Red star shines on China｜Lin Luo’s incident: “No news from the north”

Lin Luochang, a native of Yudu County, Jiangxi Province, participated in the revolution in 1931. In 1934, he set off on the Long March with the Central Red Army and never came back.

It was not until 1955 that the Lin family received a glorious martyr certificate. There was no time or place of sacrifice on it, only the words "No news from the north."

Three generations of the Lin family began a long and persistent search. Lin Liping, a teacher at Yudu No. 2 Middle School, decided to find her little grandpa in her own way. She joined the Changzhengyuan Choir in Yudu, Jiangxi, and the members were all descendants of the Red Army. Every time she performed somewhere, she would go to the local Martyrs Memorial Garden to find news about her little grandpa.

In 2014, after Lin Liping performed in Xing'an, Guangxi, she went to pay homage to the Martyrs in the rain. Among the names engraved densely on the stele corridor, she found her little grandfather's name - Lin Luochang. Lin Liping called her father's phone with tears in her eyes and told him that her young grandfather had died in the Battle of Xiangjiang River. This was a heroic battle during the Red Army's Long March.

A handful of Xiangjiang soil, thousands of miles back home. Three generations of the Lin family came to the banks of the Xiangjiang River, filled jars with sediment from the Xiangjiang River, and brought their loved ones home in this way. For more than 10 years, Lin Liping and her group members have been singing the "Long March Suite" along the Long March Road and heard countless touching stories.

During the 25,000-mile journey of the First Red Army, one Red Army soldier died on average every 300 meters. Along the Long March, many nameless tombstones were left behind. During the war years, countless sons and daughters from southern Jiangxi followed the army northward, integrating their lives into the memory of the mountains and rivers of the Republic.

According to incomplete statistics, among the more than 100,000 registered martyrs in Ganzhou, more than 40,000 were marked as "no news from the north." On the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army's Long March, Ganzhou launched a public welfare activity to find the "No News from the North" Long March heroes to make the "unknown" famous and return the souls of the heroes to their hometowns.