tortured her could not prevent the beauty of her life and poetry from testifying to her faith in God. We are in Lian Xis debt for making Lin Zhaos life and witness available to Christians in the West like myself because we can barely imagine from where a life like that of Lin Zhao comes. Lian Xis book will surely become a classic not only as we come to understand the struggle of Christians in China but also for how the story he tells helps us understand China.

STANLEY HAUERWAS , Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University

Blood Letters is a genuinely exciting book. Lian Xi sheds a whole new light on an extraordinarily important Christian figure (and martyr) who has hitherto been utterly unknown outside a narrow band of specialists. Beyond writing an enthralling account of the story of this heroic woman, the author provides a rich historical and international context, and he thoroughly justifies the daring analogy he draws between Lin Zhao and legendary figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A masterpiece.

PHILIP JENKINS , author of Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World

The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 19071932

Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China

T O THOSE WHO LABORED TO PRESERVE L IN Z HAOS LEGACY AND TO KEEP HER SPIRIT ALIVE

O N M AY 31, 1965, THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD L IN Z HAOPOET, JOURNALIST , dissidentwas tried in the Jingan District Peoples Court in Shanghai. She was charged as the lead member of a counterrevolutionary clique that had published A Spark of Fire, an underground journal that decried Communist misrule and Maos Great Leap Forward, which caused an unprecedented famine in 19591961 and claimed at least thirty-six million lives nationwide.

Lin Zhao had also contributed a long poem entitled A Day in Prometheuss Passion to the journal. It mocked Mao as a villainous Zeus trying, and failing, to force Prometheus to put out the fire of freedom taken from heaven. According to the authorities, the poem viciously attacked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the socialist system and inspired fellow counterrevolutionaries to blatantly call for a peaceful, democratic, and free China. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

This is a shameful ruling! Lin Zhao wrote on the back of the verdict the next day, in her own blood. But I heard it with pride! It is the enemys estimation of my individual act of combat. Deep inside my heart I feel the pride of a combatant! I have done too little. It is far from enough. Yes, I must do more to live up to your

It was an unexpected, jarring note in the symphony of Maos revolution. The Communist movement, which began in the 1920s and which Mao had led since the 1930s, had triumphed with the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949. The revolution had turned communism into a sacred creed and a mass religion in China, complete with its Marxist and Maoist scriptures, priests (the cadres), and revolutionary liturgy.

The cult of Mao dated to the 1940s but blossomed with the publication of Quotations from Chairman Maoknown in the West as The Little Red Bookin 1964. Over one billion copies were printed over the next decade. During the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, collective rituals of slogan chanting and of waving The Little Red Book were performed daily in front of the portrait of the great leader. Meanwhile, some 4.8 billion Mao badges were made. The largest was as big as a soccer ball.

Sacrilege was hard to imagine and rare. Even those condemned counterrevolutionaries sent to execution grounds had often chanted Long live Chairman Mao as shots were fired, in a last-ditch effort to escape the wrath of the revolution and to attest their loyalty to it.

At a time when critics of the party had been silenced throughout China, Lin Zhao chose to oppose it openly from her prison cell. From the day of my arrest I have declared in front of those Communists my identity as a resister, she wrote in a blood letter to her mother from prison. I have been open in my basic stand as a freedom fighter against communism and against tyranny.

Lin Zhaos dissent seemed as futile as it was suicidal. What sustained it was her intense religious faith. She had been baptized in her teens at the Laura Haygood Memorial School, a Southern Methodist mission school in her hometown of Suzhou, but drifted away from the church when she joined the Communist revolution in 1949 to help emancipate the masses and create a new, just society, as she Thereafter she gradually returned to a fervent Christian faith.

As a Christian, she believed that her struggle was both political and spiritual. In a postsentencing letter from prison to the editors of Peoples Dailythe partys mouthpieceshe explained that, in opposing communism, she was following the line of a servant of God, the political line of Christ. My life belongs to God, she claimed. God willing, she would be able to live. But if God wants me to become a willing martyr, I will only be grateful from the bottom of my heart for the honor He bestows on me!

Lin Zhaos defiance of the regime was unparalleled in Maos China. The tens of millions who perished as the direct result of the CCP rule died as victims, their voices unheard. No significant, secular opposition to the ideology of communism was recorded in China during Maos reign. Lin Zhao endured as a resister because of her democratic ideals and because her Christian faith enabled her to preserve her moral autonomy as well as political judgment, which the Communist state had denied its citizens. Her faith provided a counterweight to the religion of Maoism and sustained her in her dissent.

T HE TITLE OF this book comes from Lin Zhaos impassioned means of expressing that dissent. During her imprisonment, an official document read, Lin Zhao poked her flesh countless times and used her filthy blood to write hundreds of thousands of words of extremely reactionary, extremely malicious letters, notes, and diaries, madly attacking, abusing, and slandering our party and its leader. Her letters were addressed variously to the party propaganda apparatus, the United Nations, the prison authorities, and her mother. She called them her freedom writings.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Blood Letters»

Look at similar books to Blood Letters. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Blood Letters»

Discussion, reviews of the book Blood Letters and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.