RED CHINA: The Ugly & the Beautiful

From all over the countryside they descended on Peking last week—swarms of muscular women in tight pigtails, laborers' boots and identical blue boiler suits. The glorious revolution, said Madame Soong Ching-ling, U.S.-educated* widow of Sun Yat-sen and now People's Vice Chairman, had brought about a great change in Chinese "esthetic views . . . The fragile, slender and sentimental girls, whom the exploiting classes regarded as pretty, are ugly and degenerate to the working people." Banners flaunted high, red-and-gold streamers clutched in their hands, the emancipated women of Red China cried back their full-throated approval: "What was beautiful is now...

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