China: An Act of Barbarism

Life was not easy for Chiang Kai-shek’s mother, Wang Tsai-yu, a simple peasant woman who was widowed early and did embroidery to send her promising son to academies in Paoting and Tokyo, Japan. When she died in 1921, the fast-rising young Chiang matched her devotion by building her an elaborate tomb in the eastern China mountain village of Chikow, where the family lived. Last week, calling her memorial a “source of poison in Chinese society,” an official Peking report joyfully revealed that members of the Red Guards had attacked the tomb and razed it to rubble. That particular act of barbarism, as Peking saw it, “marks a great victory for the thought of Mao Tse-tung.”