By age 16, she had joined an underground Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cell and was writing articles criticizing the corruption of the Nationalist government under the pen name Lin Zhao.
During her tenure, she was assigned to work in a group to administer land reform in the countryside, where she witnessed the torture and violent deaths of landlords as justified by the principle of class struggle.
Lin later enrolled in the Chinese literature department at Peking University where she was an editor of the school paper Honglou (The Red Building) which met in her dorm room.
When Zhang Yuanxun was forced to endure a debate that was turning into a struggle session, Lin stood on top of a table and dressed down the mob saying "What kind of meeting are we having tonight?
[3] In response to her friendship with members of The Square and defense of civil debate, Lin Zhao was branded a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign which started in July 1957.
There she met a fellow rightist Gan Cui, who in 1959 asked permission (as was required at the time) to marry Lin Zhao and be assigned to a job near with her after his graduation.
[4] In late 1959, while on medical parole in Shanghai, Lin met Zhang Chunyuan, a history student and People's Liberation Army veteran.
A fellow Peking University student, Lui Faqing, who had been accused of being Rightist and sent to Gansu, was on the brink of death there due to starvation.
While waiting on the legal system to come for her, Lin Zhao approached Hu Ziheng, her former teacher at the South Jiangsu Journalism Vocational School, who was working for Liberation Daily.
She met Huang Zheng, (recently returned from a labor camp) and convinced him to help her draft a political platform for the "Battle League of Free Youths of China".
Which was in her mind, a future coalition of young, intellectual rightists, democracy activists, united in a non-violent movement for a renaissance of human liberation.
She alleges that she faced sexual harassment, and when she submitted a formal report to the prison authorities this resulted in harsher treatment, long periods of time spent in handcuffs.
She wrote "Mourning inside a Jail Cell" in response and pledged to visit his tomb one day to pay her respects, but contented herself for the moment in believing that he was able to see "inside a certain prison in Red China, a young soldier of freedom, with wounds from shackles in her arms, was propping up her sick body, and using a straw stem as her pen and the crudest ink and paper, silently writing down her mourning and her grief for you".
On 12 April 1964, Lin Zhao wrote a poem "Family Sacrifice" in memory of Xu Jinyuan, her uncle, The Party Secretary of the Communist Youth League in Suzhou who had been executed by the Nationalists in the Shanghai massacre.
On 4 November 1964 Lin Zhao was indicted as the principle criminal of the Battle League of Free Youth of China Counterrevolutionary Clique, as well as plotting to publicize A Spark of Fire with the Lanzhou University Rightists, participation in other counterrevolutionary activities both on parole and in prison, and attempting to overthrow "the people's democratic dictatorship" amongst other crimes.. She again attempted suicide by cutting her left wrist.
However, when on 5 December, when she was being tried for "Resorting to loud shouting in an effort to instigate the inmates into an insurrection" She responded that "The indictment neglected to list the important fact that, while in prison, I established an ordnance bureau and build three munitions factories and two arsenals".
Lin presented him with a small sailboat made from candy wrappers, she asked Zhang to look after her family, and to "tell people in the future about this suffering".
They are a melting pot infused with Christian sentiments, allusions to classical Chinese writings, calls for the end of the Bandits (The Communist Party) and exaltations of freedom.
An example of her melting pot of thinking is the topic of suicide, her ideals of the "Chinese code of honor" that is typified by a Confucian scholar who dies before he accepts dishonor clashes with her Christianity.
Lin Zhao contracted these suicides with the Buddhist monks whose temples were forced to draw up 'patriotic covenants' refusing to chant sutras to expiate the sins of counterrevolutionaries who had died.
Lin Zhao seems to have known and exploited the tools of the authoritarianism as a means of preserving her message, in 1962 for example, she insisted on handing in her writings before being released on medical parole.
When we became more mature, felt alarmed at the absurdity and cruelty of reality, and began demanding our democratic rights, we came to suffer unprecedented persecution, abuse, and repression.
Our youth, love, friendship, studies, careers, ambitions, ideals, happiness, freedom ... all that we live for, all that a human being has, were almost completely destroyed and buried by the foul, evil, and hypocritical rule of this totalitarian system.
This is my curse and my revenged" [1] In "Hungry Slaves" Lin Zhao writes "When the tide of blood rises on a vengeful earth On which branches will the flocks of ravens perch?"
We do not know the details of her martyrdom—only that on May 1, 1968, a few representatives from “concerned departments” visited her elderly mother, told her that Lin Zhao had been executed on April 29, and that because “the counterrevolutionary” had consumed a bullet, her family had to pay five cents.
[11] In March 1982 Lin Zhao's sister, Peng Lingfan, was given a few notebooks of her prison writings, a small fraction of the total amount.
Some time after her death, a police official agreed to risk his own life in order to smuggle many of Lin's writings to her friends and family.
When her son was killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre both Ding and Lin had attended Laura Haygood Memorial Schools for Girls in Suzhou.
In 2015 Shao Jiang published the book, Citizen Publican In China before the internet, which prominently features Lin Zhao, and the Lanzhou University Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Clique.
ChinaAid presents the "Lin Zhao Freedom Award" annually in her honor,[21] for non-violent dissidents who have suffered at the hands of the Chinese government.