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Li Shenzhi (August 15, 1923 - April 22, 2003) was a sociologist, media professional, and expert on international issues. From 1941 to 1945, Li studied at the Economics Department of Yenching University in Beijing, the Economics Department of St. John's University, and Yenching University in Chengdu, during which time he participated in a CCP secret organization. After graduation, he worked as a middle school teacher and magazine editor. In 1946, Li joined the *Xinhua Daily*, and later became an editor of the International Department of Xinhua News Agency. He joined CCP in November 1948, and became the head of the editorial team and deputy director of the International Department of Xinhua News Agency in 1949. From 1954 to 1957, he was the diplomatic secretary of then foreign minister Zhou Enlai. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, Li was persecuted for advocating press freedom and democracy. After being rehabilitated, Li returned to Beijing in 1973, where he worked for the International Issues Writing Group set up by CCP’s Central Committee. He accompanied then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on his trip to the U.S. as an advisor in 1979, and later accompanied then premier Zhao Ziyang on his trip to the U.S. as an assistant in 1984. He was in charge of the establishment of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1980, served as director of the Institute from 1982 to 1988, and vice-president of the Academy from 1985 onwards. After the 1989 democracy movement, Li was disciplined for supporting the students, and he then resigned from his position. Li later dedicated himself to promoting liberalism, democracy and rule of law in China. On April 22, 2003, Li died in Beijing due to illness.

Li Xun (1948- ), a scholar of the Cultural Revolution, graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of the Shanghai Adult After-Hours University.  From 1979 to 1992, Li worked at the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions. Li has long studied the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai. In 1996, she co-authored and published The Big Downfall: the Rise and Fall of the Shanghai Rebel Workers through the China Times  Publishing Company in Taiwan. She was invited by Elizabeth J. Perry, an American scholar on China, to be a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-authored with Perry an English book, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution, in 1997. After ten years in the United States, Li returned to China to continued her research on the Cultural Revolution, collecting, reading, and analyzing a large amount of historical materials, conducting in-depth interviews with more than 120 people, which led to the publication of [The Age of Revolutionary Revolt: Historical Manuscripts of the Cultural Revolution Movement in Shanghai](https://shop.oupchina.com.hk/products/%E9%9D%A9%E5%91%BD%E9%80%A0%E5%8F%8D%E5%B9%B4%E4%BB%A3-%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E6%96%87%E9%9D%A9%E9%81%8B%E5%8B%95%E5%8F%B2%E7%A8%BF-%E5%85%A9%E5%8D%B7%E6%9C%AC), through Oxford Press in 2015. The book has been widely praised by the academic community.

Li Zhisui (December 30, 1919 - February 13, 1995) was a physician and Mao Zedong's personal doctor. Li was born into a family of doctors; his great-grandfather was an imperial physician during the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, and his father was a Kuomintang official. Li received his M.D. in 1945 and worked as a military doctor for the Kuomintang and as a ship's doctor in Australia before serving as a doctor in 1951 at the medical clinic of the Central Security Bureau in Zhongnanhai, the organization responsible for overseeing protection for and conducting surveillance on senior CCP and PLA leaders. According to his own account, Li served as Mao's personal physician from 1954-1976. He was the first director of the People's Liberation Army No. 305 Hospital from 1970-1979. In 1980, Li became vice president of the Chinese Medical Association and the Chinese Geriatrics Society, as well as editor-in-chief of the Chinese Medical Journal and the Chinese editions of The American Journal of Medicine. In 1988, Li moved to the United States. In 1994, he published a memoir entitled The Private Life of Chairman Mao, based on his recollection of journals he had kept and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. On February 13, 1995, Li died of a heart attack at his home in a suburb of Chicago.

Liao Yiwu (August 4, 1958-), born in Yanting County, Sichuan Province, is a writer and poet now based in Berlin. During the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China, wrote a long poem entitled “The Massacre” on the day before the June 4 massacre, and later planned with his friends to make a film to commemorate the victims of June Fourth. He was prosecuted for counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement crimes and sentenced to four years in prison. After his release from prison, Liao continued to write, publishing several books such as <i>The Corpse Walker</i> and <i>Earthquake Insane Asylum</i>. His books have been banned in mainland China, and he himself has been harassed by the authorities, having his home raided, he himself arrested and restricted from leaving the country. In 2011, Liao Yiwu fled China and went into exile in Germany, and the next year won the prestigious <a href="https://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/en/the-prizewinners/2010-2019/liao-yiwu">German Book Trade Peace Prize</a>. He has published a number of books, some of which he was not able to publish in China and some he wrote after leaving China, including <i>For a Song and a Hundred Songs</i> (recounting his experiences in prison), <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/god-is-red-liao-yiwu?variant=32216087789602"><i>God is Red</i></a> (persecution of Christians in China), and recently <i>Wuhan</i> (a creative nonfiction about the COVID-19 epidemic).

Lin Zhao (the pen name of Peng Lingzhao) was a writer and poet. Born on January 23, 1932 Lin grew up in an intellectual family in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. In 1947, she enrolled in the Suzhou Jinghai Women's Normal School, a Methodist girls school and was baptized. She secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1948, and began writing critiques of the Kuomintang-led government under the pen name Lin Zhao. She lost her CCP membership in less than a year because of her disobedience to the Party. After graduating in 1949, she ignored her parents' advice to go to university and, at the risk of breaking with her family, enrolled in the Party-run Sunan Journalism College, and then participated in the Land Reform Movement after graduating in May 1950. She worked hard to rejoin the Party, but was not accepted. In 1952, she was assigned to work for Changzhou People News, and then for the Changzhou Federation of Literary and Art. In 1954, Lin enrolled in the journalism program at the Chinese Literature Department of Peking University, where she joined the Peking University Poetry Society and later became an editor of the campus publication Red Chamber. It was there that she broke with Communism and gradually rediscovered her Christian faith. In 1957, Lin was labeled a Rightist for speaking up for other students. One of her poems from that era read: <i>The power of truth never lies in the arrogant air of the guardians of truth.</i> Lin later wrote a 240-line poem called “Seagull” and circulated it among friends. The poem tells the story of a ship carrying chained prisoners. Their crime: they seek freedom. <i>Freedom, I cry out inside me, freedom! The thought of you has filled my heart with yearning, like a choking man gasping for air, like one dying of thirst lurching toward a spring.</i> It was read by the group of students in Tianshui, Gansu Province, who were founding the magazine <i>Spark</i> (<a href="http://108.160.154.72/s/china-unofficial/item/1759#lg=1&slide=0">see separate entry</a>). Thrilled by her overtly political message, one of their leaders, Zhang Chunyuan (<a href="http://108.160.154.72/s/china-unofficial/item/106"separate entry</a>), traveled to meet her. She agreed to allow the students to print “Seagull” and a new poem, “A Day in the Life of Prometheus,” in their magazine. The magazine was shut down in 1960 and people affiliated with it were detained, including Lin. She was released on medical parole in early 1962 due to tuberculosis, but was arrested and imprisoned again in December of the same year for her continuous advocacy for democratic reforms. In May 1965, she was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for leading the Chinese Free Youth Militant League, which the party called a counter-revolutionary movement. During her imprisonment, Lin continued to write, detailing her grievances with the government and her demands for political reform. When she was denied a pen and paper, she sometimes used a sharpened straw or chopstick to prick her finger and write in blood. Like many political prisoners, Lin was regularly tortured. The most common form was handcuffing, with the arms pulled behind the back and the handcuffs tightly fastened, leaving the inmate unable to eat, dress, or use the toilet without help. Inmates like Lin who were in solitary confinement often had to lick their food off the floor and soil their trousers. Some cuffs were so tight that the shoulders would be damaged, and the flesh of the wrists would rot, leaving permanent marks. At times, prisoners would beat Lin, or guards would pull out her hair. For the final six years of her life, Lin didn’t leave prison. But when the cuffs were taken off she kept writing, using ink and paper that her relatives sent her. When she was denied writing implements or when the issue was urgent, she wrote in her own blood. She would sharpen the end of a toothbrush by scraping it on the floor and then prick her finger, collecting the blood in a spoon and then writing with a sliver of bamboo or reed. Sometimes she wrote on scraps of paper, other times on her clothing. Lin’s writing was direct, angry, and shorn of nuance. Most famously, she wrote a 137-page letter to the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily. She also used her blood to paint an altar on her prison wall in honor of her father, who had committed suicide after his arrest in 1960. She later used her blood to add images of an incense burner and flowers, and from 9:30 am to noon each Sunday she held what she called “grand church worship,” singing the hymns and saying the prayers that she had learned in the Methodist girls’ school. Lin's focus came from her conviction that her writings would last. In 1967 she described a recent 30,000-character batch of blood letters that she had sent to her mother in this self-confident way: “In the future, they will make up yet another volume of either my complete published works or a posthumous collection of my papers.” None of her letters reached her mother, let alone People’s Daily. But prison guards didn’t destroy valuable evidence against this enemy of the state. Instead, they methodically filed her writings in her ever-expanding file. In 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Lin was listed as a counter-revolutionary who should be executed. She was made to wear a “Monkey King cap”—named after the mythical Chinese hero who was so uncontrollable that he had to wear a band around his head that could be contracted to bring him to heel. In her case, it was a rubber hood with a slit cut for the eyes and a hole for her nose. The hood was removed only at mealtime. On April 29, 1968, she got an updated death sentence and was executed on the same day. According to subsequent reports, her parents were asked to pay the cost of the bullet used to shoot her. In 1979, Peking University formally lifted the charge against Lin of being a Rightist. Later, the Xinhua news agency held a memorial service for her because she had once worked as a journalist. She was formally rehabilitated in 1980. The judge who reviewed Lin’s file decided to give much of her writing to her family in 1982. He didn’t include official court documents, but he released sheets of manuscripts, numbered and bound with green thread, and four notebooks filled with her diaries, as well as ink copies of her blood letters home, which Lin had copied so they would be preserved for posterity. The judge based his decision on aesthetics. He said he was impressed by Lin’s poetry and felt that her family deserved to have it. In the early 2000s, Lin’s friends edited her writings. They made photos of the blood letters and compiled PDFs that were posted online and went viral. One of the first dissidents to discover them was Ding Zilin, the mother of a Tiananmen massacre victim. A fellow alumna of the onetime Methodist school in Suzhou, Ding found Lin’s letters to be revelatory, describing the same system that had also killed her son. She later wrote that they were “a kind of redemption for my soul.” In the 1980s, admirers and family members found Lin’s ashes and buried them at Lingyan Hill outside her hometown, the eastern city of Suzhou. Her grave has become one of the most visited pilgrimage sites for China’s human rights activists. Every year on the anniversary of her death, April 29, the area is locked down; the rest of the time it is guarded by closed-circuit television. Inspired by her story, the documentary filmmaker Hu Jie (<a href="http://108.160.154.72/s/china-unofficial/item/58">see separate entry</a>) made a 2004 film, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, which tells her tale through interviews with those who knew her. Through Hu Jie, the Chinese Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo came to know of her, praising her, as did the prominent rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who called her “a martyred saint, a prophet and a poet with an ecstatic soul, the Prometheus of a free China.” For people like the well-known writer and critic Cui Weiping, people like Lin showed that the search for a freer, more humane China wasn’t new. It was something that Chinese people had been struggling for since the party took power. For Cui, the effect was electric. Reading Lin’s words half a century after they were written, she declared: “Now we have our genealogy.” Details of Lin Zhao’s life from Ian Johnson, <i>Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future</i> (New York, Oxford University Press, 2023) and <i>Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China</i> (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

Liu Junning (November 1961—) , a native of Shucheng, Anhui Province, is a political scientist. Liu received his Ph.D. in political science from Peking University in 1993, was a researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and a visiting scholar at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In early 2000s, Liu was expelled from Chinese Academy of Social Science for his advocacy for liberalism and constitutional democracy. He later became a researcher at the Institute of Chinese Culture under China's Ministry of Culture. Liu is a liberal scholar, a signatory to Charter 08, and the author of *Republic·Democracy·Constitutionalism: A Study of Liberalism*, *On Conservatism*, and *Democracy: A Chinese Citizen’s Textbook*, among other books.

Liu Wenzhong (1947-) is a native of Shanghai and a writer known for helping his brother critique Mao’s rule. In 1957, Liu's brother, Liu Wenhui, was labeled a Rightist for criticizing his factory manager during the Hundred Flowers Movement. After the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, Liu Wenhui wrote a 10,000-word essay, "Sixteen Articles on Refuting the Cultural Revolution," critiquing the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s power. Liu Wenhui was arrested and executed by firing squad for committing anti-revolutionary crimes. He is believed to be the first regime critic to be publicly executed during the Cultural Revolution. Liu Wenzhong was arrested for helping his brother to transcribe 14 copies of the article, and was held in a detention center for two years and four months. He was later sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for remarks, such as wanting to avenge his brother's death, as well as for participating in a book club in the detention center. After his release, he was sent to a labor farm to work until February 1979, when he was rehabilitated and returned to Shanghai. Liu became a businessman in the1980s. According to journalist Jiang Xue’s article, In June 2003, Liu Wenzhong read <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i> for the first time. When he read the book's opening line, “I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it”, Liu decided to quit business and devote to answering his brother's question: what could socialism look like in other parts of the world? To this end, he traveled to 108 countries, of which more than 40 were countries that practiced or had practiced socialism, including North Korea, Cuba, and countries after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. Through examining the local political systems, he wrote <i>Xin Hai Guo Tu Zhi (The New Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms</i>), borrowing the name of a 19th-century Chinese gazetteer, as well as a travelogue <i>Reflect, China</i>. Liu also wrote The First Man Against the Cultural Revolution and His Co-Conspirators, specifically about his brother Liu Wenhui.

Liu Xiaobo (December 28, 1955 - July 13, 2017) was a writer, literary critic, human rights activist, and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Liu was a native of Changchun, Jilin Province. After graduating from high school in 1974, Liu went to work as a farmer in a rural commune in Nong'an County, Jilin Province as a send-down youth, and was recruited as a plasterer by the Changchun Construction Company in 1976. In 1977, Liu was admitted to the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Jilin University, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1982. He was then enrolled in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D., and was appointed as a lecturer in the department. Liu began publishing essays on literature, aesthetics, and politics when he was studying for his master's degree, and published several books, including *The Critique of Choice: Dialogue with Li Zehou*, *Contemporary Politics and Intellectuals of China*, and *The Future of Free China Exists in Civil Society*. During the 1989 democracy movement, Liu was involved in publicizing, writing, speaking, fundraising for the protests, and gained the trust of the students by participating in the hunger strike, which allowed him to negotiate with the army on June 4 and convinced the students to evacuate. Liu was arrested and accused by the official media of being one of the "black hands" behind the movement, and was fired from his job that same year; in January 1991 Liu was convicted of counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement but was exempted from criminal punishment for persuading students to evacuate the Tiananmen Square. Since then Liu worked as a freelance writer in Beijing and engaged in human rights activities, for which he was subjected to punishments such as re-education through labor. In December 2008, Liu participated in the drafting and publicizing of Charter 08. He was convicted of inciting subversion of state power the following year and sentenced to 11 years in prison. In 2010, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison, making him the first Chinese citizen to receive the prize. In June 2017, Liu was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with advanced liver cancer; on July 13, the hospital announced that Liu's condition had deteriorated and he had passed away on the same day.

Liu Yuanchen (1987-) is a director and screenwriter. A native of Wuhan, Hubei Province, Liu graduated from the School of Journalism and Communication of Wuhan University in 2009, and then went to the United States to study journalism documentary at NYU's School of Journalism, where he received his master's degree in 2011. He then co-founded a film production company with two classmates in New York, where he worked as a producer and director of photography. His graduation project at NYU, the movie <i>To the Light</i>, tells the story of three coal miners and their families in eastern Sichuan.

Liushahe (which means “the river of shifting sands” and is the penname Yu Xuntan), November 11, 1931 - November 23, 2019, was a poet, writer, and scholar. Liushahe was born into a landowning family; his father was a local cadre in the Nationalist government and was killed during the Land Reform Movement. Since high school, Liushahe aspired to become a writer and published poems and essays in local newspapers. In 1949, he was admitted to the Department of Agricultural Chemistry of Sichuan University, and left the university a few months later to work as an editor for the CCP-led Western Sichuan Peasant Daily newspaper, In 1952, Liushahe became a professional writer at the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literature and Art Circles.  In 1957, in response to Mao Zedong's Hundred Flowers Campaign, Liushahe co-founded the monthly poetry magazine *Stars*, and published a poem series entitled "*Grass and Trees*" that were regarded as anti-party and anti-socialist, and were criticized by Mao. Liushahe was then labeled a Rightist, dismissed from his position, and subjected to supervised labor in his workplace. Many others associated with *Stars* and “*Grass and Trees*” also suffered persecution. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Liushahe was exiled to work in a sawmill in his hometown of Jintang County, during which his home was raided 12 times. After being rehabilitated, Liushahe went back to work at the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literature and Art Circles as an editor of *Stars*. He also resumed writing and published a large number of works. On November 23, 2019, Liushahe died of throat cancer.