This slender volume tells the story of Our Lady of Consolation in China (1883-1948) and Our Lady of Joy, founded by Our Lady of Consolation in 1928 and existing to this present day on Lantao, Hong Kong. The main focus of this text was to portray the suffering and martyrdom of many of their monks in 1947, 1948 and 1951 under the persecution of the Chinese Communists.Thirty-three monks from Our Lady of Consolation were martyred in 1948 and two monks from Our Lady of Joy in 1951.This is the story of the Trappist monks of Communist China, as told from the grave.Here is an excerpt:Father Chrysostomus Chang plumbed the depths of his human will for a supernatural strength. With only a few minutes remaining of his life in the material world, he lifted his thoughts to the spiritual. Through screams from the mob, he addressed his confreres at his side one last time, to prepare them not for death, but for life, everlasting life."We're going to die for God. Let us lift our hearts one more time, in offering our total beings," he said.Helpless, the six Trappist monks stood handcuffed and chained on a makeshift platform, targets of a frenzied hatred that surged toward them. The blood-encrusted, lice-infested men, wearing rags caked in their own filth, had nowhere to run, no one to help them. After six months of mind-bending interrogations and body-rending torture, it was over. It was all over.By that spring of 1948, 33 of the abbey's monks had been martyred during the Death March. Then the Chinese Communists went after Our Lady of Joy. By 1951, two more had died for the faith, for the Roman Catholic Church.

This powerful book presents documents spanning the war between the Communists and Chinese Nationalists in the mid-1940s up to 1983, shortly before the "modernization" promoted after Mao's death. These are memoirs of those who have experienced in their own flesh how far violence of a power blinded by ideology can go, a power that, after winning its battle against armed forces, decided to exterminate its "enemies without guns", as Mao called intellectuals, believers, and political opponents.

With tens of millions killed and thousands of Catholics incarcerated because of rigged trials, China under Mao’s dictatorship was the Asian version of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. It’s one of the darkest moments in Church history – one that continues to be played out to this day through a historic abuse of power and a seemingly endless hunt for believers in Jesus Christ and His Church. Now the stories of these brave Catholic “counter-revolutionaries” are brought to you for the first time. These four autobiographical testimonies will leave you speechless and inspired. You’ll witness the endless strength and hope these brave men displayed despite years of shocking psychological and physical abuse. Nothing short of miraculous, you’ll hear their miraculous stories in the face of hunger, torture, interrogation, indoctrination, and the humiliation of the “people’s trials.” There emerged from these souls the crystalline faith of those brave enough to accept their own Calvary for fidelity to Christ without ever becoming slaves of hatred.

"The following pages do not tell in full the story of the faithful witnesses of China. That would require volumes. Many narratives have been rejected, not because they were not of intense interest, but because one book would not contain them all. Those selected are representative and typical. The experiences of Christians belonging to ten different denominations are recorded, but the space given to the annals of different missions by no means indicates their relative importance. Some societies have already published their own histories of the tragedy, or are preparing for such publications, and so have furnished little material for this book. Other societies have not been directly solicited for narratives of the experiences of their members, but extracts have been taken from their periodicals. Where the extract is of great length or importance, permission has been obtained for its use; in other cases, acknowledgment accompanies the quotation. In a few instances ignorance of the source or authorship of an account given has made acknowledgment impossible; but the author desires here to express her thanks for such involuntary contributions. A large part of the book is filled with narratives to which the author listened during the siege of Peking and the ensuing year of residence in that city."--From the introduction.

Upon the book?s original publication in Peking in 1978, the publisher said: "This novel is written by two ex-inmates of the U.S.-Chiang Kai-shek secret service concentration camps in Chung-king, Szechuan Province, China. The year is 1949. "Focusing mainly on the actual life-and-death struggles inside the camps on the eve of the city?s liberation, the story extol?s the revolutionary martyrs whose unfailing optimism, fortitude and resourcefulness enable them to overcome the ordeals of torture, hunger and truth drugs. They finally establish contact with the Party Underground outside the prison, strengthening the overall revolutionary struggle. "On the basis of the authors? intimate knowledge of the events in the countryside, factories, schools, U.S.-Chiang spy organizations and concentration camps as China?s War of Liberation draws to a victorious close, the characters are superbly delineated and the story is magnificently built scene after scene into an intricately woven plot. The reader will be gripped, moved and inspired after following these heroic people through the pages of this novel as they fight for a better world."

The staggering story of the most important Chinese political dissident of the Mao era, a devout Christian who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed by the regime Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith -- and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets. Miraculously, Lin Zhao's prison writings survived, though they have only recently come to light. Drawing on these works and others from the years before her arrest, as well as interviews with her friends, her classmates, and other former political prisoners, Lian Xi paints an indelible portrait of courage and faith in the face of unrelenting evil.

The first book-length study of China's Catholic martyr saints, this work recounts the cultural, religious, and economic conflicts that unfolded during China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911). China's Saints considers closely the personal and public lives of both missionaries and Chinese converts lived during China's late-imperial era.