League of Left-Wing Writers
On 17 January 1931, while attending a secret Communist Party meeting at the Oriental Hotel in the Shanghai International Settlement, Rou Shi was arrested along with 35 other attendees by the Shanghai Municipal Police. They were handed over to the Kuomintang government and held in prison for three weeks. On 7 February 1931, the Kuomintang executed 23 Communists in Longhua, Shanghai. The five members of the Left League executed on that day, Rou Shi, Li Weisen, Hu Yepin, Yin Fu, and Feng Keng, are called the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers by the Communist Party. Among the executed were three women, one pregnant. They were executed either by gunshot or by being buried alive. According to Frank Moraes, Rou Shi was in the latter group, but an article on Xinhua says he was killed by gunshots. In the essay "Remembrance for the Sake of Forgetting" (为了忘却的纪念), Lu Xun states that Rou Shi was shot ten times.