Free Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan Page B

university. People were exhausted, drained emotionally, and ready for a break from the political drama. Zhang went back to work on his thesis after confessing, hopeful he would be allowed to graduate. Lin Zhao, however, suspected the party was not yet finished with them.
    One Saturday night in late December, Zhang happened to run into her at a bookstore off campus. Her face was wrapped in a white scarf, and their eyes met across a table of paperbacks and magazines. It was dangerous for two Rightists to be seen talking to each other, and it had been months since he had seen her. Without saying a word, she left the store, and Zhang followed her into the cold. They ducked down a dark alley lit only by the stars, and walked until they reached an open field where they could be sure they were alone. “The situation is getting worse. We should prepare to be arrested,” Lin Zhao said. “Remember my family’s address. No matter how long we suffer, we can’t lose touch.” They traded addresses, but wrote nothing down and memorized them instead. A scrap of paper with an address was just the kind of thing the party could use as evidence of a Rightist conspiracy.
    The police came for Zhang just four days later, on Christmas morning. He was labeled an “ultra-Rightist” and sentenced to eight years of reeducation through labor at a prison farm south of Beijing, the beginning of a twenty-two-year ordeal. Lin Zhao was sentenced to three years of labor “under observation.” Nearly 1,500 others at Beida were punished as well, almost a fifth of the eight thousand students and teachers at the university. Some were allowed to remain at the school, but many lost their jobs, were expelled or worse. Shen Zeyi, who wrote the poster with Zhang, was sent to a labor camp in northern Shaanxi Province. A math lecturer who helped translate the Khrushchev speech was sentenced to life in prison. The founders of the Hundred Flowers Society all received long sentences, too.
    Across the country, more than half a million people were shipped off to labor camps or exiled to toil in the countryside. In many places, party bosses ordered that at least 5 percent of people in each work unit be unveiled as Rightists, and as a result even people who didn’t criticize the party were punished so officials could meet their quotas. Mao justified the crackdown by accusing two of his ministers, leaders of one of the small coalition parties, of organizing a Rightist plot to overthrow the socialist system. He was contradicting himself, of course, accusing people of crimes when they had only done what he asked. But now the party said it was because the Hundred Flowers policy had been designed all along to “lure the snake out of its hole.”
    Eight years later, in 1966, Zhang completed his sentence but the labor camp ordered him to undergo “continuing reform.” The only change was that he could go home once a year. Zhang had another trip in mind. He had not forgotten Lin Zhao’s family’s address, and he was determined to see Lin Zhao again. She was already in prison by then, but her mother persuaded the authorities to let him visit her by telling them he was her fiancé. Lin Zhao was still refusing to confess to any crime, and the prison wanted him to persuade her to “reform her thinking.” Zhang had the same goal; he was worried about her health and thought she should give in, so she could be released sooner.
    He saw her in May 1966, two years before her execution. He had sneaked away to Shanghai during one of his trips home, and now he was waiting in the visiting room at the Tilanqiao Prison. Two dozen armed guards and other prison officials entered the room first, then Lin Zhao finally shuffled in with the help of a woman in a medical coat. Lin Zhao’s face was pale and gaunt, her clothes worn and ragged, and much of her hair had turned gray. Tied around her forehead was a white cloth on which she had scrawled a large character in fresh blood: Injustice .