The untold story of Lin Zhao, a martyr in Mao’s China, with Xi Lian [MIPodcast #96]

One of the most outspoken critics of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution was a young poet and journalist named Lin Zhao. She was a Christian convert, then a member of the Communist Party, then an enemy of the state who paid for her opposition with her life. She was executed by firing squad. And her story would have vanished—along with the lives of some two million other Chinese who were killed during the cultural revolution—but she left a record. She wrote her witness in her own blood. In this episode you’ll encounter one of Christianity’s most remarkable martyrs of the twentieth century.

Professor Xi Lian joins us to discuss his latest book, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China.

About the Guest

XI LIAN, Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School, is the author of Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China (2018). His other books include The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) and Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (Yale University Press, 2010). Dr. Lian’s other research projects include the flourishing of Christianity among minority peoples on the margins of the Chinese state and the emergence of Protestant elites and their prominent, if also precarious, role in the search for civil society in today’s China.

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