Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and major political figure during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She used the stage name Lan Ping (藍蘋) during her acting career, and was known by many other names. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution and for forming the radical political alliance known as the "Gang of Four".
Richard Wurmbrand, also known as Nicolai Ionescu was a Romanian Evangelical Lutheran priest, and professor of Jewish descent. In 1948, having become a Christian ten years before, he publicly said Communism and Christianity were incompatible. Wurmbrand preached at bomb shelters and rescued Jews during World War II. As a result, he experienced imprisonment and torture by the then-Communist regime of Romania, which maintained a policy of state atheism.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
A show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.
Liu Zhenying, known as Brother Yun, born 1958, is an exiled Chinese Christian house church leader, evangelist, and proponent of the Back To Jerusalem movement. Brother Yun was involved in the Christian house church networks in China during the 1980s and 90s. Accounts about his life and ministry are to be found in his autobiography, The Heavenly Man.
Red Guards were a mass student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 through 1967, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted. According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows:
Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization.... So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red...and then the whole universe.
Nien Cheng or Zheng Nian is the pen name of Yao Nien-Yuan. She was a Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai.
Andrew Daulton Lee is a former drug dealer who was convicted of espionage for his involvement in the Cold War spying activities of his childhood friend, Christopher Boyce.
Xie Bingying, was originally born as Xie Minggang, and her courtesy name is Fengbao. She was a Chinese soldier and writer, most well-known for her autobiographies of her life as a soldier in the Nationalist Army.
Mao Hengfeng is a women's rights and human rights activist in the People's Republic of China. She refused to abort her third child after already having twins and was detained in an ankang and then dismissed from her job. A frequent petitioner, Mao served a year and a half of re-education through labor from 2004 to 2005 and two and half years in prison for "intentional destruction of property" in from 2006 to 2008. She was released from Shanghai Women's Prison on 29 November 2008. Since then she has served another year in RTL after protesting in support of Liu Xiaobo. She was briefly released, in February 2011, but under house arrest. She was almost immediately taken again, and placed in Shanghai City Prison Hospital, where she was previously tortured and ill-treated.
Lai Junchen was a Chinese politician and writer. He was a well-known secret police official during the Chinese Tang and Wu Zhou dynasties, whose ability to interrogate and falsely implicate officials of crimes made him a subject of fear and hatred. In 697, he was accused of plotting to falsely accuse Wu Zetian's sons and other family members of treason, and he was executed.
Cheng Yuanzhen (程元振) was a Chinese eunuch, military general, and politician during the Tang Dynasty. He was exceedingly powerful early in the reign of Emperor Daizong and was said to, in his attempts to consolidate his power, have killed or demoted a number of key generals and officials on his own whim, and thus drew the hatred from the other officials and generals. In 763, he was blamed for not warning Emperor Daizong about the Tubo invasion that eventually caused the capital Chang'an to fall to Tubo forces, forcing Emperor Daizong to flee. Emperor Daizong exiled him, and he died in exile.
Lin Zhao, born Peng Lingzhao (彭令昭), was a prominent Chinese dissident who was imprisoned and later executed by the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution for her criticism of Mao Zedong's policies. She is widely considered to be a martyr and exemplar for Chinese and other Christians, like the Chinese church leader and teacher Watchman Nee.
Robert Hillary King, also known as Robert King Wilkerson, is an American known as one of the Angola Three, former prisoners who were held at Louisiana State Penitentiary in solitary confinement for decades after being convicted in 1973 of prison murders.
Sun Weishi was the first female director of modern spoken drama (Huaju) in Chinese history. Sun's father was killed by the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1927, and Sun was eventually adopted by Zhou Enlai, who later became the first premier of the People's Republic of China. While in Yan'an, Sun aroused the enmity of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, beginning a rivalry between the two that lasted throughout Sun's life until her ultimate death at Jiang's hands. During World War II, Sun lived in Moscow, studying theater. Lin Biao was also in Moscow at the time and proposed to Sun before returning to China in 1942, but Sun rejected him. Lin married another woman, Ye Qun, in 1943. Ye held a lifelong grudge against Sun for her earlier relationship with Lin.
Suzanne 'Touty' Hiltermann-Souloumiac, née Hiltermann, resisted the Nazis as part of the Dutch-Paris escape line during World War II. She survived Ravensbrück concentration camp. She received the US Medal of Freedom in recognition of her help to evading Allied airmen. After the war she wrote children's stories and founded a French school in Hong Kong.
Brian Thomas Webster Stewart was a British soldier, colonial official, diplomat and the second-most senior officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service. He fought in the Second World War, played an influential role in the Malayan Emergency, then served as British Consul-General in Shanghai on the eve of the cultural revolution, as British Representative to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and as the Director of Technical Services and Assistant Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1974 to 1979.
Cheng Naishan was a writer from China who came from an upper-class background, had lived in Hong Kong, was trained in the English language, and was a Christian. Unlike her contemporaries, she taught English and later wrote in English. One of the most well-known of the Shanghai School (haipai) writing style, Cheng revived the literary legacy of the elites who had been rejected during the Cultural Revolution. She won numerous awards for her novels and short stories before embarking on a series of non-fiction works telling the history of "Old Shanghai".
Simon Cheng Man-kit is a Hong Kong activist. He was formerly a trade and investment officer at the British Consulate-General in Hong Kong. Cheng was detained by Chinese authorities in August 2019 in West Kowloon station when he returned from a business trip in Shenzhen. While the Chinese authorities stated that he was arrested for "soliciting prostitutes", Cheng denied the accusation and added that Chinese agents tortured him in an attempt to make him confess that he was a British spy who was involved in instigating the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Cheng subsequently fled to London and was granted asylum in June 2020.
