[1] Lin enrolled in the St Vincent Seminary in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ningbo in 1931.
Lin returned to the Diocese of Ningbo, where he worked as the principal of a diocesan Catholic school until 1955.
Bishop Andre-Jean-Francois Defebvre of Ningbo named Lin one of the diocese's administrators during the 1950s.
[1] He was arrested by the Communist Chinese government in 1955 and sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor for "counter-revolutionary crimes.
[1] James Lin Xili was secretly ordained as the first Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wenzhou on October 4, 1992.