Zhao Yiman

Zhao Yiman the Chinese communist resistance fighter and martyr (1905-1936) who led partisan operations against the Japanese occupation in Manchuria and was executed after her capture. Her refusal to betray her comrades under torture made her one of the most revered heroines of the war of resistance.

Youth and Political Awakening

Zhao Yiman was born on 25 October 1905 in Yibin county, Sichuan province, into a declining landlord family that had fallen into poverty. She showed a strong will and a quick intelligence as a girl, and she resisted the early marriage that custom would have imposed on her, insisting instead on an education. She studied at a girls school and later at a teachers college.

As a student she was drawn into the patriotic and revolutionary movements of the 1920s, and she joined the Chinese Communist Youth League and then the Chinese Communist Party. She took part in student agitation, in the campaigns to boycott foreign goods, and in the political work that sought to mobilise women and workers for the national cause.

She was committed to the emancipation of women as well as to the revolution, and she wrote and spoke on the need for women to take part in public life and in the struggle for national independence. When the communists were driven underground in 1927 she continued her work as an organiser in Shanghai and in other cities, living under constant threat of arrest.

The Turn to Armed Resistance

After the Japanese seized Manchuria in 1931 the communists sent organisers to the northeast to build armed resistance, and Zhao Yiman was among those assigned to the region. She worked first in Harbin, where she organised workers and led strikes and demonstrations, and she became a prominent figure in the clandestine movement.

She then moved to the countryside to join the guerrilla forces, taking command of a unit of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. She led partisan operations in the mountains and forests of the northeast, organising the villagers, gathering intelligence and leading raids against Japanese and puppet garrisons.

As a woman in command of armed men she was a striking figure, and her courage and her care for her soldiers won their loyalty. She was known for her skill in the mobile tactics of the guerrillas and for her refusal to accept the subordinate role that custom assigned to women, and she became an example to the peasants of the region.

Capture and Torture

In November 1935 Zhao Yiman was wounded in a fight with Japanese and puppet forces near the village of Chunzhu in Heilongjiang, and she was captured. The occupation authorities, recognising the value of their prisoner, sought to make her disclose the organisation of the resistance, the locations of its units and the identities of its leaders.

She was tortured for months, subjected to beatings and to forms of cruelty intended to break her will, and the wounds from her capture were left untreated. According to the accounts preserved by her comrades, she refused to give any information and remained defiant, telling her interrogators that the resistance would continue whatever became of her.

Even in captivity she continued to work for the cause, speaking to the guards and to other prisoners about the struggle and urging them not to lose heart. Her bearing under torture became legendary, and the Japanese officers who dealt with her are said to have been struck by her refusal to submit.

Execution and the Farewell Letters

On 2 August 1936 Zhao Yiman was executed by the Japanese at the town of Zhuzhu in Heilongjiang province, at the age of thirty. As she was taken to the place of execution she is reported to have called out slogans of defiance and to have sung the international song, and she died with her spirit unbroken.

Shortly before her death she wrote a farewell letter to her young son, entrusting him to the care of others and explaining that she had given her life for the sake of the country. The letter, full of sorrow and of hope, has become one of the most treasured texts of the resistance, read as a testament of a mother who chose the nation over her own life.

The circumstances of her death, the months of torture and the calm courage of her final hours, made her the most famous of the women martyrs of the anti-Japanese war in the northeast. Her story spread through the underground and, after the war, through the schools and the press of the new republic.

Memory and Legacy

Zhao Yiman was honoured after the founding of the People's Republic as a national heroine and a martyr of the revolution. Memorials to her were built in the northeast, schools and streets were named for her, and her farewell letter was included in the texts studied by generations of Chinese children.

She is remembered as an emblem both of resistance to foreign occupation and of the emancipation of women. Her decision to leave her child and to take up arms, her leadership of partisan troops and her steadfastness under interrogation gave her a place apart among the heroes of the war, and she is often cited as an example of the equality women achieved in the revolutionary movement.

The place of her execution and her grave have become sites of commemoration, and her image appears in the memorials of the anti-Japanese war. She stands with Yang Jingyu and the other martyrs of Manchuria as a symbol of the suffering and the courage of the resistance in the occupied northeast.

See also

• Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army
• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Yang Jingyu
• Manchukuo