Zhao Yiman (Chinese:趙一曼; Wade–Giles:Chao I-man; 1905 – 2 August 1936) was a female Chinese resistance fighter against the Imperial Japanese Army in Northeast China, which was under the occupation of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. She was captured in 1935 by Japanese forces and executed in 1936. She is considered a national hero in China, and an eponymous biopic was made for her in 1950. The 2005 film My Mother Zhao Yiman was based on her son's memory of her.
Early life
Zhao Yiman and her son Ning'er
Zhao was born Li Kuntai in October 1905 in Yibin County, Sichuan, into a landlord family with eight children.:32:704 As a girl, she rebelled against foot binding and fought for the right to go to school.:32 In 1913, she began attending a private school, where she did well academically. Under the influence of her brother-in-law Zheng Youzhi, a communist, she read many progressive books and periodicals and became receptive to revolutionary ideas.:704 In 1924, at the age of 19, she joined the Socialist Youth League of China and began revolutionary activities in her county.:704 That year, she published an article in the radical women's magazine Women's Weekly in which she denounced her elder brother for refusing to pay for her education.
Revolutionary career
During the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, Zhao led students in blocking British kerosene tankers from docking at the pier in Yibin.:33 In 1926, she enrolled at the Yibin Women's High School, where she became a leader of the student movement, and in the summer of that year, she joined the Chinese Communist Party.:704:33 In the autumn of 1926, the party sent her to the Central Military and Political School in Wuhan, the Wuhan branch of the Whampoa Military Academy, where she was one of the first women students.:704 In 1927, she took part in the Northern Expedition campaign led by Ye Ting.
In September 1927, Zhao went to the Soviet Union to study at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, where she used the name Li Yichao. The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women instead states that she studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.:704–705 In Moscow, she married Chen Dabang, a fellow student and former Whampoa cadet, in 1928.:705
Underground work
Zhao was ordered back to China while she was pregnant, and she returned in the winter of 1928. She did underground work for the party in Hubei, Jiangxi and Shanghai, including in Yichang and Nanchang, at the time of Chiang Kai-shek's campaign against leftists and radicals.:705 In 1929, she gave birth to a son in Yichang.:705 When the boy was about two years old, she left him with his uncle Chen Yueyun, after having a photograph taken with him, which she sent to her husband.:705:33
Northeast China
After the Mukden Incident of 1931, Zhao took the name Zhao Yiman and was sent to Japanese-occupied Northeast China.:705:33 She worked in Shenyang and among women workers in Harbin, and in 1932, she became acting secretary of the Harbin General Workers' Union.:705 In April 1933, she guided a strike by Harbin tram workers, which won its demands. After the Japanese broke up the party organization in Harbin, she and her colleagues retreated to the countryside, and from 1932 to 1934, she held various party posts at provincial and county levels.:705
In July 1934, Zhao went to Zhuhe County, now Shangzhi, as a special commissioner (tepaiyuan) of the party and a member of its Zhuhe Central County Committee, and she became known locally as a guerrilla leader.:705 In 1935, she became political commissar of the 2nd Regiment of the 1st Division of the Third Army of the Northeastern People's Revolutionary Army.:705 Japanese-run newspapers called her the female commissar "with two guns and a white horse", and the Japanese named her as a target alongside the guerrilla commander Zhao Shangzhi.
Capture, imprisonment and execution
In November 1935, as the Third Army retreated eastward before the Japanese, the 2nd Regiment was left to fight along the railway to cover the withdrawal and was surrounded.:705 Zhao told the regiment's commander to break out while she and a squad of soldiers covered him, and she was badly wounded and captured.:705 According to the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, she was hit in the right eye and left arm and lost consciousness from loss of blood.:705 A report dated 7 December 1935 by the police department of the Manchukuo provincial government of Binjiang, which the Heilongjiang Provincial Archives displayed in 2025, records that ten police officers surrounded a house in the fifth district of Zhuhe County on 22 November, killing two of its five occupants and capturing three, and that Zhao had serious wounds to her left arm and left leg. The report gave her age as 27 and her nickname as "Skinny Li", and most of the personal details she gave her interrogators were false.
Zhao was held at the police headquarters in Harbin, where she was tortured but revealed no information.:705 A Japanese military record noted that she did not confess even under prolonged electric torture. The Japanese then sent her to a hospital in Harbin for treatment in the hope of obtaining a confession, and she refused to have her leg amputated so that she could return to combat. In the hospital, she won over a guard, Dong Xianxun, and a nurse, Han Yongyi, who helped her escape on 28 June 1936. She was recaptured three days later and subjected to harsher interrogation.
Zhao's letter to her son
After about nine months of imprisonment, the Japanese decided to send Zhao back to Zhuhe to be executed.:705 Early on 2 August 1936, on the train to Zhuhe, she wrote a farewell letter of more than 160 characters to her son. The letter states, "I hope you will not forget that your mother sacrificed herself for the nation.":33 She was executed in Zhuhe later that day.:33 She is said to have sung a revolutionary song as she approached the execution ground and to have died shouting anti-Japanese slogans.:705
Family
Zhao was survived by her husband Chen Dabang and their son Chen Yexian, known as Ning'er, who grew up not knowing his mother's true identity.:705 After 1949, her husband, son and sister Li Kunjie searched for her, and with the help of an old photograph, a journalist identified Zhao Yiman as Li Kuntai.:705 While searching for his mother, her son was moved by the 1950 film about Zhao, and her farewell letter, which had been recorded in Japanese interrogation files, reached the family more than 20 years after her death. Chen Yexian copied the letter at the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall and had the name "Zhao Yiman" tattooed on his arm. Her granddaughter Chen Hong keeps the letter as a family heirloom and has spoken about her at schools in Sichuan.
Memorials
Poster of the 1950 film Zhao Yiman, starring Shi Lianxing
Zhao's experiences are portrayed in textbooks and museums, as well as in films and comics.:26 In 2009, she was named one of the 100 heroes who made outstanding contributions to the founding of the People's Republic of China. In 2014, the Ministry of Civil Affairs included her in its first list of famous martyrs of the war against Japan.
The former police headquarters in Harbin where Zhao was held now houses the Northeast Martyrs Memorial Hall, and Harbin named a 2,375-metre (1.476mi) street, Yiman Street, after her. In Yibin, a memorial hall to her stands on Cuiping Mountain, and a park, a village, an avenue and a middle school bear her name. In 1989, the Party History Office and the All-China Women's Federation of Yibin published a biography of her.:32
The 1950 film Zhao Yiman depicts her work as a political mobilizer of workers and peasants in occupied Manchuria and her execution by the Japanese in 1936.:21 The 2005 film My Mother Zhao Yiman was based on her son's memory of her. Unlike the 1950 film, it includes flashbacks to Zhao's earlier years and is narrated by the character of her son.:33 Her life has also been adapted for television and the stage.
123456789101112131415161718Yang, Sanjun; Kang, Jinqian (18 May 2021). 赵一曼：誓志为人不为家[Zhao Yiman: vowing to live for the people, not for the family]. CPPCC Online (in Chinese). Xinhua News Agency. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
123456789101112Pan, Yihong (2025). Not Just a Man's War: Chinese Women's Memories of the War of Resistance Against Japan, 1931–45. University of British Columbia Press. ISBN978-0-7748-7036-8.
12Shi, Jianfeng; Xu, Xiao (2 September 2014). “把为抗战牺牲的国民党军人视为英烈，这是从来没有过的”[Treating Nationalist soldiers who died in the war against Japan as martyrs has never happened before]. The Paper (in Chinese). Retrieved 31 October 2026.
12Chen, Jin'an (28 August 2025). 被捕时受致命伤 日文档案曝光烈士赵一曼被审讯细节[Fatally wounded when captured: Japanese archive reveals details of martyr Zhao Yiman's interrogation]. HK01 (in Chinese). Retrieved 31 October 2026.
12345Zhou, Yuan (7 April 2021). 泪目！她牺牲前给儿子写下这封信｜红色百宝第㉙集[The letter she wrote to her son before she died: Red Treasures, episode 29]. China Daily (in Chinese). Xinhua News Agency. Retrieved 31 October 2026.
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