Who Dares to Make the Sun and Moon Shine in New Skies

“Who Dares to Make the Sun and Moon Shine in New Skies?” is the slogan printed in red, in Chairman Mao’s calligraphy, where a sender’s address would normally appear on Rong Jinzhen’s first letter home after he left. Its placement makes a political slogan serve as a substitute for personal location: the letter reaches his family, but gives them no ordinary way to trace where it came from.

Appearance on the First Letter

Rong Jinzhen wrote the first letter three days after leaving; his family received it twelve days later. The envelope gave no sender’s address, only the slogan. It also lacked a postmark from the sending post office and bore only the frank of the receiving sorting office. The family had initially thought Box No. 36 referred to a local address, but the delay and the envelope’s markings made that explanation untenable: the apparent local address was a decoy, and Rong Jinzhen might be much farther away than they could imagine.

A Repeated Sign of Distance

The first envelope established a pattern. Later letters arrived in the same kind of envelope, without a sending-office frank and after roughly eight or nine days in transit. The slogan thus belonged to a repeated form of communication that conveyed news from Rong Jinzhen while withholding the route back to him. The family could recognize the correspondence, but its outward signs offered no usable location.

Replacement During the Cultural Revolution

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the slogan was replaced on the envelopes by a line from a popular song: “Sailing Across the Ocean, We Rely on the Helmsman”. Everything else remained the same. The words changed with the era, but the envelope’s more consequential features—the absent return address, missing dispatch frank, and delayed arrival—persisted, keeping Rong Jinzhen’s distance legible without making his whereabouts known.